Saturday, November 11, 2006

Civilization and Its Discontents

Is Civilization worth the effort?

There have been tradeoffs. Civilization at base is urbanism. Trading nomadic hunting/gathering for stationary horticulture. Horticulture grows more intense and leads to agriculture. More surplus leads to population increase. This leads to role stratification and specialization. Villages grow into towns which grow into cities which grow into states and empires. At every level complexity is increased. Meanwhile environments are degraded and till the tipping point is reached and overshoot results in collapse. Complexity retreats.

Diminishing returns have struck with a vengeance in the form of the industrial megalopolis. This is as bad as it gets. Yet, I'm not quite comfortable with my descendants living entirely as hunter-gatherers no matter how uncomplicated and happy their primitivist lives may be. This is at the root of the creation myth at the heart of Judeo-Christianity and Greek myth. Humanity trades the garden of delight for the curse of knowledge, the farm and the city.

Is it possible to have a restrained civilization that doesn't require constant growth in population and complexity? Can civilization be sliced into static levels or is civilization a process in and of itself? Certainly industrial capitalist civilization is a process that requires eternal, accelerating growth. It's effectively a Ponzi scheme that tallies the cost which is paid by those at the bottom of the pyramid. These costs manifest as ecological destruction, increasingly dehumanizing hierarchy and the diminishing returns on complexity which afflict the last generation before the collapse.

Yet civilization as merely the grouping of humans into permanent settlements produces a wide range of non-toxic benefits. The danger comes when growth tips over some critical point which results in environmental abuse and resource wars. The exact location of this point depends largely on just what the carrying capacity of a given region is. Some places may easily support towns of 10,000 people without danger of environmental degradation while other harsher locales could sustainably support 100. The problem seems to arise from the fact that a stable population is not something that any species seems to be able to choose to maintain. Correcting populations has ever been the province of accident, disease and starvation and in the case of humans war. To be honest, life itself is about runaway reproduction, or converting as much matter as possible into replications of the reproducing things. Successful genes use various roundabout strategies basically to organize other elements into copies of themselves. Life by its nature is ultimately viral. Nothing truly exists "in balance" in the bioshpere; things just reproduce as much as constraining factors let them. This is true of bacteria, algae, deer, buffalo, eagles, humans, etc. What are resources? Things that can be used. What are they really used for: Energy and material, more specifically the energy to turn material into copies of genes. So aggregate behavior of any species, including ours, will be to maximize strategies that make copies of its genes (these can involve indirect strategies outside of direct reproduction which is "higher" animals often have strategies involving helping others in direct degree of genetic closeness).

Human beings are in the unique position among all the species ever to exist. We can recognize that there are situations in which it would be wise to limit our numbers. It's not civilization itself at fault, but our biological natures skew the civilizing process out of control every time. Whatever the carrying capacity is, we will be sure to exceed it once we figure out how to establish any sort of surplus. Whatever level of complexity brings us technological comfort, we will be sure to press and increase complexity until bureaucracy and specialization turn the majority of us into slaves for the organizers and administrators at the top of the hierarchy.

I honestly believe a) that some level of civilization is worth the loss of Eden and b) we have the means to make civilization a sustainable affair . I would like to stop here to point out that although our prevailing creation myth shows the Garden of our origin as being a tragic trade for agriculture and science(knowledge), it also depicts the paradise following the apocalypse as a shining city. Urbanity free of unchecked population growth and the resulting resource depletion, tyranny and war is possible. The most salient practical step is a limit on urban populations. Hunting and gathering tribes have the luxury of resource availibility rather immediately limiting their numbers. Agricultural-urbanites do not. We have to accept the responsibility to regulate our birthrates and the size of our settlements so that they never strain their regions. If a sensible estimate shows that there is enough food and fuel to support 20,000 humans and still allow for regeneration of resource stocks, then keeping the population well within this natural limit should be the obvious course of action. Allowing the population to swell to 40, 50, 60,000 and more is an act of suicide. This is what leads to want and to going further afield to rob neighbors of their resources after your own stash has been depleted beyond the regeneration level. Sadly this seems to be the inevitable outcome with regard to our species. Maybe our latest experience on the downside of Hubbert's peak will teach us a lesson; we will have to curb our tendency to replicate if we want to continue to enjoy the benefits and comforts of some level of complexity and technology, or to continue to exist at all.

Salvaging the Industrial Wreck

The furnishings of hydrocarbon-based industrialization are not suitable for the post-hydrocarbon world. Hardly a square mile of traditional human habitation has escaped the blanket of the industrial "modern" model over what is now called the historic. The built environment that is home to nearly half the world's people bears no resemblance to the sustainable pre-industrial model. The industrial city in its late stages is a disastrously overgrown mess. If the historic city is a well-defined single cell, the industrial megalopolis is a cancerous clump. Yet suburban sprawl, highways and conurbation aren't simply going to disappear. These acres of monoculture zones and asphalt will be with us for a very long time. Given the physical arrangement we have and with limited prospects for physically altering it, how can we expect to retrofit its use to a lower energy environment? I don't envision wise government-directed programs. Rather people will make personal changes to their immediate surroundings and property when they have no other choice. Will intense gardening feed the people of suburbia? Will active solar, wind and water generated electricity continue to allow mass commuting by rail? Will jobs and trade relocalize as it becomes too expensive to commute? Will local economies redevolop as globalization and corporatism contract and local production and commerce become needed?

