The Great Pause Week 63: Mr. Anderson's Warning

"Our recipes for a prosperous future are a prediction of what society will be forced to consider."

Recently I had the good fortune to listen in on an interview with one of my favorite climate scientists, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndell Centre. I have often quoted Anderson in these pages and I profiled him in my books, The Paris Agreement (2015) and Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Drawdown Economy to End the Climate Crisis (2019). In this interview of May 13, 2021, Anderson brought home these salient points:

The political challenge is an order of magnitude different than from what most people would interpret from The Paris Agreement.

***

If you want to hit the 1.5°C target, the world would need to stop emitting any CO2 from about 2029…. You have to draw a straight line from 2022 to 2029 and eliminate all CO2 emissions — that would just barely keep you in the budget.

***

I think all of climate change pushes our imagination to the extreme so the one thing I will say is that there are no non-radical futures. The future is radically different from the present either because we make huge, rapid shifts in reducing our emissions with profound shifts in our society, or we hang onto the status quo for a few more years whilst we lock in huge shifts from the impacts of climate change. So the future is radically different — there is no neat way around that.

***

I can’t see any way we can do it by 2029. But I think we could hold to 2 degrees of warming, which is deeply depressing because that’s huge levels of impacts. … We just had a paper last year where we actually unpacked what would (attaining) 2 degrees C look like… and for the wealthier parts of the world they’d need to be at zero CO2 by somewhere around 2035. Now that might be a bit later for some of the less wealthy countries in that group. If you‘re Poland or somewhere like that it might take a bit longer. If you’re Switzerland or Luxembourg or some of the wealthier parts you’d be a bit earlier than that… But that is only if you start now. Because it is a cumulative problem, every year we choose to fail, or every year our reduction rates aren’t the rates that are necessary, then the end date comes closer to us.

If we start in the wealthier part of the world, we’d need 10 percent reductions every single year starting from now. But given that it takes us 2 or 3 years to reach 10 percent, even if we were serious about it, which we’re not, because our emissions are so high in the near term, the 2 or 3 years it takes us to get to 10 percent actually means you need to aim more likely at 20 percent per year by 2030 to get to zero by 2035. 

***

For the poorer parts of the world there is about a 15 year lag for them to get to zero emissions… by about 2050. But they will still need to peak their emissions by about 2025. Now, no-one is talking about that. China is saying, “Well we might peak by 2030,” India by 2050.

***

Even Covid was only 6 to 7 percent. You would need a couple of those per year…. It is only a metaphor and like most metaphors it quickly falls apart. But it does show us that we can make rapid changes in our society if they are necessary.

We have been cautiously but definitively informed by numerous scientific conferences and publications now that both of the following statements are true:

1. In the business as usual scenario presently being followed, Earth is on track to a global average temperature increase of 3.7 to 6.9 degrees C by the end of the present century. 
2. At any temperature above 3 degrees, no organized human civilization will be possible. Agriculture will not work. Our sweat glands will not cool us outdoors (they fail above 40 to 50°C, depending on individuals). Superstorms will wreak havoc on wind farms, solar arrays, and hydroelectric dams. Fires and floods will take down our cities.

“There is no suggestion that all humans would die and all life would go off the planet,” Anderson said, “and there is no suggestion that that would be the case, but it would be a devastatingly different world than where we are today and it also wouldn’t be stable.” 

There might be no stopping at 4°C. It looks like that if you head up into that temperature that you are starting to kick in lots more feedbacks. Four degrees is a temperature threshold that you are passing through as you head towards some new stabilization at a much higher level. Anyway, at every level it is something we should be avoiding.

We are into the third phase of Odum’s pulsing cycle, which he termed, “descession.” Now the system goes through a phase shift. Instead of maximizing growth, it adapts to resource limits by optimizing. Waste is converted to circularity. “To sustain the emergy per person requires rapid decrease in population” (as we are seeing). Reduced resources and negative factors of crowding cause the population to decline until resources begin to accumulate again.

Population triggers feedbacks when it becomes large. One feedback is that wealth accumulation allows gradual liberation of some oppressed classes — wage slaves, immigrants, women, minorities — who then have aspirations to wealth and power that are best furthered with fewer children. Another is the innate desire for space and a modicum of privacy, a yearning to touch and be part of the natural world, and having fewer children is viewed as a means to escape one’s crowded, impersonal conditions. 

H.T. Odum advised that the hair shirt approach — asking people to change their diets and drive or fly less — is both unnecessary and counterproductive. He thought that reducing luxuries and closing the wealth gap was the best course.

To simply limit resource use is not a useful policy since it goes against the maximum empower principle of self-organization, which dictates the maximization of energy and resource flows through all hierarchical levels of a system for it to be sustainable. But limiting luxury and wasteful uses allows resources to go into productive functions and is adaptive. Thus, measures to limit unnecessary horsepower stimulate the economy, whereas taxing or limiting useful resource uses is not a viable option, since it forces the system to decrease its resource base, affecting use and misuse. 

For Odum, the megalithic, petroleum–dominated, capitalist systems were just another ecosystem but with greater infrastructure investment and energy throughput. He urged societies to reorganize for descent, which with adequate preparation could be just as prosperous as ascent. He envisioned that a shift in the nature of capitalism would be part of that reorganization.

When there are resources to develop, rapid competitive growth of a few enterprises prevails. In ecosystems, this is called eutrophic overgrowth by weeds. In the economy, this is growth capitalism. Those developments with investment loans outgrow those without the more rapid start. 

***

During growth, capital earns high interest as enterprises pay back loans and dividends. People with money have large incomes for which they did no work for the system. After growth, unearned income decreases. A system is more efficient if money is paid for real work. 

