Sunday, September 26, 2021

The Great Pause Week 80: Getting to Littleness

"What do Finland, Iceland and Estonia have in common, apart from less sunlight and high snowfall? Littleness."


W
hen we see events
like the Arab Spring, the January 6th Insurrection, or the irrational pushback against mask mandates in the midst of a devastating pandemic, we think of the NIMH mouse utopias experiment. One must ask whether what we are seeing is a gradual unravelling, in fits and spurts, of civil order. In the pressure cooker of climate change, viral assault, competing theocracies, competing narratives, and peak everything, will we be able to defuse this bomb in time?

Ivan Illich described Leopold Kohr as “a funny bird — meek, fey, droll, and incisive.” I first met him in a villa in Lombardy a little over three years before he passed, at 84. Although nearly deaf, he looked 20 years younger than his age and had a wry wit that never failed to make me laugh loudly. He described himself as a “philosophical anarchist” and professional crank, but was quick to recall what E.F. Schumacher had said:

“Some people call me a crank. I don’t mind at all. A crank is a low-cost, low-capital tool. It can be used on a moderate small scale. It is nonviolent. And it makes revolutions.”

Kohr grew up in the small Austrian town where Silent Night had been composed. He was making preparations to return there from his final home in Wales when death overtook him. Three-quarters of a century before, after studying in Paris, Vienna and London, getting a law degree and doctorates in political science and economics, in 1937 he ran off to do the Spanish Civil War thing, “armed with nothing but a Spanish dictionary and a copy of Don Quixote.” There, crouched behind stone walls being bombed or sitting in smoky bistros mixed with scents of rum and coffee, he would befriend George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux. He describes one such scene:

One day a fellow came, gangly, tallish, and asked whether he could sit by my table. Everything was crowded: I had one seat free and, as a matter of fact, there was only room for two and I said, “Of course,” and he said, “Well, anyone who introduces himself nowadays uses a false name. At any rate, my name is George Orwell.” And of course this was a false name. His real name was Eric Blair. But from that day on, for a week, we always met. I had no idea who he was. But what struck me was our conversations and his attitude towards the emerging age of mass dominance. People said afterwards that he was a prophet anticipating things to come in his 1984. He didn’t anticipate things to come. We talked about what was going on around us, in 1937.

Orwell, as he recorded in Homage to Catalonia, was already disillusioned with the alphabet soup of ideologies at play in Spain and must have had a lot to say about that to Kohr. After the Fascists won, Kohr got a visa out of Austria, slipped aboard the Orient Express to Paris, and escaped to America in 1938 ahead of Austria’s Nazi annexation. Lacking proper papers, he found sanctuary in Toronto and later managed to get back into the USA where he taught at Rutgers until 1955. He wrote The Breakdown of Nations “in three weeks, in a snowed-in Christmas period, no one there, everything deep in snow, everyone on holiday.”

From the late 50s through the early 70s he taught economics as the U. of Puerto Rico and UNAM in Mexico. After many rejections, Breakdown was published in 1957 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and is still in print from Chelsea Green. I read it for the first time just now and discovered it fit nicely into my thoughts about population.

After a lengthy description of how a process of devolution might work, Breakdown’s 11th chapter “But Will It Be Done?” might be the shortest chapter ever written — just 3 characters — “No!” on an otherwise blank page. Perhaps Kohr had been looking out at the snow and was in a Zen frame of mind.

When I proposed ten years later at the Boston convention of the American Economics Association that the question was no longer how to expand but how to contract; not how to grow but how to put limits to growth, I still drew nothing but blank stares from fellow economists, who dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet. And they might have dismissed me along with my ideas had I not benefited from an academic policy that was well expressed by a Jesuit friend from Ottawa when he said: “I always felt that every great university must have some crackpots on its faculty. And if it has not, I consider it the sacred duty of every dean to see to it that some are appointed.”

In an afterword penned for a US edition in 1978, Kohr described how the book evolved through a series of lectures and his experience with the politics of Europe leading into the Second World War. Soon after the conclusion of the war he was giving one of those lectures to a gathering of military planners at the Imperial Staff College — “then a hundred highly realistic staff officers from all corners of the British Empire” — and he showed maps of how Europe might be reorganized not as a single state standing in opposition to the Soviet bloc, but as a federation of little states organized by watershed.

A growing society, when it reaches a given point, has always exploded, like the supernova in the stars. So the annihilating element awaiting us all is not disunion but growth, overgrowth.

Kohr believed that even though devolution from empire to small states was inevitable, no-one would believe in it soon enough to see it coming and plan for it.

