Civilization and Succession

In an Archdruid Report post a couple of weeks ago, I used the well-worn metaphor of bacteria in a petri dish to talk about the way that ecological limits constrain the range of possibilities open to any life form, Homo sapiens included. Several people objected to the comparison, insisting basically that human beings are enough smarter than microbes that the same rules don’t apply. Flattering to human vanity as this insistence may be, I have to admit to a certain skepticism about the claim in the light of current events.

According to the best current figures, world production of petroleum peaked almost two years ago and has been declining ever since; world production of all liquid fuels peaked more than a year ago, and is likewise declining; much of the Third World is already in desperate straits as its access to fossil fuels dries up — and government and business leaders across the industrial world, which has far more to lose from the twilight of cheap abundant energy than the Third World does, are still treating peak oil as a public relations problem. If we’re enough smarter than microbes in a petri dish to escape the same fate, we have yet to demonstrate it.

On a deeper level, of course, such comments miss the point just as thoroughly as the claim they’re meant to satirize. The value of the petri dish metaphor is that it shows how ecological processes works in a context simple enough to make them clear. The same pattern can be traced in more complex biological systems, human societies among them. The logic of the petri dish, after all, is the same logic that drove dieoff on Easter Island and among the lowland Maya: if you use the resources necessary to your survival at an unsustainable rate, you get the classic overshoot curve — population boom, followed by population bust.

Thus humanity is no more exempt from ecological processes than from the law of gravity. The invention of airplanes doesn’t mean that gravity no longer affects us; it means that if we use a lot of energy, we can overcome the force of gravity and lift ourselves off the ground for a while. The same principle holds with the laws of ecology. Using an immense amount of energy, we lifted a minority of the world’s population high above the subsistence level for a while, but that doesn’t mean that ecological laws no longer affect us. It means that for three hundred years, we’ve been able to push past the limits normally imposed by those laws, by burning up huge amounts of fossil fuels. When the fossil fuels are gone, the laws will still be there.

One of the central principles of ecology, in fact, is that similar patterns can be traced among organisms at many different levels of complexity. The difference in intelligence between yeast and deer is many times greater than the difference between deer and human beings, and yet deer and yeast alike go through exactly parallel cycles of boom and bust when resource availability rather than predators functions as the primary means of population control. Thus it’s reasonable to look to ecological patterns among other living things for clues to the driving forces behind equivalent processes in human societies.

One ecological pattern that deserves especially close attention as we begin the long slide down the back end of Hubbert’s peak is the process called succession. Any of my readers who were unwise enough to buy a home in one of the huge and mostly unsold housing developments cranked out at the top of the late real estate bubble will be learning quite a bit about succession over the next few years, so it may be useful for more than one reason to summarize it here.

Imagine an area of bare bulldozed soil someplace where the annual rainfall is high enough to support woodland. Long before the forlorn sign saying “Coming Soon Luxury Homes Only $450K” falls to the ground, seeds blown in by the wind send up a first crop of invasive weeds. Those pave the way for other weeds and grasses, which eventually choke out the firstcomers. After a few years, shrubs and pioneer trees begin rising, and become anchor species for a young woodland, which shades out the last of the weeds and the grass. In the shade of the pioneer trees, saplings of other species sprout. If nothing interferes with the process, the abandoned lot can pass through anything up to a dozen different stages before it finally settles down as an old growth forest community a couple of centuries later.

This is what ecologists call succession. Each step along the way from bare dirt to mature forest is a sere or a seral stage. The same process shapes the animal population of the vacant lot, as one species after another moves into the area for a time, until it’s supplanted by another better adapted to the changing environment and food supply. It also proceeds underground, as the dizzyingly complex fabric of life that makes up healthy soil reestablishes itself and then cycles through its own changes. Watch a vacant lot in a different ecosystem, and you’ll see it go through its own sequence of seres, ending in its own climax community — that’s the term for the final, relatively stable sere in a mature ecosystem, like the old growth forest in our example. The details change, but the basic pattern remains the same.

Essential to the pattern is a difference in the way that earlier and later seres deal with energy and other resources. Species common in early seres – R-selected species, in ecologists’ jargon – usually maximize their control over resources and their production of biomass, even at the cost of inefficient use of resources and energy. Weeds are a classic example of R-selected species: they grow fast, spread rapidly, and get choked out when slower-growing plants get established, or the abundant resources that make their fast growth possible run short. Species common in later seres – K-selected species – maximize efficiency in using resources and energy, even when this means accepting limits on biomass production and expansion into available niches. Temperate zone hardwood trees are a classic example of K-selected species: they grow slowly, take years to reach maturity, and endure for centuries when left undisturbed.