He concluded:

If the principles (emergy, maximum empower, pulsing paradigm) are correct and we interpret their application correctly, then our recipes for a prosperous future are a prediction of what society will be forced to consider. If civilization is to progress, it has to learn to advocate the patterns that these principles predict. In the process, a growth culture will be able to change smoothly into a culture of descent. However, history records many systems that crashed instead. Showing a good way down is a call for everyone to think ahead and plan. 

Family planning is merely part of the process as we round the bend at the Anthropocene apogee and start to progress towards something resembling the Holocene we left. It will not be that, it will be different, but these coming decades will take us there as we learn to steward rather than spend, gather rather than disperse, and contract rather than expand. The alternative is unthinkable.

As it is, we probably went further in this end of the cycle than we should have and needed to be cornering much sooner. The wealth we squandered was biodiversity, something that takes not centuries to recover, like soils and forests, but millions of years. We need to curtail that profligacy quickly and save what remains.

 

Last week the Biden Adminstration took a remarkable step that very few noticed. The President issued an executive order directing all agencies of government to conduct a sweeping climate risk assessment. While that may seem common sense — something many banks and insurance companies already do — it is actually a first step towards Odum’s maxim of pricing-in true costs. The Federal Government’s “climate risk exposure” will be assigned a dollar figure for the first time, and in fine detail.

While the opposition party has so far been quiet about this, it is unlikely their major donors in the coal and gas states will let it go unnoticed. Last week, when the International Energy Agency flexed its muscles on climate change, the industry pushed back:

No new oil and natural gas fields are needed in the net-zero pathway.”

 — Fatih Birol, Executive Director, International Energy Agency

 
 [The above statement] “…not only runs entirely contrary to the main reason that the IEA was founded, namely, to promote secure and affordable energy supplies to foster economic growth, but it also seems to forget the pivotal role hydrocarbons, mainly oil and gas, play in the global economy.”

 — Cyril Widdershoven, international consultant and commentator, on Oilprice.com

Widdershoven will never grok the pulsing cycles of ecosystems. He is not paid to. But the rest of us can.

References

Bardi, Ugo, The Seneca Effect, New York: Springer Publishing (2017).

Bardi, Ugo, Sara Falsini, and Ilaria Perissi. “Toward a general theory of societal collapse: a biophysical examination of Tainter’s model of the diminishing returns of complexity.” BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality 4, no. 1 (2019): 3.

Catton Jr, William R. Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse: Humanity’s Impending Impasse. Xlibris Corporation, 2009.

Odum, Howard T., and Elisabeth C. Odum. “The prosperous way down.” Energy 31, no. 1 (2006): 21–32.

Schröder, Enno, and Servaas Storm. “Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions: The Road to “Hothouse Earth” is Paved with Good Intentions.” International Journal of Political Economy 49, no. 2 (2020): 153–173.

Steffen, Will, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes et al. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 33 (2018): 8252–8259.

Tainter, Joseph, The Collapse of Complex Societies. London: Cambridge University Press (1988).

_________________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

 Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

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The Great Pause Week 62: A Survivable Change of Fortune

"Pulsing on each scale is an accumulating build up of products converged to centers, followed by descent with sharp, short diverging dispersal."

“If, when they came out of camp, they found hostility and their house vandalized, their tenancy cancelled, then this, despite its evidently traumatic nature, was a survivable change of fortune.”

 — Simon Winchester, speaking of the Japanese internment experience during WWII, in Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, chapter 4 (2021).

 

In May 2000, the distinguished ecological systems thinker Howard T. Odum presented a paper at the international workshop, “Advances in Energy Studies,” in Porto Venere, Italy, that turned out to be the final contribution of his life. Two years after he died, it was published in the scientific journal Energy as “The Prosperous Way Down.” The paper has since influenced countless students of ecosystem ecology and general systems theory and inclined more than a few to become preppers. In that final paper, Odum laid out a number of his driving theories, fixed our position on the long cycle of history, and gave some advice about what he thought we needed to be doing, urgently.

It is entirely forgivable that he got a number of things wrong, because it is only now, 20 years later, that we know more of things he could only speculate about, but in broad stroke he got both the problem and its solution correct, as will become clearer as this century progresses.

Odum said that ecosystems follow the laws of thermodynamics. In any system there “is an alternation between slow production, growth and succession followed by a pulse of consumption, descent and decession. Pulsing on each scale is an accumulating build up of products converged to centers, followed by descent with sharp, short diverging dispersal.”

There are four main stages of the pulsing cycle: 

• growth on abundant available resources, with sharp increases in a system’s population, structure, and assets, based on low-efficiency and high-competition (capitalism and monopolistic overgrowth); 
• climax and transition, when the system reaches the maximum size allowed by the available resources, increases efficiency, develops collaborative competition patterns, and prepares for descent by storing information; 
• descent, with adaptations to less resources available, a decrease in population and assets, an increase in recycling patterns, and a transmission of information in a way that minimizes losses; 
• low-energy restoration, with no-growth, consumption smaller than accumulation, and storage of resources for a new cycle ahead. 

Odum compared where we are now to the peak of the Roman Empire; a climax and transition. He said it took one thousand years for the whole cycle to run and about 300 years for the descent phase, which is known in systems theory as the Seneca effect, after the Roman psychohistorian who first forecast the pattern. Odum reminded his readers that Joseph Tainter in his Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) provided many examples of “once-proud and enormous civilizations that remain only as stones under desert sands or the vegetation of jungles.” 