It will not explode. Like the aging colossi of the stellar universe, it will gradually collapse internally, leaving as its principal contribution to posterity its fragments, the little states — until the consolidation process of big power development starts all over again. This is not pleasant to anticipate. What is pleasant, however, is the realization that, in the intervening period between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination, history will in all likelihood repeat itself and the world, little and free once more, will experience another of those spells of cultural greatness which characterized the small-state worlds of the Middle Ages and Ancient Greece.
***
The young people of today have yet to grasp that the unprecedented change that has overtaken our time concerns not the nature of our social difficulties, but their scale. Like their elders, they have yet to become aware that what matters is no longer war, but big war; not unemployment, but massive unemployment; not oppression, but the magnitude of oppression; not the poor, who Jesus said will always be with us, but the scandalous number of their multitudes.
Nor have they as yet shown any understanding for the real conflict of this age, which is no longer between races, sexes, classes, left and right, youth and age, rich and poor, socialism and capitalism — all hangover confrontations from the past. The real conflict of today is between Man and Mass, the Individual and Society, the Citizen and the State, the Big and the Small Community, between David and Goliath. But as long as our youth and campus leaders have the same tendency as their national leaders whom they want to succeed to measure their grandeur by the size of the organizations they command, there is little reason to assume that they will do more for smallness than provide it with an Ark and salute it in tribute to its poetry and beauty as it drifts away on the rising waters of the Deluge.

Before Kohr passed away he might have read Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) but could not have seen Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Civilizations Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). He would have recognized the parallels between their case studies of the Maya Theater State, Easter Island and the Norse colony on Greenland with his own studies of the Holy Roman Empire and Ancient Greece. He was also on familiar terms with Toynbee’s studies of 28 civilizations and the conclusion that once a sustainable growth peak is exceeded, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal from the realities of a decaying world; science; and authoritative sources of information), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight or by following some sort of charismatic prophet).

In the 1990s, the evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin applied equations used to model the populations of predators and prey to describe human societies. He showed how income inequality augured political instability, with a long “secular” cycle lasting two to three centuries before the lower-class became so miserable and the upper-class so obscenely wealthy that detente fractured. This precipitated a shorter cycle at progressively turbulent intervals of 50 years — 1870, 1920, 1970, 2020. The mathematician Safa Motesharrei applied Turchin’s predator-prey models to an all-devouring consumer society of “predators” and rapidly depleting natural resource “prey.” He found that neither unequal competition nor resource depletion necessitated collapse unless both arrived at the same time. Then Katie bar the door.

Kohr told a CBC interviewer,

What animates the waves of water, as Da Vinci said, also explains the waves of wind, of sound and light. So this is a meta-economics, these are physics outside…beyond economics. And then I am at the door of economics, I open it and see another wave: business cycles. And the reason why economists can’t grasp this is that this structure of cycles has changed. These are no longer caused by the irregularities of business activities which produces spells; they have entirely different, non-economic, meta-economic, physical origins. What we confront is size cycles. At a given size of integration, things become uncontrollable, not only by capitalist intervention, but by state intervention, by communist intervention. There are cyclical fluctuations and size cycles in the Soviet Union, but without a Marxist theory to explain it, it can’t be in a controlled economy. So they shoot the business managers. So this is what I mean. To understand economic phenomena, one must not mathematicize or statistify them, but philosophize them, go back to the laws of nature.

Kohr compared the traffic patterns in cities to the rush of students to get out of a classroom when the bell rings.

… one entrance door for students is ample. Reluctantly they filter through at slow pace, but when the bell rings at the end, they get stuck in the doors, because the exit velocity is much faster, and the higher velocity has the effect of increasing the pressure.

He said the proper size for governability depends on velocity, or more precisely, integration. As a society prospers it gains communication needs, commuting to work, shopping, business travel, tourism, and more. These add “velocity,” or what Paul Ehrlich lumped under “affluence.” It is a population force multiplier. Kohr said a billion people living unintegrated in Siberia might not be a problem, but integrated into a modern consumer society they represent five or ten times their number in terms of pressure.

Now the only way of reducing this is not necessarily birth control, but size control of states, to reduce the distances each of us has to cover to perform our daily functions. Not decentralization, but centralization writ small — the small community, which slows down the need for fast movements.

When next the G8 gather in Davos, they should read this from Kohr:

So, when I suggest that the solution to bigness is break up the big powers, I often use the analogy of an avalanche coming from the Austrian Alps.
The way avalanches are dealt with is the controllers put small barriers of concrete sticks over a field. So when an avalanche begins to develop, just as it begins to enjoy the mass of its weight and power, it runs into these partitioning pillars which turn the awful thing into a harmless spray, without damaging the beauty of the snow. And the thing is that, politically, nothing at all is lost by returning to smaller communities.

