Another perspective on the depression

[GliderGuider]

The Depression Has Come - Let's Finish the Job, Right

The New York Times made my day when it reported on the state of the economy and world trade on January 3, after the first business day of the new year. We won't see a corporate media headline of "Depression Cuts Greenhouse Gases Drastically" or "This is What Petrocollapse Looks Like" very soon because not enough people see the interconnections of history's trends on energy and limits. But I'll take what I can get for some winter good cheer.

With the Earth's climate at the tipping point to spin the planet into overheated mass extinction, some of us are thankful for the economy's collapse. "The worst slowdown since the Great Depression," said the New York Times (Business Day, Jan. 3). While it's true some kinds of environmental protection slacken when times are rougher for certain industries, on the whole there's a direct relationship between consumption and ecological destruction. Another relationship is between increased consumption (and work and debt) to unhappiness, mental illness and diminished social cohesion.

In addition to climate concerns and society's pathologies, we need to terminate our dangerous reliance on petroleum, coal, natural gas, uranium other metals and poisons that have built up our toxic house of cards. There are positive trends, such as dam removal and the radicalization of America's top climate scientist, James Hansen.

~~~

Clearly, "alternatives" such as those as well as urban food gardens, pedal power produce-hauling, and more veganism need to begin in ernest.

These methods for local self-sufficiency and sustainable food and freight were laughed at by most of the "mainstream" until now. Now they make more sense to anyone questioning buying a car or shelling out scarce dollars for expensive, long-distance hauled food.

To pursue these strategies now, to strip the car and oil industries of "earnings," will accelerate the fall of the corporate petroleum state. Its days are numbered, prompting a call for the proactive dissolution of the U.S. (Culture Change Letter #221). There's more to be done to finish the job of this oil-shock induced Depression, for more positive outcomes than we'll get if we cling to yesterday's economic system. It's too fantastic this week anyway, but what about ceasing 90% of the "Defense" budget to help bring an end to the deadly economic system heating the climate? We cannot foresee how soon collapse will be able to run its course to put the self-serving weapons industry mostly out of business.

But we can rejoice in the fact that

"The U.S. economy was on even weaker footing than commonly believed as 2008 came to a close. Moreover, the signal from the export orders index is that the rest of the world is right there with us. Hardly a signal for economic recovery anytime soon. New orders... are at the lowest level on record going back to January 1948." (New York Times, Jan. 3)

Who would have thought just six months ago that widgets and other pollution boxes would start to dry up so soon, with much fewer freighters from China now coming to the U.S.? "Maybe there's a god after all," said a street person priding herself on consuming less and less new stuff .

Celebrate! "The manufacturing sector (of China) had contracted for a fifth consecutive month... the steepest decline in its history." Thank you gods and goddesses!

These developments occurred because of peak oil and peak money. Praise be to petrocollapse.

More wonderful news from the same edition of the Times: "November Chip Sales Slipped 10%" (from Reuters). Shucks, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition must be in tears. Of joy.

Despite the predictable response to this declaration, I have to say that I am in compete agreement with Jan Lundberg.

Situations that cannot continue, don't. Unsustainable practices by definition cannot be sustained. The sooner we reset all human activity to a (much) lower level, the less aggregate damage we will do to the Earth's inhabitants, including ourselves.

Viewed from a positive instead of a negative perspective, this depression is not a catastrophe but rather an unexpected opportunity to reconcile our actions and beliefs with the realities of both physics and ecology, and to resume our rightful place as equals within the community of life.

[screembloodymurder]

1. Very interesting perspective.

If you look at oil consumption before and after the 70's oil shock, you will see that what had been a 7% growth rate, dropped to a more sustainable level of growth. At 7%, consumption doubles every 10 years. It has been argued that if the 7% rate had continued, we would now be long past peak oil. Could it be that this depression is a deliberate attempt to conserve a vital resource?

[GliderGuider]

2. Liebig's Law may have something to say on this

In any complex ecology that's approaching a Liebig Minimum of an essential resource, you would expect system disruptions to occur around that resource, and those disruptions will limit rate of consumption of that resource. Since global civilization is an ecology, and oil is one of its critical resources, such rate-limiting events would be a natural outcome of the system's dynamics.

Liebig's Law of the Minimum states that growth is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth.