Odum also understood the significance of data storage, perhaps the defining technology of our time:

When essential information is broadly shared on a large scale, it becomes a long-lasting, unifying mechanism. Information sharing can replace the restrictive information competition of growth capitalism. Television and the internet have the capability of changing the global organization away from military territorialism. If global ethics for equitable trade and sharing information can prevail, global empower and peace can be protected by the information mutualism that maximizes empower. The dangerous alternative is fragmenting societies warring for residual resources. 

The problem here is that the global sharing of information takes substantial resources to develop. It may be restricted to those ideals that are important at the global level. Examples of important messages that need to be shared globally are: protecting the purity of the global atmosphere, maintaining cordiality and trade between neighboring countries that are culturally different, and sharing technologies that are useful anywhere. 

It has been called a paradox that there is a spread of global information and economics and at the same time an intensification of separate efforts by local groups to hold on to their special languages, heritages, cultures, arts, and religions. There is no paradox, just properties of a developing hierarchy in which people can be effective by being different about what is small scale but united about what is large scale. 

Biological architecture — indeed evolutionary biology — entails information management. The genetic code is often called a library for good reason. We can micro-forensically trace our origins back to the conjoining of single cell organisms. Whenever our bodies retrieve a genetic “book,” our epigenome picks which chapter to read. 

Information seems ethereal and remote from biological and industrial processes. But because information requires many energy transformations, there are limits to the amount sustainable. Even when isolated in compact form, information requires some form of energy as a carrier, such as that in the DNA of seeds, the paper of books, the electromagnetic waves of radio transmission, or the neuroelectrical processes of the brain. Significant resources are needed to copy, store, disseminate and test the existing information, in order to support patterns for generation of new information. 

Therefore, information capacity declines with diminishing resources. Also, information loses utility and retrievability as it accumulates. Information may be characterized as something that requires fewer resources to save and copy than to make anew. Like the brain, society has to select and condense the clutter of short-term memory into fewer items of long-term memory. The universities are the main institutions with this capability, if enough resources (emergy) are provided to this purpose. 

The reservoirs of data storage may be in the ivory towers of Academia today but after the burning of the Library of Alexandria they came to reside in the palaces of Constantinople and Cairo and later, the monasteries of medieval Europe and Tibet. Safety of the collection was a more important consideration than whether it was being used. While woodcuts, paper and papyrus were no match for the flames set by Caesar in 48 BCE that consumed the Alexandrian library — incinerating nearly the entire corpus of Greek literature and half a million other records of antiquity, with many of the surviving texts later destroyed by Christian zealots in 391 AD — today we are busily translating the accumulated knowledge of the ages to ones and zeros stored on magnetic surfaces with known half-lives measured in years, not decades, as long as the gigabytes can be periodically renewed by gigawatts.

As we peer over the edge of a Seneca cliff for a reason Odum had not grasped but which I will presently get to, frantic information gathering surrounds us. Consider recent announcements from Google and Apple about the information ecosystems they are building in the VR/AR space. The latest headsets have external cameras that augment reality but also scan rooms using LIDAR 3-D imaging while simultaneously downloading information from your retinas to record for posterity your age, sex, race, diet, wellness, genetic lineage, education, ADHD, where you grew up, mental stability, drug use, experiences, PTSD, likes and dislikes, fears and hopes. 

What Facebook gathers from your clicks and posts is child’s play compared to Google’s Library of Alexandria. As autonomous robot cars, drones and eyewear ubiquitously LIDAR-scan not just the exteriors of buildings but their interiors and occupants, a model of the present transfers to coded ones and zeros stored in data vaults in the Dalles of the Columbia River powered by increasingly torrential rains or in football-field-sized deep undersea habitats powered by ocean currents derived from the spin of the Earth as it circumnavigates its star. Information thus gathered requires “fewer resources to save and copy than to make anew” but is nonetheless exceedingly fragile. 

Later this year it will be likely that someone on Instagram or TikTok in Kuala Lumpur will happen upon some product video posted by an influencer they follow, click a button on their watch or phone screen, and within an hour or two that product will arrive at their door. In a few more years that item might be a digital wearable, coded as an NFT, delivered instantly, but which can only be viewed with Apple iContact lenses. If you don’t own those lenses, the Emperor has no clothes. 

This is how the storage of information is being paid for — how emergy is being allocated — but it is also what a peak is like — in Roman times captives of conquest chained to yokes, serving as handmaidens, or dying in amphitheaters for the entertainment of patricians; in our times battlebots, robot go-fers, and smart homes — armies of unseen energy cyberslaves working tirelessly to make our inexhaustible desires possible. Normalcy and confirmation biases have us wired to cling to this pleasant moment and reject all contrary expectations. Odum predicted that as the nonrenewable fossil spigot slowed to a drip, our robots would tire, their ability to recharge compromised. Instead, the robots are building their own solar power systems for shrinking mills per watt, a la the Waldo F. Jones’ Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph. 

Still, do not imagine any of this can be saved in Default World. The math is uncompromising. We can only electrify so much. We can only substitute so much. After that there must be reduction.

Odum well understood the threat of climate change, but he did not conceive that only a decade after he died the climate emergency would supplant peak oil as the driver of the transition from growth capitalism to rapid degrowth in the fashion foretold by Seneca. Our acquisition of knowledge of climate change has outpaced even our development of technology to squeeze oil from rocks in order to sustain the headlong growth and waste part of the cycle. Climate scientists won their race with petroleum engineers, they just don’t know it yet.