In his forward to the Dutton edition, Kirkpatrick Sale wrote:

In the real political world, in other words, there are limits, and usually fairly conscribed limits, beyond which it does not make much sense to grow. It is only in small states, Kohr suggests, that there can be true democracy, because it is only there that the citizen can have some direct influence over the governing institutions; only there that economic problems become tractable and controllable, and economic lives become more rational; only there that culture can flourish without the diversion of money and energy into statist pomp and military adventure; only there that the individual in all dimensions can flourish free of systematic social and governmental pressures. Thus, the purposes of the modern world might better be directed not to the fruitless pursuit of one-worldism but to the fruitful development of small, coherent regions, not to the aggrandizement of states but to the breakdown of nations.

Kohr’s own introduction to the 1957 edition of Breakdown rolled his entire philosophy into a simple idea: that there seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Conversely, the antidote to all the problems we face is equally simple: littleness.

Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers. That is when they begin to slide into uncontrollable catastrophe. For social problems, to paraphrase the population doctrine of Thomas Malthus, have the unfortunate tendency to grow at a geometric ratio with the growth of the organism of which they are part, while the ability of man to cope with them, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic ratio. Which means that, if a society grows beyond its optimum size, its problems must eventually outrun the growth of those human faculties which are necessary for dealing with them.
Hence it is always bigness, and only bigness, which is the problem of existence, social as well as physical, and all I have done in fusing apparently disjointed and unrelated bits of evidence into an integrated theory of size is to demonstrate first that what applies everywhere applies also in the field of social relations; and secondly that, if moral, physical, or political misery is nothing but a function of size, if the only problem is one of bigness, the only solution must lie in the cutting down of the substances and organisms which have outgrown their natural limits. The problem is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer: not union but division.

At the end of the Second World War, Iceland, Finland and Estonia found themselves in foreign clasp. Finland bought its way out, ceding 10% of its territory, including its fourth largest city, Viipuri (Vyborg), paying out a large amount of war reparations to the Soviet Union, and formally apologizing for having fought alongside both Nazi Germany and the Allies against Russia. Today Finland always tops the World Happiness Report and has one of the most comprehensive social welfare systems in the world. It mints unicorn tech startups (>billion-dollar capitalization) with amazing frequency. It has the highest concentration of cooperatives relative to its population.

Iceland is the world’s most sparsely populated country with the world’s oldest Parliament. In May 1944, under Allied occupation, 97 percent of Icelanders voted to end their union with Denmark, abolish the monarchy, and establish a republic. Thanks to its FinTech sector, Iceland in the 21st century became one of the most prosperous countries in the world, with a slight hiccup during the credit default swap crisis of 2008 when its four major investment banks declared bankruptcy and Iceland declined the requests from investment banks in Europe to consider that a national debt. 

Since October 2017 Iceland’s coalition government consists of the Independence Party, the Progressive Party and the Left-Green Movement, headed by Katrín Jakobsdóttir. It had 81.4% voter turnout during the most recent elections. About 85 percent of total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. According to the Economist Intelligence Index, Iceland has the second-highest quality of life in the world. Based on the Gini coefficient, Iceland also has one of the lowest rates of income inequality in the world. Its people retain good health long into old age, on average.

After its non-violent Singing Revolution in 1991, the last units of the Red Army withdrew from Estonia in 1994. Today the Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, elected in 2021, looks like Nancy Pelosi when she was 25. It is the only country in the world to currently be led by both a female President and Prime Minister. It has full e-government, with 99 percent of the public services being available on the web 24 hours a day. Broadband is universal and fast. In 2019 parliamentary elections 44% of the total votes were cast over the internet. 109 languages are spoken. A balanced budget, almost non-existent public debt, flat-rate income tax, free trade regime, competitive commercial banking sector, innovative e-Services and even mobile-based services are all hallmarks of Estonia’s market economy. Its GDP growth rate is 5 times the EU average. It too has a surfeit of unicorns and the reassuring knowledge of a healthy, long-lived, and well-cared-for elderly sector.

In my meeting with Leopold Kohr in 1990 he related a story of the time he got an invitation to visit the President of Luxembourg. While he was seated alone with the President, the phone rang. The President picked it up and answered, “Government.” Kohr told me that he always thought that was how small the government could be but this was the first time he had actually seen it.

What do Finland, Iceland and Estonia have in common, apart from less sunlight and high snowfall? Littleness. When they understood where they needed to go, they got their people’s support and got it done.

The first rule of holes is, when you find yourself in one, stop digging. When approaching the edge of an abyss, the right move is retreat. Population growth and economic growth are not a matched set. Neither is an end goal. The end goal is a happy, healthy, informed citizenry living in harmony with nature.

