Humanist Perspectives: issue 190: Earth’s “Wisest” Species Heads for the Cliff (Again)
Earth’s “Wisest” Species Heads for the Cliff (Again)
It is obvious to most that humanity faces clear and present dangers to its health and social structures from a number of sources. Human population growth and ever higher levels of consumption have pushed many critical environmental systems past their sustainable limits and into sharp decline.
Similarly, non-renewable resources have been extensively mined and the richness of the ore bodies we are now exploiting and will exploit in the future has declined by almost an order of magnitude from only a century ago.
There is one factor and one factor only which allows human society to still pay its bills and go to work in the morning: oil. Although this über-commodity is becoming increasingly scarce, in 2014 it is still readily available enough to allow the lights to stay on and the wheels to keep turning on the very complex society modern humans have created for themselves.
Right now, in countries such as Canada, governments are waiting for the international situation to improve before their own problems will moderate. Leadership has been handed over to corporate/globalist interests and politicians wait for the benefits to trickle down to their constituents. Unfortunately, few trickle-down benefits seem to permeate below the 1% layer.
Governments find themselves toying with financial mechanisms in reaction to real world, structural issues. The globalist policies of importing massive levels of cheap labour, exporting the highest paying jobs to the cheapest labour market and minimizing investment in their own people are now standard issue for the political class of most developed countries. But in fact, these are structural problems and represent a complete failure of leadership. Or more accurately, a complete sell-out by leadership to globalist interests.
This sell-out has been conducted under the banner of “Globalism = Global Progress.” It doesn’t. Globalism promotes maximum consumption and maximum debt, the two conditions which assure the 1% (a.k.a. “the parasitic overhead”) of the greatest returns. It also guarantees the maximum destruction of environmental assets, the fastest depletion of critical resources and the most rapid path towards extreme income polarization (inequality) and the social chaos which accompanies it.
The measure for this approach is simple GDP – the cash flow in the commercial (monetized) economy – which is totally inadequate to describe the size, structure or dynamics of the real wealth creation process.
Corporate governance of global affairs is a fast, efficient ride to societal collapse and even a monolithic globalism which represented the general welfare is certainly not a practical option. World government could not possibly establish positive control of human affairs without the imposition of an incredibly authoritarian and oppressive regime.
On the other hand, without extensive coordinated action, global well-being will continue to spiral out of control because solutions to our most pressing problems lie outside of the boundaries of what national governments alone can address.
Only through international standards and international cooperation can national governments provide stability and focus the resources to apply long-term solutions to global problems as they manifest themselves within national boundaries.
So what does this mean on the ground? Race-to-the-bottom free trade has to be replaced by a system of nation-building trade-as-necessary which is focused on maximizing the development of human resources and equality, minimizing environmental impacts and preserving natural assets.
This race-to-the-top direction is diametrically opposed to our current policy assumptions.
The world can either try to solve all of its global problems at once or it can depend on nations to solve their own problems in their own time and on their own terms within a clear set of global standards and objectives. Only one method has the potential to succeed.
Cooperate globally, implement locally.
In John Steinbeck’s classic novel (and later John Ford’s movie) The Grapes of Wrath, set during the American Great Depression, farmers driven from their homes by drought, agricultural industry and bank foreclosures, set out for California seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future. They were spurred on by advertising from cheap labour employers promising lots of high paying jobs in Golden California. The advertising campaign assured the employers of large numbers of desperate workers arriving at the gates of their industrial farms in California. This allowed them to do two things. The first was to pay very low wages to a desperate and therefore submissive workforce. The second was to charge them exorbitant rents and high food prices in their worker compounds effectively taxing away what little they did make.
Fast forwarding to Canada in the 21st century, we have mass immigration and especially the Temporary Foreign Workers program (the equivalent of the “illegal” immigration flow into the USA). This meets Immigration Lobby Objectives: Keep wages low and rents and debt high. Make market for land speculators, subsidize cheap labour employers and create ideal conditions for very high growth rates of consumption and debt.
One look at the numbers of immigrants, the erosion of Canadian wages and the increase in debt, and the similarities to past systemic exploitation become obvious. The business-as-usual media are even recycling their love for bubbles. Instead of re-using the name “the wealth effect” applied in the USA to housing inflation, Canadian institutions use the term “asset enhancement” for exactly the same thing. And for all of their love of fighting deficits, fiscal conservatives must wake up to the fact that cheap labour is a deficit spinner and social safety net eroder.
The combination of asset inflation and low wages accelerates income polarization and the rising inequality levels in our society. Mass immigration and lower resources per capita create a perfect storm of rising social inequality amid general economic decline.