Where Odum got it wrong, besides imagining that cessation of fossil pollution would arrest the climate juggernaut, was in not fully appreciating the diabolic power of modern monetary theory to enable Ponzi schemes like the Bakkan, Eagle Ford, and similar gas fracking grifts, or in Moores Law migrating from computer chips to solar cells, such that in Odum’s time an installed watt of PV power might have cost around $100 compared with one cent today (and likely one-tenth that, one mill, in just a few years). He could not have foreseen that direct solar and wind electricity would rapidly substitute as baseload for both fossil fuels and nuclear power, or that “peak oil” (the crash following depletion of energy) would be receding as a popular meme. Oil, coal and gas have become stranded assets for their owners, who are being told, not very nicely, they must shut themselves down now, or else.

In a recent interview, one of the race’s unheralded victors, the Tyndell Centre’s Kevin Anderson, attempted to place a timeline on the descent phase of civilization, saying:

If you want to hit the 1.5°C target, the world would need to stop emitting any CO2 from about 2029…. You have to draw a straight line from 2022 to 2029 and eliminate all CO2 emissions — that would just barely keep you in the budget.

***

If we start in the wealthier part of the world, we’d need 10 percent reductions every single year starting from now. But given that it takes us 2 or 3 years to reach 10 percent, even if we were serious about it, which we’re not, because our emissions are so high in the near term, the 2 or 3 years it takes us to get to 10 percent actually means you need to aim more likely at 20 percent per year by 2030 to get to zero by 2035. 

The curtailment of the global economy in 2020 from the effects of the Covid pandemic was in the 6 to 7 percent range. So, we would need about two Covids per year for the next 10 years or so (probably to the end of the century) just to hold to 1.5 degrees above normal. And of course, 1.5 degrees above normal would be truly catastrophic, as we can imagine just from considering what has been happening from the effects of less than a one degree rise to 2020. 

At any temperature above 3 degrees, no organized human civilization would be possible. We would retreat to our caves. Agriculture will not work. Our sweat glands will not cool us outdoors. Superstorms will wreak havoc on wind farms, solar arrays, and hydroelectric dams. Fires and floods will take down our cities. Unaltered, present business as usual is on track to take us past 3 degrees in the second half of this century.

Storing information seems like a good thing to be doing. So are a decrease in population and assets, an increase in recycling patterns, no-growth, consumption smaller than accumulation, and storage of resources for a new cycle ahead. Good advice, H.T.. Thanks.

References:

Bardi, Ugo, The Seneca Effect, New York: Springer Publishing (2017).

Bardi, Ugo, Sara Falsini, and Ilaria Perissi. “Toward a general theory of societal collapse: a biophysical examination of Tainter’s model of the diminishing returns of complexity.” BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality 4, no. 1 (2019): 3. 

Odum, Howard T., and Elisabeth C. Odum. “The prosperous way down.” Energy 31, no. 1 (2006): 21–32.

Tainter, Joseph, The Collapse of Complex Societies. London: Cambridge University Press (1988).

_________________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

 

The Great Pause Week 61: Swallow the Doctor

"The first successful transubstantiation is estimated to happen around 2035. After that we will each be able to back ourselves up to the cloud, if we can afford the data plan."

 

Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis, May 5, 2021 X-Prize Launch

Near the start of World War II, Robert A. Heinlein published a story in Astounding Science Fiction called “Waldo.” In this fantasy, Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones was born too weak to even hold his head up or grasp a spoon. Perhaps he was also on the spectrum. He channeled his mind into the “Waldo F. Jones’ Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph,” a prosthetic glove that directed a much more powerful mechanical hand. Waldo SRP hands could be different sizes, either huge for building construction or microscopic for micro-manipulation.

Seventeen years later, a former graduate student of U-Cal physicist Richard Feynman came to his mentor with an interesting idea. Feynman revealed the idea in the annual lecture at the American Physical Society meeting that year. As a thought experiment, he proposed a Waldo-like manipulator hand that could build one-quarter scale machine tools and a controller to operate them. This set of small tools would then be used by the new controller to build one-sixteenth-scale controllers and tools, and so forth. Repeat that process 40 times and you are at a one billionth scale, running perhaps a billion tiny factories to produce still smaller tools. Ninety steps and you are at a septillionth.

In his 1986 book, Engines of Creation, K. Eric Drexler postulated beyond machine tools to molecular computers and cell repair robots circulating through the bloodstream. Here, take this pill. Swallow the doctor. 

Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler: 9780385199735 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
This brilliant work heralds the new age of nanotechnology, which will give us thorough and inexpensive control of the…www.penguinrandomhouse.com

In The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil predicted that such medical nanorobotics might completely remedy the effects of aging by 2030.

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil: 9780143037880 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
"Anyone can grasp Mr. Kurzweil's main idea: that mankind's technological knowledge has been snowballing, with dizzying…www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Recently I was in Clubhouse, a chatroom app, listening to a discussion about epigenetics when one of the British participants opined that he would rather live a few years well than a great many years more. To which the moderator replied, “Why choose?”

I can think of why. So could Thomas Malthus, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, and the framers of the UN Convention on Biodiversity. Quoting a recent Ehrlich paper:

Over 70% of all people currently live in countries that run a biocapacity deficit while also having less than world-average income, excluding them from compensating their biocapacity deficit….

And yet, despite this ghastly arithmetic (‘ghastly’ being the adjective chosen by the authors to include in the title of the paper), the world is still marching in singularity file down a Kurzweilian primrose path, assuming that if we have a problem, sooner than popular demand requires, there will be an app for that.

Although population-connected climate change will worsen human mortality, morbidity, development, cognition, agricultural yields, and conflicts, there is no way — ethically or otherwise (barring extreme and unprecedented increases in human mortality) — to avoid rising human numbers and the accompanying overconsumption.