 _________________

 

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

Sunday, September 19, 2021

The Great Pause Week 79: Building Mouse Utopias

"We don’t know, certainly at the community or the national level, how to envision a future that is attractive and which doesn’t have growth in it."

In September, 2020, a rodent named Magawa won the animal equivalent of Britain’s highest civilian honor for bravery because of his uncanny knack for uncovering landmines and unexploded ordnance. In 2016, he travelled from his home in Africa to Cambodia’s famed Angkor temples to begin his bomb-sniffing career. Trained to cover the area of a tennis court in 20 minutes, he detected and alerted his handlers to 71 landmines and 38 items of unexploded ordnance in his four year career. While Magawa may have saved countless people from death or maiming, scores of his fellow migrants may have saved even more. They were trained to sniff out asymptomatic tuberculosis patients. 

Winning gold metals was better than discovering utopia for these rodents. That’s because utopia may not be all it is cracked up to be. Working with National Institute of Mental Health from 1954 to 1972, the American ethologist and behavioral researcher John B. Calhoun created what he considered the perfect mouse utopia — unlimited food and water, multiple levels, and private nesting areas.

He repeated his experiment 25 times at different scales and observed nearly identical results every time. The layout was a rectangle measuring ten feet by fourteen feet divided into four equal sections equipped identically with a food hopper, water and nesting areas and separated from section to section by electric barriers.

Universe 25

His final experiment, “Universe 25,” had space for 3,840 mice but population peaked at 2,200 and began to decline from there because the mice were exhibiting a what Calhoun called a behavioral sink — an increase in pathological activities due to the stress involved in high density living.
Regardless of the scale of the experiments, the same set of events would transpire each time:

  • The mice would mate and breed in large quantities. 
  • Eventually a leveling-off would occur.
  • The rodents would develop either hostile or anti-social behaviors.
  • The population would trail off to extinction.

Males would lash out at other members — including infants — often biting and wounding them. Females would stop nest building or caring for the young. Eventually infant mortality topped 90 percent, mainly from abandonment.

The death phase of each experiment consisted of two stages: the “first death” — characterized by the loss of purpose in life beyond mere existence (including the loss of desire to mate, raise young, or establish a role within society) — and “second death” marked by the literal end of life and the extinction of the colony. But, ominously, it did not end there.

Before the death of the colony, Calhoun took the four healthiest males and females and allowed them to breed. Placed in a fresh new environment without all of the stress, one might expect a new generation of mice to follow. What Calhoun saw instead was epigenetic damage. Mouse behavior had been so inexorably abused that none of the infants survived to reproduce. Calhoun said, “I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution.”

More than six decades have passed since Calhoun conducted his last experiment, nonetheless, questions linger.

Sure, we can be heartened by the fact that humans are not mice. We have science, technology and medicine to heal ourselves and explore new environments and possibilities. But we should also acknowledge that such distinctions are the standard go-to of incorrigible optimists.

Dennis Meadows, co-author of the original Limits to Growth study in 1971, says the problem is transitioning from rapid forward movement to being quiescent. 

It’s like riding a bicycle. It is relatively easy to ride a bicycle and its also relatively easy to stand next to your bicycle holding it there still. But to get from rapid forward movement to dismounting and standing — that is a skill set, which if you don’t master it can cause a lot of damage. And that is what we face in our society. We don’t know, certainly at the community or the national level, how to envision a future that is attractive and which doesn’t have growth in it.

Meadows says population is now clearly declining in a number of nations — China, Japan, Russia, “so rather than fight it, by offering subsidies or banning birth control, it would be useful for governments to try to understand how they can run a system in which the population isn’t continuously expanding.”

In which you don’t continuously need more building stock, in which tax revenues don’t keep going up and up and up, in which there is not a steady supply of young people to support the old people in their pensions and so forth. It’s a lot of interesting problems, which you could address, and which would be intellectually challenging. Until we have answers to those questions we are going to ignore the fact that we are overpopulated.

In 1948, at the International Congress on Population and World Resources, demographer P.K. Welpton challenged the Congress to consider the obvious.

It seems to me that even in countries like the U.S.A., the population is above the economic optimum; that is, we have more people even there than is most desirable from the standpoint of the natural resources which we possess. That does not mean that a rapid decrease in population would be desirable, but I think it does mean that if we could choose between a stationary population of say, 100,000,000 and 150,000,000 or 200,000,000 we should without question be better off with the former. 

The United States population today has grown above 330,000,000. It finds itself confounded by multiple interlocking crises — persistent drought in the West, urban decay in the Northeast, and rising sea level along its Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Population should be set not by good times, it is learning, but by what it can feed and shelter in the worst of times.