I used to imagine that at the very worst, peak oil would mean the death of car culture and that we'd simply see a return of intraurban and interurban fixed path transit. Whatever parts of suburbia and exurbia couldn't be retrofitted for efficient use of rail might be abandoned or regain use as farmland. What I saw was a fracturing of the overwrought metroplex back to the humble metropolis; the world would look like it did in the early parts of the industrial saga. I now view this notion as quaint and naively optimistic. On the slide down Hubbert's Curve all the sorts of changes I used to imagine will indeed become the norm, but only as a stopgap toward even lower levels of energy use. The last stages of terminal industrialization will be the most vulnerable to the increasing costs and scarcity of energy so the exurban and then suburban modes of living can be expected to collapse first. But as we move inexorably toward solar sustenance, even the young industrial metropolis--like New York 1931 or Paris 1889--won't be possible. Of course even a simple somewhat rocky descent to pre-industrial modes of existence may be hoping for too much. As Matt Savinar has written "we won't simply go back to 1750." Rather, we could be in for civilization freefall ending with a few million humans huddled into wherever the tropical zones may lie after the effects of global warming are in full swing, hunting and gathering and spending their spare time painting stick figures on the rocky walls of their caves.


The only incarnation of the city I have ever known has been the industrial metroplex. Ever growing hordes of human beings live in what are putatively urban settings, but it cannot be said that these people live in anything that might have passed for a civic environment before the transformations brought on by harnessing hydrocarbons in the industrial age. What we see today are city "centers" chockful of variously bland or shocking--but rarely beautiful-- highrise buildings and those centers surrounded by monofunctional urban and suburban zones. The megalopolis is the agglomeration of these cosmic suburban and urban spaces that have woven themselves together to form a nearly unbroken concrete and asphalt carpet over thousands of square miles: galactic "cities" composed of constellations of skyscraper farms, housing projects, subdivisions and commercial centers nestled in an ether of blacktop. In the age of cheap energy we have lost all sense of beauty, proportion and comprehension of the inherent good of recognizing natural limits, especially as embodied by a city with an actual edge that doesn't require motorized transport. The living arrangements of every human society prior to the hydrocarbon age had no choice but to recognize limits. Their practices and built environments reflected this, producing things that while not Utopian were pleasing in their rationality and appropriateness for human utility, habitation and ultimately human comfort by means of symmetry and proportion which are the underlying factors of beauty. The industrial desecration of urban space and its organic scale, aesthetics and defining lines is a result of refitting for the commonplace use of machines, especially in regards to mobility, i.e. inherent reliance on the automobile and the elevator to traverse formerly impossible dimensions of horizontal and vertical space. The true city today has little to do with arbitrary municipal borders denoting "Boston", "New York" and such, but is instead all the farflung zones of the metroplex connected by motorized transportation, dotted with central districts in which the quarters intended for regular use are placed several hundred feet above street level.

I'm sure that everyone everywhere notices that cities are growing uglier and more alienating and have been for several decades. I make this assumption because urban populations have been decamping to the automobile suburbs ever since industry began making cities into toxic engines of economic growth. The answer in the age of suburbanization has been flight from the cities as living places, yet retaining oily tethers of highway (and decreasingly rail) to them for work and entertainment. There seems to be a worldwide amnesia concerning the preindustrial urban environment. The Renaissance cities wrapping medieval cores may represent the highest such forms and look nothing like the edgeless sprawl that denotes industrial progress. Cities existed before industry scattered smoky factories, brutal skyscrapers, automobiles, roadways and parking lots all over them. Industrialization, despite all the promises of progress and comfort, has destroyed what makes places worth inhabiting. The coming energy descent will bring the industrial era to a decisive close and despite the human misery this implies, our species will be better off when the worst is over and we have been bushwhacked back to whatever the solar input carrying capacity really is . We will not be putting up any more skyscrapers because projects like these just won't be possible with solar-powered machinery with anything resembling cost efficiency. The use of limited access highways and suburban enclaves will end because the alternatives to oil just don't have the required energy density. Alternative energies will be sufficiently expensive to make building low-rise structures with pre-carbon age methods and human effort the natural choice; Whatever urban environment we fashion in the future will be scaled for people on foot, not riding in cars and elevators. City size will track the general population decline as the burgeoning numbers of working poor, underemployed and subsidized unemployed that we associate with the modern city are a product of industrial growth and industrial agriculture and their continued existence is not compatible with a world in energy decline freefall and the chaotic collapse and undoing of industrialization. The idea of cities of millions spread out over hundreds of square miles will seem ridiculous.

As I write this I am still living in a neighborhood in a borough of the City of New York. Though I live within the precincts of New York City, I am in truth part of the megalopolis that winds from Boston to Washington. The energy descent following peak hydrocarbon production will probably render megalopolis unlivable. Suppositions about the possible patterns of chaos, abandonment and retrofitting will be the subject of these pages. Though I live in an unsustainable mess, there are elements of my life here with which I am absolutely in love. This is a historic neighborhood with an amazing concentration of pleasing, prewar buildings. It's no Renaissance city, but it's far better than living in an imitation colonial in a cul-de-sac in the exurbs. Everything I need is within an easy walk. I have to commute a few subway stops to get to work, but aside from that my life is happily prescribed by a radius of 500 paces from my building's front door. Yet I recognise that this is only a very small aberration preserved mostly by accident. And I am still living in the middle of a vast area vulnerable to disruptions to its massive energy feed. Living in a walkable neighborhood won't protect me from the economic contraction as the industrial engine that powers this agglomeration of megacities, their suburbs and hub cities grinds to a halt for want of oil and natural gas. It won't protect me from food scarcity due to both reduced transportation capacities from faraway agribusiness and reduced food production. I have inclinations to stay and help with whatever retrofitting must be cobbled together, but as will become clear in these pages, the evidence suggests flight would be more prudent.

I invite your comments, corrections and suggestions. I also apologize for the disappearance of the initial blog entry and the comments that were initially sent to it.