The mechanisms and consequences of increasing inequality are very well laid out in Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century which has almost single-handedly brought discussion of fundamental economic theory back into mainstream conversation. Capital is a huge step towards bridging the gap between conventional commercial economics and social policy.
Briefly, Piketty demonstrates that the most important way to get rich is to inherit wealth, lending credence to the blue collar expression “you can’t work for that kind of money.” The other method is to be paid a salary completely out of the range of any contribution you might have made. He also illustrates that the very rich get 5% to 6% on their investments while the middle class get only 2% or so. Simple mathematics dictates that the share of the global wealth owned by the superrich must therefore continue to increase until they own everything since the economies in question do not average more than 2% annual growth. The violent social consequences of this trend have played out many times throughout history.
But nothing so elegantly describes the interests behind, or the mechanisms for creating, an overabundance of cheap labour and its social and human consequences than The Grapes of Wrath. Perfect societal déjà vu in 2014.
An increasing percentage of people in Canada feel left behind in government policies and national policies and are consequently checking out of the democratic process. Without any clear leadership in which they trust, why bother to participate? This trend is particularly strong with the young who, unsurprisingly, are the most disadvantaged segment of the population.
Many people are baffled by government policies. How can you allow large numbers of immigrants into the country when such a large number of citizens are unemployed or under-employed? Worse, how can you allow cheap labour employers to use the Temporary Foreign Workers loophole to directly undercut Canadian wages and working and living conditions? (See The Grapes of Wrath.)
How can the country be committed to lowering carbon emissions when its major policies are higher population growth through immigration, higher consumption, and recklessly rapid exploitation of the oil sands with no emissions mitigation infrastructure or even basic science in place? Why are we still paving over the best farmland in the world?
Why do the media keep lauding the health (synonymous with size to them) of Canada’s economy when the economic and social health of its citizens is declining?
A few answers. Media corporations are, well, corporations and they think like corporations. They have corporate interests such as continued growth and ever higher profits going hand in hand with ever higher management compensation.
How do media corporations generate continuous growth? Since they are almost always tied to a specific region, the only way they can grow is if their region increases its population. The Toronto Star does not sell in Dallas or Paris or Beijing. It only sells in the area close to Toronto. Ditto for the Vancouver Sun and the Montreal Gazette. The same geographic limitations apply to the radio and TV branches of the industry, No population growth, no circulation growth, no advertisement revenue growth.
But the effects of growth are compounded even more by the structure of advertising that population growth determines. Thick sections of new home ads along with splashy new car and consumer electronics, finance (debt) and furniture offerings are the real meat of profitability for media corporations and those who run them.
Population size and rates of growth determine the profitability of media corporations and their editorial policies reflect this. Check the advertising patterns in your local paper to understand their revenue sources and their editorial policies.
It’s even more straightforward for developers. Given their alternate choice of doing renovations and constructing the odd new replacement or upgrade home, which is what the construction market would consist of given a stable population, developers have opted to build huge tracts of hundreds or even thousands of houses. They manage to do this by donating large amounts of money to politicians who make markets for them by promoting mass immigration. In many areas around Toronto (and undoubtedly elsewhere), developers’ contributions constitute over 75% of the donations to the campaigns of successful municipal politicians. Repeated and favourable mention by the local media is also a critical factor.
Banks prosper from debt, and number of mortgages and their size are propelled by a growing population demanding more houses and driving up prices for the ones that exist. The connection between local big box retailers and population size and the thirst of low-margin, labour-intensive business models for cheap and submissive labour also needs little elaboration. These people give money to media corporations and politicians and they expect results from their purchase. These people know where their money comes from.
Is it any wonder that “the news” constantly reports on the rate of growth of the economy, the number of housing starts (the perfect environmental inverse barometer) and rising house prices as the measures of progress? For media corporations and their sponsors, they do constitute health and progress. For everyone else, the impact is as massively negative as it is unsustainable for the nation. The immigration/growth-forever lobby knows where its money comes from.
It is past time that governments determined where the real national interests lie. As a society we need reporting that directly ties what people are experiencing to clear national goals and real world indicators. We need to know the quality of permanent net jobs created (and their wage rates) not the number of temporary low-paid jobs. We need reporting that covers the steak of the human outcomes, not the sizzle of promoters’ profits.
Reversing our current policies to look down the road and reduce environmental decline, stabilize resources per capita and invest in our people to improve incomes and equality levels would prove devastating to the growth lobby. The entire revenue model for media corporations would change as would the structure of political party funding.
But the first step is for people to understand how our national policies are dictated by the benefit that those simple growth policies provide to the most powerful groups in the country. Then the reasoning behind the path governments follow becomes a little less baffling.