We have rodents who have mirrored our highest attributes of altruism by sniffing out land mines or tuberculosis, but are still unable to control their own fecundity. The question is, does this separate them from us, or make us more alike?

__________________

 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

Sunday, September 12, 2021

The Great Pause Week 78: Rewilding Iowa

"Major producers of animal products are at risk of a serious economic shock."


 A few years ago I was at a conference and had a chance to try a fake burger. Vegetarian or vegan since 1970, I had not forgotten the taste of a nicely grilled hamburger and was pleasantly surprised at how good this fake one was. I have to say it was better than most of the bean, gluten and tofu burgers we make at The Farm. 

I still wasn’t all that keen on the concept of lab food for the masses, though. I know, and teach, the epigenetic importance of the soil-food-web to the human gut biome, as well all the many dangers of genetically modified (GM) foods. Jeremy Rifkin got that right in Algeny: A New Word, A New World in 1984. 

But now I am forced to re-examine some of my thinking in light of the new wave of “precision fermentation” and cell cultures. The guys in lab coats are absolutely correct when they say you don’t need a cow to make milk. We’ve been doing it with soybeans at The Farm since 1971. You can also do it with tree sap, nuts and hemp hearts.

So, while I agree switching to mechanical cows may not be much different than switching from horses to bicycles, I have to fall back on the indigenous shamanic teachings and ask my allies in the plant world if this is really what they want and need.

In The Biochar Solution, I described how ruminants and grasses co-evolved:

When a grazing animal browses ground cover, it removes photosynthetic surface area, so the plant sheds root mass, which becomes labile carbon in the soil. As the animal browses, it is also exhales carbon dioxide, which wafts over the plant and is taken in through pores to build biomass. When the animal excretes, some carbon is lost into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, but considerably more makes it into the soil, along with nitrogen, phosphorus, and, of course, the rich microfauna contained in the animal’s intestine. 
In tropical environments that alternate between seasonally humid and arid, or in temperate zones that alternate between hot and cold, billions of tons of vegetation die each year. The microorganism population needed to decompose the vegetation would also die off from the changed seasonal conditions, were it not for the guts of large grazing animals, which remain a moist and fertile home for microorganisms. Over millions of years, a symbiotic relationship between plants, large animals, and microorganisms has evolved. Even in the harshest part of the year, microbes are able to break down the tough plant material, nourish the grazing animal, and sustain the life of the soil. 
Over those millions of years, many species of large herbivores have come and gone, and have usually managed to keep up with the billions of tons of vegetation dying every year. Besides the microfauna in their intestines, the herbivores provide a reseeding service — hooves dig up the soil, digestion stratifies the seed, excrement buries it, rooting mulches, and urine fertilizes — all to ensure the spread and survival of the forage species. Grazing animals garden. 
The dung of grass-eating mammals is home to a fascinating zygomycete fungus known as Pilobolus, which feeds on nutrients that have passed through the animal. Eventually it sends up tubes, each tipped with a fluid-filled bulb. On top of the bulb is a black spore packet. The fluid-filled bulbs act as water cannons, propelling the spore packets up to six feet away from the dung. 
Pilobolus spores need to be eaten by an animal, which passes them through its digestive system, then excretes them with its dung, providing food for the fungus to continue. If the spores didn’t get propelled away from the dung that Pilobolus lives in, they would never make it back to the animal, because most grazing animals will not graze on or near their own dung. 
This dispersal strategy also serves other organisms, in particular, parasitic nematode worms that live in the gut of a grazing animal and send their eggs out with the dung. When the baby nematodes hatch, they climb up the Pilobolus tubes to the spore packet where they, too, are shot out of the cannon like a microbial amusement ride. 

Even if fake meat or dairy may taste good and have calories, it is likely to be less helpful for your microbiome or to the grassland ecology. But then, designer meat can include probiotic cocktails and animal protein is presently eating up continent-sized chunks of rainforest at a rate that will finish them off by the middle of the century, so which is worse? Vitamins produced using Precision Fermentation (PF) already include vitamin C, B2, B12, D2, EFAs, K2, coenzyme Q10, pyrroloquinoline quinine (PQQ) and glutathione (GSH). Others can be produced using a combination of chemistry and PF, such as niacin or B3, B5, C, and L-carnitine. 

 


Plant-based substitutes for beef have been doing very well in the marketplace. Beyond Meat debuted on NASDAQ in May 2019 and has reached a market capitalization of more than $7 billion. Tyson foods watch out. They are coming for you.