Liebig's Law has been extended to biological populations (and is commonly used in ecosystem models). For example, the growth of an organism such as a plant (GG: or a civilization) may be dependent on a number of different factors, such as sunlight or mineral nutrients (GG: or oil). The availability of these may vary, such that at any given time one is more limiting than the others. Liebig's Law states that growth only occurs at the rate permitted by the most limiting.

[Bigmack]

3. This link to the definition works better....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum

[GliderGuider]

4. Thanks.

[screembloodymurder]

5. Nature is a hard taskmaster.

And we who have wallowed in her plenty, will now be burdened.

[GliderGuider]

6. "In this house we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!"

Marge: I'm worried about the kids, Homey. Lisa's becoming very obsessive. This morning I caught her trying to dissect her own raincoat.
Homer: I know. And this perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke! It just keeps going faster and faster.
Marge: That's it: we have to get them back to school.
Homer: I'm with you, Marge. Lisa! Get in here.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

[Citizen Number 9]

7. You might be on to something there. Nature has plenty.

If Nature has so much, and we are so burdened, let's just tax Her and level the playing field a bit.

Oh, wait.....

[SlowDownFast]

9. Deliberate by somebody or "something".

Karma's a bitch that knows how to force balance.

[leftofthedial]

8. what the world needs now,

is a permanent "depression"

we need to ratchet down--forever!--the exploitation of resources and the attempted murder of the planet.

[Citizen Number 9]

10. Is that a declaration of war

on the human race?

[leftofthedial]

11. no

It is recognition that the human race is killing itself. Without profound, systematic change in how humans use the planet, we won't survive as a species.

[Citizen Number 9]

13. Maybe it's just evolutionary pressure

on the human organism itself.

[GliderGuider]

20. The current rate of ecological change is too fast to be evolutionary

Evolutionary pressures typically exert over the span of millennia. If they hold their current trajectories, the pressures we are creating will reach species-altering levels within decades. The only way those changes would create evolutionary pressure would be by forcing humanity through a bottleneck.

[Citizen Number 9]

27. What's the one (or, maybe two) thing(s) that humans can do

when their species is under pressure?

[GliderGuider]

28. Response to evolutionary-scale pressures

Such pressures are far too great for humans to resist directly. Approaches based on simply shifting our activity patterns are unlikely to help, especially in the face of rising technology levels and non-decreasing population. This is the message of I=PAT.

The one thing we can do is to start telling ourselves a different story about our reason for being here and the values that sustain that existence. If we manage to shift our cultural narrative to one that is about being a part of the web of life rather than apart from it, the it will be possible to change our behaviour enough to become part of the solution rather than part of the precipitate.

For a more in-depth exploration of this rather abstract response to the crisis, I recommend Charles Eisenstein's remarkable book The Ascent of Humanity which is available in its entirety on-line.

[Citizen Number 9]

29. Not even with our big brains?

I was thinking that cooperation is one of the things we can do that the other animals don't do. With them it is only about competition.

[GliderGuider]

30. Nope.

Man is not so much a rational animal as a rationalizing animal. The choices we think we make through reason are generally made well in advance of us even becoming conscious of them. We then dress those pre-made decisions up in whatever psychological clothing gives them the necessary acceptability, either to ourselves or those around us. Here's a popular article about research into the mechanisms at work: http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2008/04/14/free_will_not_as_much_as_you_think/

Using sophisticated brain imaging techniques, the researchers found that they can predict people's simple decisions up to 10 seconds before they're conscious of making such a choice.

"It seems that your brain starts to trigger your decision before you make up your mind," said the study's lead author, John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. "We can't rule out free will, but I think it's very implausible. The question is, can we still decide against the decision our brain has made?"

In this experiment Haynes and his colleagues found that two regions of the brain responsible for even higher-order decision-making - the frontopolar cortex and the parietal cortex - were activated even earlier when people were asked to press a button with either their right or left hands.

Employing both functional magnetic resonance imaging and pattern recognition statistical techniques, the researchers were able to predict which button people would choose before they made their conscious decisions - as much as 10 seconds early, "an eternity," Haynes said.

Haynes believes that delay suggests the absence of free will as most people define it.

On the subject of cooperation vs. competition, there's little evidence that humans are any more or less cooperative than other species (the idea that non-human species are purely competitive is simply false, as any wolf hunting pack demonstrates). Evolutionary theories of inclusive fitness say that we are a competitive species, except within bounded domains where altruism and cooperation confer greater inclusive fitness.