There are two ways a mining town can develop. It can be on top of a small resource which is seen as having a limited lifespan and therefore never becomes more than a oversized work camp, or it can be on top of a larger resource and be thought to have an infinite lifespan and evolve into a full, family-based community.
So, pick a mining town, any mining town. Depending on the lifespan of the basic resource, the town can have an extended run as a healthy community after its initial heady days of rapid growth. But eventually the mineral body plays out and decline begins. This can either end in a ghost town or a deteriorating larger centre typically sporting high debt levels and declining incomes for both residents and the township.
If public expenditure on infrastructure is not tailored to the size and lifespan of the resource, there can be a huge debt overhang as revenues start to fade.
The hottest mining centre in the country, Fort McMurray (Wood Buffalo), has a long-term debt per household over 10 times the average for municipalities in Canada. Have the financial managers in Fort McMurray taken the lifespan of their critical commodity resources into consideration in their long-term budgets? (They haven’t answered my emails as of yet.)
Rapid growth spins very high debt levels for workers due to high housing costs. Who picks up the tab after the party ends? Who profits in the short term and who pays in the long term? Are we going to continue the process of “privatizing profits and socializing debt”?
Promoters will say that after the oil/resource is gone, there are many things that their industrious population can do to maintain or even grow their communities. But if this is the case, why wasn’t this evident in Pickle Lake, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Detroit, post-manufacturing Ontario, etc. etc. after their primary income source folded up?
Compare this to a broad-based, stable economy where the objective is not the immediate and maximum extraction rate for natural resources but the development of human resources and the preservation of resource and environmental assets. This objective would be met through minimal public and private debt and continued high levels of resources per capita to keep supplies steady and costs low far into the future.
Currently world policy is largely guided by commercial economic measures. Even within the realm of the commercial economy, these are fatally flawed. The term “competitive” is used to justify free trade, implying that the most efficient producer gets all of the business. This is far from the truth. In fact, the cheapest producer gets all of the business.
“Competitive” implies a fair and flat playing field on which producers compete using inputs directly related to the work involved. But radically different labour and environmental standards make fairness impossible. In addition to that, the elephant in the free trade room is exchange rates. These are based on the highly manipulated and ephemeral valuations of national fiat currencies and have little to do with the efficiency of domestic companies.
Canada has so far sacrificed over 500,0001 high-paying manufacturing jobs to the god of “Globalization” while importing huge numbers of immigrants to fill tax-negative jobs in the service sector and maintain growth in the overall economy. Tax-negative means that the taxes produced from these jobs will not pay for the government services those workers will require. So far the tab for this imbalance is on the order of $20 billion per year but this figure is for immigrants only and does not allow for Canadians held in cheap labour jobs by low investment and an unlimited supply of offshore cheap labour.
Imagine a manufacturing company in Canada having to deal with competition from China. As was the typical case in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Canadian company produced a much superior product and output per worker was far higher, yet it was unable to compete due to selling price. Was it really that much cheaper to produce in China? Could a worker really feed, clothe and house himself and pay taxes on an income which would not buy a bag of potato chips a day in Winnipeg?
Certainly not. The Chinese currency was held at a very low level which underwrote the real cost and maintained low selling prices for Chinese goods. In the late ‘90s, Canadian manufacturers were competitive with American manufacturers and Mexican manufacturers with a 65-cent dollar. Fast forward a few years and despite improving our products and processes, we aren’t competitive with the dollar at par as our effective prices have risen by 50%. Currency exchange fluctuations whipsaw “competitiveness.”
If the USA runs a huge deficit, their dollar declines and we are no longer competitive. If there is trouble in other parts of the world and money flows into the USA, inflating their dollar, we are competitive. If the Canadian dollar is inflated by energy exports or land speculators buying up Canadian property, our industries are not competitive.
The concept of free trade producing efficient industries is a fallacy, as is the claim that it produces stronger societies or a more stable world. Free trade supports the race to the bottom via the quest for the cheapest producers, not the most efficient or the most socially responsible. Also, interdependent production spread around the world is highly unstable.
It is fine to measure the commercial economy in fiat currency – dollars, euros, yen, etc. – but national policy and global standards should be guided solely by the stocks and flows of our physical assets and human outcomes. That is, we should be counting in real physical units and determining our goals based on sustainable impacts on human and social welfare.
Regional human populations have surged in the good times and collapsed in the bad times throughout history. The terminal segment of the past two population cycles are fairly well known. The Black Plague in the mid-1300s and the Little Ice Age of the 1600s ended centuries of fairly rapid population growth which had pushed the stress on agricultural lands to a very high level. After generations of favourable climate, the weather took a turn for the worse and crop failures precipitated plague and social disorder.