A couple short weeks after getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore, Eat Just announced last night it has made the first commercial sale of its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. 
 — The Spoon, December 2019

You can find Beyond Meat chicken in KFC and its patties in Burger King. Burger King markets the Impossible Whopper by touting its health benefits (0 mg of cholesterol). Israel’s SuperMeat is opening its own test-kitchen-meets-restaurant initiative in Tel Aviv. Soy-based Miracle Meat from Yokohama chain Freshness Burger has attracted more than $27 million in funding this year to scale to 4000 tons production. They may be 10x that in 3 years.

3D-printed steak from MeaTech
 Using the technologies gained from its $18 million Peace of Meat acquisition in December 2020, Israel-based, NASDAQ-listed MeaTech now aims to establish a Belgian pilot plant and start chicken fat 3D printing during 2022. The company has also begun research into the best way of scaling the 3D bioprinting of pork, turkey, duck and more. Last year, Israeli food bioprinting firm SavorEat raised $13 in its Tel Aviv IPO. Redefine Meat’s 3D printed animal-free meat, raised $29 million in a February IPO. Barcelona-based Novameat has announced plans to market 3D printed, plant-based ‘steaks’ to restaurants in 2022.

Current estimates are that the global market will grow to $88.6 billion by 2030. Finland-based Solar Foods has received 23 million euro to go into production in 2023 with its soy-based alternatives. It reckons the switch to plant protein will actually reduce the amount of soy being grown in the world because most of it goes to animal feed at a 30:1 loss in protein to waste — manure, hair, hide, bone. To feed the estimated 9.8 billion people on the planet in 2050 at present animal-based dietary standards, we would need to farm (mainly by clearing forest) an additional area the size of two Indias — 2.29 million square miles

Meanwhile, food-processing wastes upcycled by Spanish startup MOA Foodtech — sugar, wheat, corn, beer, potato and fruit — are being fermented into high-value protein ingredients for snacks, pet food and specialized products for athletes, the elderly, diabetics and others. No genetic engineering required; these are just your specialized digestive microbes and thoughtful formulations. No new land required, either.

There may be examples of vertical farming that are good but most of what I have seen is just motivated by money.
 — Food Critic Mark Bittman

Since the 1970s, costs of PF food have fallen 10,000,000 times since the first molecules were produced, to about $100/kg today. An order of magnitude reduction, expected to occur between 2023 and 2025, to about $10/kg will unlock the mass market. By 2035, PF protein will be $1/kg while the cost of cow-produced milk protein will have doubled to more than $10/kg. Similar trends will emerge for PF ground beef, reaching cost parity in 2025 and likely three times lower than the cost of conventional meat by 2030.

Of course, there is something akin to the taxpayer fossil subsidy in the US dairy industry, too, supported by wealthy lobbying. Subsidies add $0.27/kg to milk producers’ net and tariffs protect them from international price pressure.

Nonetheless, most U.S. dairy farmers operate at a loss. In 2018, the lowest quartile of New England dairy farms made a loss of $447 per cow, with the average across all farms a loss of $40 per cow.

As U.S. milk consumption has steadily declined, the guaranteed buyer of last resort has been purchasing surplus production and storing it as processed cheese, periodically releasing as government food assistance or sweetheart deals with fast food chains. In early 2018, USDA partnered with Pizza Hut to include 25 percent more cheese on pan pizzas in an effort to release 70 million extra kilograms of milk per year to the market. Still the pre-pandemic surplus of cheese was the largest ever — 617,000 metric tons.

New to the Lover’s lineup, the Ultimate Cheese Lover’s pizza packs an extra cheesey punch. This new recipe is a mouth-watering combination of Alfredo sauce and three cheeses — Romano, Parmesan, and Pizza Hut’s signature pizza cheese– blended to create an ultimate cheese experience like no other. 
— Pizza Hut Advertisement

As the psychology of stranded investment strikes a fossilized food industry seemingly secure by virtue of its successful regulatory capture, it looks like a deer in the headlights' glare. According to a study by RethinkX:

Decision-makers must also recognize there are no geographical barriers to the food and agriculture disruption, so if the US resists or fails to support the modern food industry, other countries such as China will capture the health, wealth, and jobs that accrue to those leading the way. 

Because fake meat uses 98 percent less water and 99 percent less land, it means that by 2035, about 60 percent of the land currently being used for livestock and feed production will be freed for other uses as the cost/price curves cross. According to RethinkX, this liberated territory should be viewed as potential rewilding area. Just in the United States it is about the size of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase — or six Iowas. 

RethinkX predicts U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from cattle will drop by 60 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2035. Even when the full Life Cycle Analysis of modern food production is included, net emissions from the food sector as a whole will decline by 45 percent by 2030, 65 percent by 2035. 