Apply the model of succession to human ecology and a remarkably useful way of looking at the predicament of industrial society emerges. In successional terms, we are in the early stages of the transition between an R-selected sere and the K-selected sere that will replace it. The industrial economies of the present, like any other R-selected sere, maximizes production at the expense of sustainability; the successful economies of the future, emerging in a world without today’s cheap abundant energy, will need to maximize sustainability at the expense of production, like any other K-selected sere.

To put this into the broader picture it’s necessary to factor in the processes of evolutionary change, because climax communities are stable only from the perspective of a human lifetime. Environmental shifts change them; so, often on a much faster timescale, does the arrival of new species on the scene. Sometimes this latter process makes succession move in reverse for a while. For example, when an invasive sere of R-selected species outcompetes the dominant species of a K-selected climax community; eventually the succession process starts moving forward again, but the new climax community may not look much like the old one.

Apply this to the human ecology of North America, say, and it’s easy to trace the pattern. A climax community of K-selected Native American horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers was disrupted and largely replaced by an invasive sere of European farmers with a much more R-selected ecology. Not long after the new community established itself, and before succession could push it in the direction of a more K-selected ecology, a second invasive sere – the industrial economy – emerged, using resources the first two seres could not access. This second invasive sere, the first of its kind on the planet, was on the far end of the R-selected spectrum; its ability to access and use extravagant amounts of energy enabled it to dominate the farming sere that preceded it, and push the remnants of the old climax community to the brink of extinction.

Like all R-selected seres, though, the industrial economy was vulnerable on two fronts. Like all early seres in succession, it faced the risk that a more efficent K-selected sere would eventually outcompete it, and its ability to use resources at unsustainable rates made it vulnerable to disruptive cycles of boom and bust that would sooner or later guarantee that a more efficient sere would replace it. Both those processes are well under way. The industrial economy is well into overshoot at this point, and at this point a crash of some kind is pretty much inevitable. At the same time, the more efficient K-selected human ecologies of the future have been sending up visible shoots since the 1970s, in the form of a rapidly spreading network of small organic farms, local farmer’s markets, appropriate technology, and alternative ways of thinking about the world, among many other things.

Three points deserve to be made in this context. First, one of the differences between human beings and other organisms is that human ecologies are culturally rather than biologically determined; the same individuals are at least potentially able to shift from an R-selected to a K-selected human ecology by changing their means of subsistence. Since it’s unlikely that a K-selected human ecology can or will be expanded fast enough to take up the slack of the disintegrating R-selected industrial system, there’s still likely to be a great deal of human suffering and disruption over the next century or so. Still, those individuals willing to make the transition to a K-selected lifestyle sooner rather than later may find that the disintegration of the industrial system opens up opportunities to survive and even flourish.

The second point circles back to the subject of last week’s Archdruid Report post, Fermi’s paradox. The assumption at the core of the paradox, as mentioned in that post, is that today’s extravagantly energy-wasting system is the wave of the future, and more advanced civilizations than ours will have even more energy and use it even more lavishly. The concept of succession suggests a radically different view of what an advanced civilization might look like. Modern industrial society here on Earth is the exact equivalent of the first sere of pioneer weeds on the vacant lot described above – fast-growing, resource-hungry, inefficient, and destined to be supplanted by more efficient K-selected seres as the process of succession unfolds.

A truly advanced civilization, here or elsewhere, might well have more in common with a climax community: it might use very modest amounts of energy and resources with high efficiency, maximize sustainability, and build for the long term. Such a civilization would be very hard to detect across interstellar distances, and the limits to the energy resources available to it make it vanishingly unlikely that it would attempt to cross those distances; this would hardly make it a failure as a civilization, except in the eyes of those for whom the industrial-age fantasies of science fiction trump all other concerns.

The third point leads into issues that will be central to a great many future posts on this blog. The climax community that emerges after a period of prolonged ecological disruption and the arrival of new biotic assemblages rarely has much in common with the climax community that prevailed before the disruptions began. In the same way, and for most of the same reasons, claims that the deindustrial world will necessarily end up as an exact equivalent of some past society – be that medieval feudalism, tribal hunter-gatherer cultures, or anything else – need to be taken with more than the usual grain of salt. Much of the heritage of today’s industrial societies will likely prove unsustainable in the future ahead of us, but not all; some technologies of the present and recent past could easily continue to play important roles in the human ecologies of the deindustrial future, and many more can help cushion the descent. Tracing out some of the options can help guide today’s choices at a time when constructive action is desperately needed.

Solving Fermi's Paradox

One of the besetting sins of today’s intellectual climate is the habit of overspecialization. Too often, people involved in one field get wrapped up in that field’s debates and miss the fact that the universe is not neatly divided into watertight compartments. With this excuse, if any is needed, I want to shift the ground of The Archdruid Report’s discussion a bit and talk about Fermi’s paradox.

