The Math Does Not Lie

by Margaret Swedish

I spent some time this afternoon with a long essay by a physicist, Tom Murphy, who teaches at the University of California San Diego, entitled "Unsustainable Goose Chase." It's about one of my favorite themes, she says somewhat sarcastically, but also seriously. It focuses squarely on the "wicked problem" of our times - that we are living so far beyond the limits of sustainability on this planet that our doom is pretty much assured. It's in the math.

Math like this: "In this altered state, we find ourselves on a destructive rampage, as evidenced by the severe toll on habitats and biodiversity: about 85% of primary forest is gone; vertebrate populations have declined by about 70% on average since 1970; and now 96% of mammal mass on the planet is embodied in humans and our livestock. The dots are not difficult to connect. The combination of methods and substances available to us have allowed explosive exploitation of resources on a global scale. A paltry and decreasing amount of habitat—increasingly fragmented—remains.  The healthy, biodiverse regions are disappearing fast."

That paragraph is not from the goose chase but another article he linked inside that one, entitled, appropriately, "The Simple Story of Civilization." What he is pointing to, or explaining, really, is that the lives humans have been living in recent centuries, and in the decades of the 20th and 21st centuries especially, built upon the explosion of industrial and technological innovation since World War II, are completely impossible to sustain and have always been leading us toward this wall of biocapacity limits and our inevitable head-on crash into it. We are destroying the resilience of the natural world, the interlocking Web of Life, that keeps us alive. 

Entropy is the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder. Humans don't want to believe it, but the Earth actually has limits for how much life it can support and no life can surpass those limits for long without getting into a boatload of trouble. All the innovation in the world cannot violate those basic laws of nature. Physics teaches us that the basic principle at work here is rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, which is particularly relevant to our crisis. It's called entropy, one of the more frightening terms relevant to our times. This is Miriam Webster's brief description of it: entropy is "the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. (James R Newman) : a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder."

Take a burning log, for example. When ignited, it gives off heat and lots of useful energy. But when burned up, it turns to ash. It cools. The same amount of energy is there, but it is no longer useful.

When energy is burned, it is burned. When it is ash, it is ash. When it is ash, it can no longer provide useful energy. It becomes waste. When useful energy (like fossil fuels) becomes useless (like CO2 in the atmosphere), it can no longer provide energy to do anything. You have to find new sources to burn, whether in the ground, growing in the forests, or sucking in the sunlight with panels made from rare earth minerals, and then mining of metals - lots and lots and lots of mining.

With humans now facing the depletion of the remaining oil and gas in the ground this century, new sources are being considered, tested, developed. Thus the search for renewable sources that can replace fossil fuels and keep the lights on - like the sun and wind and water, split atoms and hydrogen. But the energy they can produce ain't nearly enough to power this scale of human civilization. We know this, which is why those who promise renewable energy as a way to continue living as we do, but with different energy sources, are spreading false information, false promises, avoidance of what it would mean to really make this radical transition in the short time we have left to keep much of the Earth habitable.

Yes, we can keep some of the lights on, and some food in our markets, but the only way to meet the crisis at its essence is to begin the deliberate, planned, dismantling of the industrial civilization. Let's be real. What are the chances of that happening? That time will come, but it will come unplanned, in chaos and disasters, and with a stunning loss of human and other-than-human life.

We are using up the "resources" (hate that word) of the planet. We don't have enough energy sources left to provide 8.1 billion people with smart phones, much less food, and certainly not air conditioning on this heating planet, and what I have just been reading about the amount of water and energy that AI will drain from the planet [see from Forbes: AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water] - well, again, it is impossible, though pushing ahead full speed in this direction now seems irreversible. The crash will come even sooner, though, because of this new, untamed, technology, now appearing in all our computer programs whether we want it or not.

Let's repeat this over and over until we get it. The only energy source that has made this era of industrialism and consumerism possible is oil. Oil is the god, the sacred fluid, of the civilization of economic growth, our church, our cathedral. It is fueling a global ecological crisis. And it will run out within decades. Still want to commit to it? Ain't it time to start thinking about another path to a livable future beyond the death of this industrial era?

Back in the 1990s, when I was becoming more deeply concerned about the looming ecological catastrophe, someone handed me this little booklet entitled, Friday Morning Reflections at the World Bank: Essays on Values and Developement. Not exactly a scintillating title, but it emerged from some early morning discussions among a few of the policy people who cared about the bank's ethical values and the global impacts of its programs. It was first published on 1991. Recommended to me was the essay by Sven Burmeister, one of the bank's deputy directors. What I read changed the direction of my life forever. I have shared this often since the 90s in talks and workshops I have led, in my book, Living Beyond the 'End of the World,' and in many blog posts and essays over the past decades. This is the excerpt that leapt off the page into my brain and never left it.

“...our current handling of the environment and its resources might lead to our ultimate destruction. In fact, if we continue on our present course, the question is not whether destruction will happen, but when. Acid rain, deforestation, ozone depletion, and global warming are clear signals that we are misusing and exhausting the resources of the planet... all resources are finite in the end... The important question is how we conceive of our relationship with nature. Are we here to exploit the earth and use up its capital? Or are we here to find an equilibrium with our fellow creatures, or to live as stewards off the income that the earth can yield without destroying its capital?...

“The ultimate constraint on resource use is the carrying capacity of the globe: per capita resource use should not exceed the level the globe can sustain for all the world’s people. Today’s per capita resource use in industrial countries is not sustainable for all inhabitants of the earth... the planet is capable of carrying only 500 million people indefinitely at the level of income and technology in the United States today. If resources were used more prudently as in Europe and Japan, the planet might carry one billion people indefinitely. Demographers estimate that, if present trends continue, the world’s population...will stabilize sometime in the twenty-first century at nine to twelve billion human beings.”

You see the problem. It's in the math. It doesn't work out for our survival. More technological innovation? Means more destruction of habitat. Solar panels, EVs, wind turbines - all require a massive scale of mining. Mining and manufacturing require a massive scale of energy. AI requires billions and billions of gallons of water. And humans continue to burn fossil fuels at record rates, the peak not expected to be reached until somewhere in the 2030s to 2040s. That's a whole lot of CO2 yet to be poured into the atmosphere, a lot of forest to be destroyed, a lot of habitats unraveled for all the living beings that lie in them.

It is okay to ask: What in the world are we thinking?!

So, answers to all this? That's where the wicked problem comes in. While no one really has a solution that would create an easy path out of this mess, we still have choice. The choice is about how to live through what's coming, what has already started to unfold. I will be reflecting on that a lot in coming blog posts, and there are many good, good people who are doing some deep pondering about how we start to build the kinds of communities brave enough to look at the reality as it is and start living accordingly - with the best of the human spirit instead of so much of the worst that we see these days.

And so I leave this for you - and me - to wrestle with in coming days. And while we're at it, let's add to our ponderings the notion of the Beloved Community and what that might mean for us now as we seek our paths through the mess we have made.