  • Water consumption in cattle production and associated feed cropland irrigation will fall by 50 percent by 2030, 75 percent by 2035. 
  • If all the freed land were dedicated to optimized reforestation and soil regeneration, all U.S. greenhouse pollution — 5.5 billion tons of CO2e each year — could be fully offset by natural drawdown by 2035.
  • The cost of modern foods and other precision fermentation products will be at least 50 percent and as much as 80 percent lower than the animal products they replace.
  • At current prices, revenues of the U.S. beef and dairy industry and their suppliers will decline by at least 50 percent by 2030, and by nearly 90 percent by 2035. All other livestock and commercial fisheries will follow a similar trajectory.
  • Farmland values will collapse by 40 percent-80 percent.
  • Major producers of animal products are at risk of a serious economic shock.
  • The average U.S. family will save more than $1,200 a year in food costs. This will keep an additional $100 billion per year in USAnian pockets by 2030.
  • By 2030, at least half of the demand for oil from the U.S. agriculture industry — currently about 150 million barrels of oil equivalent a year — will disappear.

Extrapolated to the entire world, the rewilding of cattle and cropland and the tree uptake of carbon dioxide would begin to stabilize the atmosphere, gradually withdrawing tens of gigatons of CO2e per year until by mid-century or shortly thereafter, the legacy fossil pollution of earlier centuries would be completely erased. Ice cover would return to Greenland and Antarctica. Ice would once more protect the northern whale migrations. The polar vortex would behave. Storms would lessen in ferocity. Zoonotic viruses would remain in wilderness host populations. Wildfires would diminish. Coasts would be spared monster hurricanes (although sea level will continue to rise for several more centuries).

Externalities not captured in the economic models include the past public health costs of animal protein and dairy, the impact of antibiotic resistance, animal Pharma’s effects on the marine environment, and the ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup. While public health costs like these were used to justify taxes on tobacco or gasoline, animal foods were exempted and subsidized.

I think I can forego some of my concerns for Pilobolus fungi. They are not in danger of extinction like we are. Still, I have reservations about energy-intensive, technology-intensive foods making up a cornerstone of my diet even if they reduce my intake of HFCS. Even RethinkX admits “potential health issues could arise when incorporating novel food components into the food chain.” I worry about the lack of love in preparing food, as important an ingredient in my health as any I can think of.

At The Farm we went in big for soy in all its miraculous and historical forms, prepared with love every step of the way: milk, tofu, okara, tempeh, grits, butters, miso, shoyu, natto, burgers, dogs, nuts, coffee, flour pastries, granolas, pizza, soysages, yogurt, frogurt, ice bean, frijoles, stroganoff, sufu, yuba, scramble and I am probably still forgetting half the rest. There were and are folks whose digestion can not handle soy but there were also wheat gluten, hemp hearts and many other plant bases from which entire cuisines can be constructed, naturally. 


All told, this is great news. 2025 is not very long to wait for the brick to drop on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and their 370 million tons of manure leaking from overflowing lagoons, battery cages for hens, gestation crates for sows, tail-docked caged cattle, tormented veal calves, and other forms of unspeakably inventive torture. The sooner that industry is disrupted, the better.

At that point, we may learn whether Townsend or Bowen is the more correct. Given virtually unlimited, high-quality food and abundant land and water, will population once more burgeon, or, having adequate opportunity now for provision of the four prerequisites of population decline, will it drop?

 __________________________


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:
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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

Sunday, September 5, 2021

The Great Pause Week 77: The Manchurian Confusion

"The reveal came when China moved to control the price of infant formula."

Two decades into their 81st Century, the powers that be in China announced a succession of dramatic policy shifts. They began with a move on the transnationalist Chinese financial sector, including Hong Kong; disrupting ownership of the largest online retail chains; sidelining their wealthy oligarchs; keeping enterprises from leaving China through public stock offerings in New York, London or Brussels; banning BitCoin miners; and reasserting authority over the all-important data that technology companies — FinTech, MedTech, EdTech, gaming, telecommunications, even China’s version of Uber, Didi Chuxing — had begun amassing to track personal buying habits, health, gaming skills, attitudes, and interests. The Chinese central party asserted dominion over all that. If you were a company in China, Xi Jinping seemed to say, the government is now your managing business partner. The data you gather belong to us. The profits you make return to be used to elevate the standard of living for Chinese people. We are, after all, communists.

Popular media outlets in many parts of the world read nefarious meanings in these tea leaves. They assumed an emerging Big Brother surveillance state, a return to hardline Marxist doctrine, or some similar totalitarian power grab of all China’s young, successful, capitalist enterprises that apparently had gone too far and transgressed some unseen red line. Reassertion of control over the financial hub at Hong Kong was only the first shoe to drop. China was moving to control its own interior, across the entire spectrum of industries and new media. 