First proposed by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, this points out that there’s a serious mismatch between our faith in technological progress and the universe our telescopes and satellites reveal to us. Our galaxy is around 13 billion years old, and contains something close to 400 billion stars. There’s a lot of debate around how many of those stars have planets, how many of those planets are capable of supporting life, and what might or might not trigger the evolutionary process that leads to intelligent, tool-using life forms, but most estimates grant that there are probably thousands or millions of inhabited planets out there.

Fermi pointed out that an intelligent species that developed the sort of technology we have today, and kept on progressing, could be expected eventually to work out a way to travel from one star system to another; they would also leave traces that would be detectable from earth. Even if interstellar travel proved to be slow and difficult, a species that developed starflight technology could colonize the entire galaxy in a few tens of millions of years – in other words, in a tiny fraction of the time the galaxy has been around. Given 400 billion chances to evolve a species capable of inventing interstellar travel, and 13 billion years to roll the dice, the chances are dizzyingly high that if it’s possible at all, at least one species would have managed the trick long before we came around, and it’s not much less probable that dozens or hundreds of species could have done it. If that’s the case, Fermi pointed out, where are they? And why haven’t we seen the least trace of their presence anywhere in the night sky?

Fermi’s paradox has been the subject of lively debate for something like half a century now, and most books on the possibility of extraterrestrial life discuss it. There are at least two reasons for that interest. On the one hand, of course, the possibility that we might someday encounter intelligent beings from another world has been a perennial fascination since the beginning of the industrial age – a fascination that has done much to drive the emergence of the folk theologies masquerading as science in today’s UFO movement.

On another level, though, Fermi’s Paradox can be restated in another and far more threatening way. The logic of the paradox depends on the assumption that unlimited technological progress is possible, and it can be turned without too much difficulty into a logical refutation of the assumption. If unlimited technological progress is possible, then there should be clear evidence of technologically advanced species in the cosmos; there is no such evidence; therefore unlimited technological progress is impossible. Crashingly unpopular though this latter idea may be, I suggest that it is correct – and a close examination of the issues involved casts a useful light on the present crisis of industrial civilization.

Let’s start with the obvious. Interstellar flight involves distances on a scale the human mind has never evolved the capacity to grasp. If the earth were the size of the letter “o” on this screen, for example, the moon would be a little over an inch and three quarters away from it, the sun about 60 feet away, and Neptune, the outermost planet of our solar system now that Pluto has been officially demoted to “dwarf planet” status, a bit more than a third of a mile off. On the same scale, though, Proxima Centauri – the closest star to our solar system – would be more than 3,000 miles away, roughly the distance from southern Florida to the Alaska panhandle. Epsilon Eridani, thought by many astronomers to be the closest star enough like our sun to have a good chance of inhabitable planets, would be more than 7,500 miles away, roughly the distance across the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of North America to the east coast of China.

The difference between going to the moon and going to the stars, in other words, isn’t simply a difference in scale. It’s a difference in kind. It takes literally unimaginable amounts of energy either to accelerate a spacecraft to the relativistic speeds needed to make an interstellar trip in less than a geological time scale, or to keep a manned (or alienned) spacecraft viable for the long trip through deep space. The Saturn V rocket that put Apollo 11 on the moon, the most powerful spacecraft to date, doesn’t even begin to approach the first baby steps toward interstellar travel. This deserves attention, because the most powerful and technologically advanced nation on Earth, riding the crest of one of the greatest economic booms in history and fueling that boom by burning through a half billion years’ worth of fossil fuels at an absurdly extravagant pace, had to divert a noticeable fraction of its total resources to the task of getting a handful of spacecraft across what, in galactic terms, is a whisker-thin gap between neighboring worlds.

It’s been an article of faith for years now, and not just among science fiction fans, that progress will take care of the difference. Progress, however, isn’t simply a matter of ingenuity or science. It depends on energy sources, and that meant biomass, wind, water and muscle until technical breakthroughs opened the treasure chest of the Earth’s carbon reserves in the 18th century. If the biosphere had found some less flammable way than coal to stash carbon in the late Paleozoic, the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century wouldn’t have happened; if nature had turned the sea life of the Mesozoic into some inert compound rather than petroleum, the transportation revolution of the 20th century would never have gotten off the ground. Throughout the history of our species, in fact, each technological revolution has depended on accessing a more concentrated form of energy than the ones previously available.