 — Bradshaw et al, Understanding the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future (2021)

Those who wish to achieve longer lives themselves cite not only nanomedicine, but rapid breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, telomere generating pharmaceuticals, organ replacement, bionic prosthetics, and xenotransplantations. Many speculate, if not promise, that surprises even more game-changing may eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans or even revert to the bodies of teenagers. Possible ramifications are consigned to the wax-sealed echo chambers of bickering bioethicists.

 

Hormone treatments to reverse the aging process already earn about $50 billion per year. Some clinics currently offer injection of blood products from young donors. The promises of the treatment, none of which have been demonstrated, include a longer life, darker hair, better memory, better sleep, and a cure for Alzheimer’s. Billionaire backers include Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), Peter Thiel (former PayPal CEO), Larry Page (co-founder of Google), and Peter Diamandis (Singularity University and the X-Prize). You may have seen it parodied in an episode of Silicon Valley, the HBO series, but two clinics in California actually offer $8,000 injections of plasma extracted from the blood of young people. A 2013 Pew Research poll in the United States found that 38% of Americans would want life extension treatments for themselves, and 68% believed most people would want it if offered the choice. Religious persuasion, according to the poll, does not enter into the decision.

Leon Kass, chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, called these attitudes “an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity.” On the other side, biogerontologist Aubrey De Grey suggested that the therapy could postpone or eliminate menopause, allowing women to space out their pregnancies over more years and thus decreasing the yearly population growth rate.

We have already found ways to increase the lifespan of microscopic nematode worms and yeasts by 10-fold, although 2009 paper cautioned: 

“Extrapolation from worms to mammals is risky at best, and it cannot be assumed that interventions will result in comparable life extension factors. Longevity gains from dietary restriction, or from mutations studied previously, yield smaller benefits to Drosophila than to nematodes, and smaller still to mammals. This is not unexpected, since mammals have evolved to live many times the worm’s lifespan, and humans live nearly twice as long as the next longest-lived primate. From an evolutionary perspective, mammals and their ancestors have already undergone several hundred million years of natural selection favoring traits that could directly or indirectly favor increased longevity….” 

The main goal of the 2045 Initiative, brainchild of Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov is:

“to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.” 

The Initiative has the goal for the “advanced non-biological carrier” controlled by a “brain-computer” interface (I always think of the Borg when I read this) that between 2030 and 2035 would be able to transfer a human consciousness, and by 2045 create a new era for humanity with holographic bodies. The first successful transubstantiation is estimated to happen around 2035. After that we will each be able to back ourselves up to the cloud, if we can afford the data plan.

Which leads me to speculate about the designer avatar bodies of the future. Could we come back as our favorite comic book hero? fashion model? movie star? Or maybe a werewolf? sprite? Medusa? Maybe we will change avatars season to season, like we would change clothing or hairstyles.

The longest documented human lifespan is 122 years — Jeanne Calment who, according to records, was born in 1875 and died in 1997. If any of us is still around in 2070 we will see if Ray Kurzweil breaks her record. Assuming we recognize Ray as Ray.

The goal of the UN Commission on Population and Development (founded in 1946) is to carry out the accords of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which met for the first time at Lake Geneva in 1927 and most recently at Nairobi in 2019. Today its function is merely to advocate for four qualitative and quantitative goals:

• Universal education: Universal primary education in all countries; wider access for women to secondary and higher level education, vocational and technical training. 
• Reduction of infant and child mortality: Below 35 per 1,000 live births and under-five mortality below 45 per 1,000.
• Reduction of maternal mortality: Halving by decade and narrowing differences between geographical regions, socio-economic and ethnic groups.
• Access to reproductive and sexual health services including active discouragement of female genital mutilation.

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These four goals are all directed at the single purpose of halting and reversing population growth, something that was generally conceived of as a long-term threat in 1927, but which is less concerning today, given the demographic reversal underway in the largest, urbanizing nations. And yet, we should still be concerned. Here’s why.

When the ecological footprint of a population exceeds the biocapacity of the environment it lives in, this is called “biocapacity deficit.” Typically it comes from three sources: overusing one’s own ecosystems (“overshoot”), “trade imbalances” between adjoining systems, and misallocation of the commons. 

The biological capacity of an ecosystem is an estimate of its production of certain biological materials and relationships we like to call natural resources, and its absorption and filtering of wastes and pollutants we like to call ecosystem services — functions such as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

For example, there were 12.2 billion hectares of biologically productive land and water areas on this planet in 2016. Dividing by the number of people alive in that year, 7.4 billion, yields a biocapacity of 1.6 global hectares per person. But that average includes protected and unprotected areas occupied by wild and migratory species, inhospitable regions like the summit of Everest or the submerging Everglades, and places of vital habitats for insects, plants, and microbes that compete with people for space.

As we slide seamlessly from 7 billion to 8 billion humans, each generation more powerful, polluting, and destructive than the previous, I have to wonder whether one century is too much time to allow a “natural” progression into negative population growth, or whether the biodiversity damage a century like this one will inflict could be incalculable and irreversible, if not terminal for us. Think about the honey bees and hummingbirds. Think about the sudden absence of insects we are seeing all over the world, and how that soon may affect populations farther up or down the food chain. 

First genetically modified mosquitoes released in the United States
Biotech firm Oxitec launches controversial field test of its insects in Florida after years of push-back from residents…www.nature.com

Now, Mr. Biotech Billionaire, are you serious about populating the world with thousands or millions of bicentiniarians and tricentinarians?

References:

Beisel, Uli, and Christophe Boëte. “The flying public health tool: genetically modified mosquitoes and malaria control.” Science as Culture 22, no. 1 (2013): 38–60.