Much of human behaviour is genetically mediated, though not completely genetically determined. We should therefore expect that many of the behaviours we see around us every day, whether personal, social or international, have some genetic component that is going to be very resistant to change. Given the impact of common negative behaviours such as greed, xenophobia and conflict of various sorts, this is not altogether encouraging.

The other influence on our behaviour though is our internal narrative, our world-view. This reflects to a large degree our shared cultural narrative, and it's this component that makes the possibility of long term, large scale behaviour change realistic. If we change our story, we change the aspects of our behaviour that are non-genetic and therefore more malleable. Unfortunately, psychological inertia and the rationalizing mechanism I mentioned above combine to make even this sort of change difficult. Such patterns can be broken by crisis, however, and fortunately we are facing a convergence of crises (in the ecology, energy and economics) that should be potent enough to do the job.

[GliderGuider]

12. 48, 69, 2C, 20, 72, 6F, 62, 6F, 74, 21

49, 20, 48, 6F, 70, 65, 20, 79, 6F, 75, 27, 72, 65, 20, 65, 6E, 6A, 6F, 79, 69, 6E, 67, 20, 79, 6F, 75, 72, 20, 6C, 69, 74, 74, 6C, 65, 20, 67, 61, 6D, 65, 21

http://www.vortex.prodigynet.co.uk/misc/ascii_conv.html

[Systematic Chaos]

14. One, zero zero one, zero zero one... SOS! One, zero zero one, zero zero one... in distress....

59, 6F, 75, 2C, 20, 74, 6F, 6F, 3F, 20, 20, 53, 65, 65, 6D, 73, 20, 74, 68, 65, 20, 77, 68, 6F, 6C, 65, 20, 6F, 66, 20, 44, 55, 20, 69, 73, 20, 66, 75, 63, 6B, 69, 6E, 67, 20, 73, 69, 63, 6B, 20, 6F, 66, 20, 74, 68, 69, 73, 20, 6F, 6E, 65, 2E, 20, 20, 4C, 4F, 4C

[Citizen Number 9]

16. Didn't you state you were putting me on 'Ignore'?

Huh. Maybe the 'Ignore' function just resets.

Go figure.

[GliderGuider]

18. Nope, not me.

I don't have anybody on ignore.

[Citizen Number 9]

23. I don't think you would.

I was referring to the other fellow. He was near starkers a while back in another thread

[Systematic Chaos]

19. I never said I was putting you on ignore.

I put nobody on ignore, and besides, you're way too much fun to even consider doing that.

Also, notice that I wasn't replying to you in the first place. Further note, just for the record, that I have no further intention of replying to you. That's considerably different than ignore.

:hi:

[Citizen Number 9]

24. Oh. Maybe that was it.

Maybe you said something like you weren't going to reply to me anymore.

Hard to remember exactly....there have been..."so many"....

[Citizen Number 9]

15. Game?

I'm a member of the Democratic Party and a US citizen.

You appear to be casting characters from abroad.

I do hope I'm not stealing any of your attention - I'm not too big on personality cults myself.

[GliderGuider]

17. Well, I can't tell why you're here

You don't appear to be here to teach.
You're not apparently here to learn.
You're not participating in the discussions in any kind of depth.
Your responses are non-responsive.

That means you're playing some kind of game.

[Citizen Number 9]

25. Teach?

I haven't collected any tuition fees.

But I have learned lots. I always do. :9

I think I participate in the discussions to at least the depth of the average DU'er. Certainly more as a matter of fact. A number of the posters appear to be simply drive-by hate mongers who throw something out the window and never come back to clean it up. I can't help that. Other times, maybe I just run out of opinions. A goodly number of posters want to make wild and outrageous statements, and then, when called on it, start trying to evade responsibility by splitting hairs. I'm not interested in one-upsmanship.

Sometimes, it may appear that I am non-responsive, but that's probably because we have failed to establish a solid starting point. Not much use running down the trail if you can't agree on the starting point. I also don't have any interest in working with the posters who revel in their low perception abilities. That's just unrewarding for me and ends up angering them.

[Odin2005]

21. Misanthropic crap

You luddites that want us back living like medieval peasants or want humanity wiped out all together disgust me. :puke:

[GliderGuider]

22. Thank heavens! I was beginning to think all you guys had changed sides.

I feel much better now.:hi:

[Citizen Number 9]

26. I can understand the desire to go back to a "simpler time"

But, I think our society pretty much allows for that, at least on a "short-term" basis.

I guess the ones we see posting here are the ones who have decided to stay engaged, but it looks like they are a minority interested in forcing a majority over to their way. That's gotta be frustrating. no wonder they are so often abusive and angry.

It seems to me that a more effective solution has always been to set a good example if you want to make headway on issues like that.

[Bigmack]

31. I don't WANT any of that shit...but....

I can't figure out how we can go on spending the earth's resources like there is no tomorrow. I'm old enough that bicycling for fun is OK, but bicycling for survival isn't something I look forward to.

In all of history, we are perhaps the most wasteful mass society. If we have to change our lifestyle to survive, we'd better start doing it now.