The modern faith in progress assumes that this process can continue indefinitely. Such an assertion, however, flies in the face of thermodynamic reality. A brief summary of that reality may not be out of place here. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and left to itself, it always flows from higher concentrations to lower; this latter rule is what’s called entropy. A system that has energy flowing through it – physicists call this a dissipative system – can develop eddies in the flow that concentrate energy in various ways. Thermodynamically, living things are entropy eddies; we take energy from the flow of sunlight through the dissipative system of the earth in various ways, and use it to maintain concentrations of energy above ambient levels. The larger and more intensive the concentration of energy, on average, the less common it is – this is why mammals are less common than insects, and insects less common than bacteria.

It’s also why big deposits of oil and coal are much less common than small ones, and why oil and coal are much less common than inert substances in earth’s crust. Fossil fuels don’t just happen at random; they exist in the earth because biological processes put them there. Petroleum is the most concentrated of the fossil fuels, and the biggest crude oil deposits – Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Cantarell in Mexico, the West Texas fields, a handful of others – represented the largest concentrations of free energy on earth at the dawn of the industrial age. They are mostly gone now, along with a great many smaller concentrations, and decades of increasingly frantic searching has failed to turn up anything on the same scale. Nor is there another, even more concentrated energy resource waiting in the wings.

If progress depends on getting access to ever more concentrated energy resources, in other words, we have reached the end of our rope. The resources now being proposed as ways to power industrial civilization are all much more diffuse than fossil fuels. (Nuclear power advocates need to remember that uranium-235, which has a great deal of energy when refined and purified, exists in very low concentrations in nature and requires a hugely expensive infrastructure to turn it into usable energy, so the whole system yields very little more energy than goes into it; fusion, if it even proves workable at all, will require an infrastructure a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than fission, and the same is true of breeder reactors.) More generally, it takes energy to concentrate energy. Once we no longer have the nearly free energy of fossil fuels concentrated for us by half a billion years of geology, concentrating energy beyond a certain fairly modest point will rapidly become a losing game in thermodynamic terms. At that point, insofar as progress is measured by the kind of technology that can cross deep space, progress will be over.

We can apply this same logic to Fermi’s paradox and reach a conclusion that makes sense of the data. Since life creates localized concentrations of energy, each planet inhabited by life forms will develop concentrated energy resources. It’s reasonable to assume that our planet is somewhere close to the average, so we can postulate that some worlds will have more stored energy than ours, and some will have less. A certain fraction of planets will evolve intelligent, tool-using species that figure out how to use their planet’s energy reserves. Some will have more and some less, some will use their reserves quickly and some slowly, but all will reach the point we are at today – the point at which it becomes painfully clear that the biosphere of a planet can only store up a finite amount of concentrated energy, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

Chances are that a certain number of the intelligent species in our galaxy have used these stored energy reserves to attempt short-distance spaceflight, as we have done. Some with a great deal of energy resources may be able to establish colonies on other worlds in their own systems, at least for a time. The difference between the tabletop and football-field distances needed to travel within a solar system, and the continental distances needed to cross from star to star, though, can’t be ignored. Given the fantastic energies required, the chance that any intelligent species will have access to enough highly concentrated energy resources to keep an industrial society progressing long enough to evolve starflight technology, and then actually accomplish the feat, is so close to zero that the silence of the heavens makes perfect sense.

These considerations suggest that White’s law, a widely accepted principle in human ecology, can be expanded in a useful way. White’s law holds that the level of economic development in a society is measured by the energy per capita it produces and uses. Since the energy per capita of any society is determined by its access to concentrated energy resources – and this holds true whether we are talking about wild foods, agricultural products, fossil fuels, or anything else – it’s worth postulating that the maximum level of economic development possible for a society is measured by the abundance and concentration of energy resources to which it has access.

It’s also worth postulating, along the lines suggested by Richard Duncan’s Olduvai theory, that a society’s maximum level of economic development will be reached, on average, at the peak of a bell-shaped curve with a height determined by the relative renewability of the society’s energy resources. A society wholly dependent on resources that renew themselves over the short term may trace a “bell-shaped curve” in which the difference between peak and trough is so small it approximates a straight line; a society dependent on resources renewable over a longer timescale may cycle up and down as its resource base depletes and recovers; a society dependent on nonrenewable resources can be expected to trace a ballistic curve in which the height of ascent is matched, or more than matched, by the depth of the following decline.

Finally, the suggestions made here raise the possibility that for more than a century and a half now, our own civilization has been pursuing a misguided image of what an advanced technology looks like. Since the late 19th century, when early science fiction writers such as Jules Verne began to popularize the concept, “advanced technology” and “extravagant use of energy” have been for all practical purposes synonyms, and today Star Trek fantasies tend to dominate any discussion of what a mature technological society might resemble. If access to concentrated energy sources inevitably peaks and declines in the course of a technological society’s history, though, a truly mature technology may turn out to be something very different from our current expectations. We’ll explore this further in next week’s post.