Bradshaw, Corey JA, Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, Rodolfo Dirzo et al. “Underestimating the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future.” Frontiers in Conservation Science 1 (2021): 9.

English, Simon G., Natalia I. Sandoval-Herrera, Christine A. Bishop, Melissa Cartwright, France Maisonneuve, John E. Elliott, and Kenneth C. Welch. “Neonicotinoid pesticides exert metabolic effects on avian pollinators.” Scientific reports 11, no. 1 (2021): 1–11.

Köhler, Heinz-R., and Rita Triebskorn. “Wildlife ecotoxicology of pesticides: can we track effects to the population level and beyond?.” Science 341, no. 6147 (2013): 759–765.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

---

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 60: Demographic Time Bombs

"Worrying about the economy keeps techno-cornucopians and unicorns up at night. Us back-to-the-landers, not so much."

Oiled collage after images by Adnan Abidi / Reuters

 

 

 

Sitting barefoot beside the Indian River on Earth Day 2021, Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk told Singularity University and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis that the population problem will become a crisis by mid-century. I was expecting to hear him say overpopulation was killing the planet. 

“We’ll need more people,” he said.

Musk was pointing out that over the next 80 years, in almost every country, population will shrink. According to a 2017 “Global Burden of Disease” study published in The Lancet, some of the largest nations’ populations will halve, while Nigeria will overtake China as the second most populous. Other African countries will also continue to densify. 

The sharp decline in global fertility rates may lead to a demographic time bomb, with some…
A new Lancet study predicts that nearly every country's population will shrink and some will halve by the end of the…www.insider.com

Outside of Africa, women are having fewer children. In 1950, the average number a woman produced was 4.7. By 2017, it was 2.4. Well before 2100, the Lancet authors predicted, it will fall below 1.7. And that is a magic number, something Thomas Malthus would not have predicted absent a globe-shattering famine.

Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, has calculated that together with the rise in deaths — up by about 18 percent from 2019 — the drop in births is contributing to the aging of the American population: A total of 25 states had more deaths than births last year, Dr. Johnson said, up from five at the end of 2019.

— The New York Times

It is comforting to think the drop in births is due at least in part to the pandemic, and historically, births do tend to dip after economic crises, but the Times observed:

The rate among women in their early 20s is down by 40 percent since 2007, the government said. Teenagers have had the sharpest decline, down by 63 percent since 2007, the data showed.

Once women have fewer than 2.1 babies each, population declines. In fact, the researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicted the world’s population will max out in in 2064 at 9.7 billion and fall to 8.8 billion before century’s end. “Falling to 8.8 billion” makes me wince. One needs to grasp what that dimension of human flesh will mean for fish and fowl. It is like accepting 2 degrees as a climate goal.

Paired with an aging population, endemic zoonosis, gender reveal, plastic pollution, and other mega-trends, Musk called it a “demographic time bomb,” warning we could reach a time by mid-century when there aren’t enough young people to support the economy, or the older generations. 

Worrying about the economy keeps techno-cornucopians and unicorns up at night. Us back-to-the-landers, not so much.

Verso
Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration Hardback with free ebook What if the people seized the means of climate…www.versobooks.com

Professor Holly Jean Buck, in her book, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, relates that science journalist Leigh Phillips, in his book, Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry, and Stuff, equates austerity and degrowth as “mathematically and socially identical.” 

To solve the global biocrisis, more is needed: more growth, progress, industry, and civilization. He asserts that “it will require significant ingenuity to engineer a reverse of the processes we have inadvertently set in motion, likely even some way to produce a carbon-negative economy for a period,” with hundreds of innovations that will come from the most advanced research laboratories and factories. “By turning its back on the possibility of such technologies, on the very idea of progress, green anti-modernism actually commits us to catastrophic climate change.” 

Some think we should try to avert this problem by encouraging fertility. Given the perfect storm of climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion, my feeling is that we should not be thinking of ways to reverse the trend. We have to look at the future like a lineup of surfers looking at incoming sets. National economies and elderly welfare, as important as they may be, are not more important than innumerable species extinctions, our own included. Degrowth is a wave we could learn to surf. And, like zoonotic pandemics, it is a wave we know is out there.

According to the projections, China will halve its population this century. Some 23 countries, including Japan and Italy, will drop even faster and farther. 

Sitting in a Beijing Pizza Hut with ecovillage pioneer and CEO of a quasi-governmental scholarly exchange program Alice Wang a few years ago I asked why China ended its one child policy.

“We didn’t need it,” she said.
 
She went on to explain that during the years that policy lasted, it was incredibly difficult to administrate and had scores of exceptions and provisos. But more importantly, people tended to lavish attention on their sole child. When those children grew and started having children of their own, they did the same. Even though the restrictions were lifted, most people who had grown up as sole children wanted to have their own small families like that so they could lavish education, travel, gifts, and love on their one child. It was an enormous cultural shift that took place in just one or two generations. 

A year after I had that conversation with Alice, I visited my sister who lives in central India. I couldn’t help but be grateful I’ve spent most of my life living in rural settings. Apart from The Farm, the villages of my life were not so small that everyone could know everyone’s name, but they were small enough that you could find a space in the forest where you could listen to fox kits yapping somewhere down the valley, or watch pileated woodpeckers in their mating ritual, racing like squirrels up, down, and around the trunks of trees, or float on your back in water and stare up at the clouds in near total silence, with only chirping birds and croaking frogs.

The Lancet study predicted that India, whose total fertility rate dropped below replacement in 2018, would peak before 2050 and fall to 68% of its former population by the end of the century, although it would still remain the most dense and populous nation on Earth. India’s present Covid experience seems bent on speeding up the Lancet’s timetable.