Since the 1600s was the latest and therefore best documented era of calamity, the full scope of social collapse and depravity is open for examination. One researcher took advantage of the rich worldwide historical record and laid it out in all of its chilling detail. Even for a jaded doom and gloomer, Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis – Wars, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century is unsettling to read.
Parker does a brilliant job of illuminating the structure of collapse from an analysis of the calories needed to run a farm to the fragility of a trading system involving specialized regions. The impact on political institutions when they fail to deliver on essential public requirements should be required reading for every politician and media associate. If you are looking for the definitive description of a full population cycle (although Parker does not call it that) buy this book. At 700 pages, it’s a long read and a superb reference.
Population cycles are clearly present in the interactive historical population graphs (for every nation back to 400 BCE with projections to 2100 CE) on our website2 but the human impacts of these lumpy curves can only be appreciated once one has read the detail presented in Global Crisis.
Our current population cycle is a global one, however, and as we stretch the limits of our resources on a worldwide basis, we are creating an increasingly interdependent and brittle world order. Parker demonstrates how quickly a complex trading system comes to grief when the participants sacrificed resilience in favour of maximizing output. Human welfare has never been more dependent on trading systems and, more specifically, has never before been dependent on vast consumption of externally supplied fuel.
There is one other crucial difference between the population cycle we are now in and all previous ones. In previous recovery phases lasting centuries, stress on agricultural lands was greatly reduced and the soil recovered over decades of non-use or increased fallow cycles. Marginal land was removed from production. In the decades following the Black Plague, labourers in England saw their real wages double. The soil and renewable resources were the basis of previous societies’ prosperity but in our current cycle, the recovery phase will not be aided by replenishing oil reserves. Oil fields are mines, not regenerative biological systems. Can we reclaim the advances we have achieved in the current cycle which began in 1750 without fossil fuels? Certainly not with the large population we have now.
Optimists and promoters will claim that humans have always adapted and overcome their problems. This is true only if one sees past societal collapses and 50% population losses as mere bumps in the road. The terminal segment of our current cycle will likely be global and more severe than anything we have experienced before. That is, unless some clever human comes up with a cheap generator which allows sea water to replace oil. Failing that, humans are likely to discover that technological cleverness is no substitute for the wisdom necessary to understand Earth’s systems.
Scarcity of a resource drives up the human effort needed to get it and therefore its cost. Mineral or resource scarcity is compounded by the fact that all harvesting and mining of resources is done using fossil fuel. So the availability of the resource is a function of its own scarcity times the scarcity of the particular fuels used to produce it.
The human effort in terms of time plus technology required to transform the resources into end products is the inverse of the net availability of the basic resource plus the energy needed to extract it. This point is illustrated using copper as the example in three graphs from our website3 :
A new (or back to hunter-gatherer) sustainability mindset has to come from two premises. The first is that man is no longer the desperate survivor clawing his way to the position of apex predator but rather that humanity is the steward of a living planet.
The second is that human elites must earn their positions of privilege by leading for the benefit of all rather that for their own further aggrandizement. If we are going to prosper for the long term, we are going to have to learn to relax and cooperate on every level.
Clear national goals are critical to establishing sustainable progress. These have all been set aside as the globalism imperative chases maximum cash flow. But the long view and the accountable view must include the breadth of the economy, its ability to develop its human resources, its ability to maintain the health of its natural resource assets and its ability to respond to global environmental pressures.
Resilience in the form of healthy environmental assets and a broad-based economy with a population with a wide range of well-developed skills will be critical in maintaining our social cohesion in the face of the daunting resource scarcity and environmental dynamics which lie ahead.
Unlike hunter-gatherer and early trade-free or low-trade agricultural societies, highly stratified human societies have always been focused on maximum consumption and population growth. Population cycles are driven by these two factors forcing down the ratio of resource per capita and triggering at some point a population collapse (typically as climate turns unfavourable).
The Grapes of Wrath model, through rapid growth, globalization, lack of national goals and lack of concern for human and natural assets, seems to be the inherent operating mode of most sophisticated societies. It is the most effective short-term method of improving the wealth and power of the elite classes. Elites love scale and growth regardless of their effects on the general populace or the lifespan of vital resource bases or of the nation itself.
Egalitarian societies on the other hand can last when based on broad concerns for human and environmental welfare. In 2014, humans have an unprecedented ability to look back and see what led to past calamities. We need to take that vision and combine it with our unprecedented ability to forecast and change our pattern of behaviour before change, once again, imposes itself on us.