The reveal came when China moved to control the price of infant formula. The hidden motive behind China’s crackdown was much simpler then the Sinowatch cabals on K-Street fantasized. It was about babies.

Facing an aging population and dwindling labor force, China in 2015 scrapped its controversial one-child policy. Still, Beijing has struggled to convince couples to have more babies. In 2020, the number of newborns plummeted 18% to 12 million compared to the previous year, the fourth straight year of decline. 

The cost of education steadily rising through the new EdTech sphere in the wake of pandemic lockdowns was less about those startups getting way too profitable for Communist Party tastes. Prices were getting way too prohibitive for parents to educate children, which meant they would be less inclined to have more.

China cracked down on unaffordable housing costs for the same reason. Then they cracked down on video game play by dating age youth, and on the high cost of dating generally. They actively encouraged the developers of Tinder-like apps, with data sharing redirected to Beijing to be combined with gaming habits, taxi-rides, concert attendance, Fitbit uploads, and purchases at the corner pharmacy. 

In a country that not long ago went to great lengths to limit family size to one child, there are now generous incentives to have more children, even a monthly check equal to US$77 for any second or third child.

Risk-taking and experimentation by young workers make them the engine of capitalism. They are also more mobile and thus can move to places where they will be most productive. So, what happens when that part of a national demography wanes? 

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.

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 or descent into vice (neither of which should be ruled out, as I will explain in later posts).

In the United States, 25 states had more deaths than births last year, up from five at the end of 2019. 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 US population. The rate among women in their early 20s is down by 40 percent since 2007. Teenagers have had the sharpest decline, down by 63 percent. The U.S. fertility rate is now around 1.73 children per woman — roughly on par with that of Denmark and Great Britain.

Max Pop

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 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 to fish and fowl. It is like accepting 3 degrees as a climate goal (our present trajectory is 4–5 degrees warmer by 2100).

In recent years this population conversation has divided into two opposing camps. One camp sees the issue in terms of economics. There is a “demographic time bomb” about to explode in the most highly developed and modernized countries. It has already begun to shrink those countries native populations below replacement level and erode their abilities to maintain economic growth, innovation, and the essential services required for a high standard of living. 

The other camp sees the issue in terms of ecology. Human population has grown beyond reasonable limits and is now degrading biodiversity, social systems, and nature, leading to a spiral of abrupt climate change, extinctions, pandemic diseases, and economic overshoot. Our demands on the planet for energy, mineral and food supplies exceed its ability to support us at this scale. 

Some in the first camp think we should try to avert this problem by encouraging fertility. Others believe immigration could solve the problem. In 1965, the US Congress repealed 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which had imposed national-origin quotas expressly designed to maintain America’s Western European ethnic makeup. Ending it resulted in 58.5 million new immigrants over the next 50 years, about 25 million Asian. Many were high-tech geeks, Unicorn creators, arriving from China and India as students or young professionals. And so was born Silicon Valley and a quadrillion-dollar industry from mere electromagnetic ones and zeros.

According to a study by the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy, more than half of the 91 start-ups that became $1 billion companies had one or more immigrant founders. Likewise, the Partnership for a New American Economy found that immigrants or their children had founded more than 40 percent of the 2010 Fortune 500 companies.

 — Shikha Dalmia, Who Has the Cure for America’s Declining Birthrate? Canada.
The New York Times,
Aug. 18, 2021.

Given the perfect storm of climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss and resource depletion, my feeling is that we should not be thinking of ways to have more babies. 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.

The demographic bomb that China is attempting to defuse is set to go off in 2035 when China’s new births will no longer keep pace with its natural death rate. A few years later, China will be hard pressed to fill employment vacancies in its production and service industries. Rather than prepare for its future by defusing the demographic bomb, as it is doing by draconian means (China time makes the New York Minute seem like hours), it would do better to let the D-bomb go off and prepare to build a better, smaller society as the implosion proceeds. 

Not everyone in the Chinese Central Congress is entirely agreed to Xi’s program, by the way. Rumors coming from China’s own version of Breitenburg or Davos suggest Xi might do well to start shopping his resumé around. In a contest between Marxist wealth sharing and unicorn billionaires, old Karl M. may hold the losing hand this time.

Instead of dethroning its oligarchs, China’s next generation of leaders may find it more fruitful to recruit immigrant clean-tech startups and back them. Climate tech venture capital is trillionizing, outstripping investments in every other industry on the planet by orders of magnitude. The nations that emerge on top will be those that discover diverse and novel ways to run the carbon cycle backwards within the next ten years. That is something that can grow.

 



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.

#GenerationRestoration

“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

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