Arundhati Roy on India's Covid catastrophe: 'We are witnessing a crime against humanity'
uring a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India's prime minister…www.theguardian.com

Over the coming decades, Nigeria will grow to around 800 million and become the second most populous. The USA, now with its lowest birthrate in 35 years, will remain a dominant power only if it allows more immigration, meaning, for the most part, more Nigerians and Indians. By virtue of stronger, better educated, youthful and feminist urban populations, it could be that Mumbai and Lagos will become epicenters of innovation and art this century.

This is Why the World is Facing a Covid Apocalypse
Covid Capitalism is a Catastrophic Failure For Most of Humanity — But the West Won’t Admit Iteand.co

Is the Lancet piece right about global contraction? Is Musk’s concern well placed? My sister described to me what life may be like for many in the world’s most populous nations — India, Nigeria, China, USA, and Pakistan, in that order — in the not-too-distant future:

“People who are members of the same family or just friends think nothing of sharing a hotel bed — my objection to this has been incomprehensible to others. A college boy might share a bed with his mother, nobody thinks twice about this. 

“High density in Indian homes and public places is the norm rather than the exception. The polite social distance in public places (aside from Covid times) is smaller than in the West and even less in private to the point of being nonexistent, except around strangers, foreigners, or when protecting females of reproductive years.

“Many homes have no furnishings, which facilitates high density. A cloth or woven mat like a tatami is rolled out on the floor for mealtimes. Thin futons are rolled up in the daytime and unrolled at night. Or there is no futon, just a sheet or blanket. If there is a bed, it is shared by Mom and Dad plus the youngest tots or maybe given to frail elderly, and it’s no more than 3 feet wide. (The ability of Indians to sleep on hard surfaces is a wonder. They’ll buy a bed and then insert a piece of plywood under the mattress rather than enjoy the springs.) No pillows, or hard ones. If a friend is passing through your town and you offer shelter, this may consist of a sheet for the floor or on un-cushioned carpet; lacking a bed is no barrier to hospitality. The arrival of molded plastic lawn chairs changed this some. They are ubiquitous indoors and out now. Tables are rare. There are trays. There are no closets, people have never heard of them, and only rich people have architects. 

“Hostels for college students have the bunks spaced closely together with a small suitcase or footlocker as the only storage. Nobody expects to have their own space.”

“One pressure that is a big population-growth factor is the Hindu-Muslim tension. The more educated a Hindu couple, the fewer children they have. But Muslims of all education levels and social strata feel it is their duty to reproduce abundantly to increase their numbers as a repressed minority.

I did not realize it at the time, but there in that Beijing restaurant, ecovillager Alice Wang gave me a complete solution to the climate, biodiversity and population emergencies. Faced with a demographic shift to 5 billion people this century that would have made the density in the favelas of Mumbai and Sao Paolo pale in comparison, the Chinese radically cut fertility. Not because of anything they feared — although that was the starting point — but because it made their lives better, and that is how, in the end, the one child policy succeeded. 

A teenage girl in Jakarta or Nairobi with TikTok on her iPhone and western soaps on the TV, each in their own way showing independent, liberated women role models, does not yearn for the life of her grandmother, held captive by religion and male-dominated culture. She probably finds most of the boys her age are pretty dumb about that. She is going to be different.

When Musk started selling his first edition Tesla Model-S at privileged elite pricing, he kept the daring young company going not because people feared climate change and wanted to get rid of their old gas-hogs, but because it was a better ride if you could afford it. You set the power switch to “Insane” and boom! The G-forces pushed you deep into that leather seat (Tesla vegan leather only arrived in 2017). We should all remember that when critics start saying the Paris climate goals are too ambitious. The zero carbon and sustainable development goals won’t succeed because we are frightened. They will succeed because life will be infinitely better.

____________________

 The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

---

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

---

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

 

The Great Pause Week 59: Joys of Soy

"Demand for soy in the EU uses 6 million square miles. 5.2 million of that is in South America."

Fifty-eight weeks ago I crossed the border from Belize and decided to make my stand in a small Mexican village with dirt streets and thatched roofs. I had been coming here to write for more than ten years and I knew that it would likely be well-insulated from the rest of the world as the pandemic raged. That was true for many months because this town, and many neighboring towns, wisely ignored the denialism of Mexican state and federal health authorities and closed themselves to routine comings and goings. Unfortunately, like many places, willpower faltered, they reopened too soon, many of my neighbors became sick and died, and that continues today. Lacking vaccines, México, like India and Brazil, is an incubator and exporter of Covid variants to the rest of the world. One factor I did not anticipate when I made my decision to remain here was the speed with which effective vaccines would be developed, meaning that the pandemic will be years shorter in the affluent North, where the world’s supplies of vaccine are restarting normality, than in the South, where the pandemic has no end in sight.

A little while ago, I got a hankering for something that is standard fare in my ecovillage in Tennessee but can’t be found even in gourmet vegan restaurants here — boiled soybeans. It is not surprising really, because unless you have been exposed to the rich, buttery flavor of properly cooked beans, you probably accept the myth that they are cattle-feed or something that can only be processed into secondary products like milk, tofu, miso, natto, or tempeh. But all through the 1970s, soybeans were the basis of our diet at The Farm community, not only because they were so versatile, but because they were so cheap. The world price of soybeans at this writing is $14.33 per bushel. In 1972 they were around $5. Adjusting for inflation, that would be $32 today. Today’s soybeans are less than half the price they were in the 70s. The reasons for that are that we grow so many more today than we did in 1972, it is mostly automated —air-conditioned giant combines steered by GPS across flattened fields — and we subsidize the production cost with Saudi oil and fracked gas.

At the Sixth International Permaculture Convergence in Perth, Bill Mollison and I got into a spat in our stage presentations over the question of soy. He called them baby killers. He disliked soy only slightly less than he disliked “land lice,” as he liked to call goats. I showed slides of healthy babies in Guatemala where our project decimated infant mortality by introducing non-GMO soy, grown organically in the Japanese smallholder way. Soybeans have all eight essential amino acids in good balance. Lysine is the limiting amino, and you can get that from maize, which Guatemalans eat a lot of. Corn tortillas and boiled soybean frijoles make a complete protein, but in our camp in Solola we also made patés for babies, tofu, tempeh, soymilk, and, of course, ice cream. The image at the top of this piece is painted from a photo of Suzi Jenkins Viavant dispensing soy ice cream to schoolchildren in San Andreas Itzapa.

What my dear friend Bill was on about was something quite real; two things, actually. Because soybeans contain protease inhibitors that interfere with digestion activity, they have an antinutritional effect unless these inhibitors are deactivated. Whatever food you consume with them can be indigestible and give you a nasty stomach ache and gas. The inhibitors found in raw soy react primarily on trypsin, and chymotrypsin and plasmin to a lesser extent. Wild animals usually learn that any plant that contains a trypsin inhibitor is a food to avoid. Before feeding soy to cattle, it is ground into meal and heat-treated to remove the inhibitors.

Other foods containing protease inhibitors are lima beans (6 different inhibitors); winged beans; mung beans; raw egg white; and bovine pancreas and lung.

In a kitchen setting, boiling soybeans for 14 minutes deactivates about 80% of the inhibitors. Boiled 30 minutes, about 90%. At higher temperatures, e.g. in pressure cookers, shorter deactivation times are needed to reach 100%. When making soymilk, tofu and tempeh, good pre-cooking is part of the process. Any soybeans cooked well or fermented will be completely digestible. 

To bring out the flavor in soybeans intended for burritos, lasagna, stroganoff, or burgers, they should be cooked until they are dark brown and soft enough to mash between your tongue and the back of your teeth. Straight from the boiling pot, they should melt in your mouth and have a buttery taste, smell, and feel. My experience with a pressure cooker tells me that proper cooking can take 90 to 120 minutes for rehydrated dry beans, and I always do the tongue-mash test.

The second point Bill made, and I agree with, is that the way soybeans are grown by industrial agriculture today is an abomination, leading to loss of family farms, biodiversity, topsoil and a habitable climate. The total area of soy now covers billions of acres — the total combined area of France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The fastest growth in recent years has been in South America, where production grew by 123 per cent between 1996 and 2004. 

Soy produces more protein per hectare than any other major crop. It is also one of the most profitable agricultural products. Around 270 million tonnes were produced in 2012, of which 93 per cent came from just six countries: Brazil, United States, Argentina, China, India and Paraguay. Soy production is also expanding rapidly in Bolivia and Uruguay. The main importers are the EU and China, while the US has the greatest soy consumption per capita. 

 — World Wildlife Federation

The sad part is that 94% of this major world food crop goes into livestock feed or industrial uses and, counting vegetable oil and soy sauce, only 6% is consumed by people directly. When you feed it to cows, 98% of the nutritional value — the part that could be feeding people — is simply wasted. It is spent fattening a 350 pound-calf into a 1250-pound steer. Some of that can be recovered in the form of leather jackets or fertilizer, but a lot of it simply gets farted away as a greenhouse gas 87 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Demand for soy in the EU uses 6 million square miles, 5.2 million of that in South America.

Nine out of 10 land-based species of animals and plants live in forests — the vast majority of them in the tropical forests of South America, Africa and Southeast Asia. Close to 1.6 billion people, including 60 million indigenous people, depend on forests for food, shelter, fuel and livelihoods. Forests provide vital ecosystem services, such as regulating water cycles, preventing soil erosion and helping to keep our climate stable: growing forests absorb and store carbon, but when they’re cleared, large amounts of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Half of the world’s tropical forests have been destroyed over the last century, and natural forests are continuing to decline in many parts of the world. 

— World Wildlife Federation

 

Before Monsanto and Cargill, John Deere and Whole Foods, there was a habit of growing soybeans for 2000 years in China, Japan and Korea. In China today around 40 million farmers grow soy, with the average farm size being around 0.2–0.3 ha (half to three-quarters of an acre). By turning stover into biochar and returning manures (“night soil”) to the fields, soil fertility was maintained for 40 centuries. Thanks to the Asian Biochar Centre in Nanjing, farms across China are once more regenerating topsoil, retaining water, and re-learning these techniques. They are producing much higher yields today than they did just 5 years ago. Rotational smallholder cropping, with leguminous crops like soy restoring nitrogen, is the way of the future. 

Using the power of soy in a regenerative, harmonious way, there is no food supply constraint holding human population from expanding ten-fold in this century. Other means will be needed to stop that.

In our next installment we’ll explore those means.

References:

Hwang, D. L., D. E. Foard, and C. H. Wei. “A soybean trypsin inhibitor. Crystallization and x-ray crystallographic study.” Journal of Biological Chemistry 252, no. 3 (1977): 1099–1101.

Liu, KeShun, Soybeans: Chemistry, Technology, and Utilization. Springer 2012.

Viavant, S.J., My First Experience in Guatemala as a Volunteer
https://munecaz.wordpress.com/my-first-experience-in-guatemala-as-a-volunteer-january-25-2014/

World Wildlife Federation. 2014. The Growth of Soy: Impacts and Solutions. WWF International, Gland, Switzerland

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

---

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app