Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  It may be presumptuous to try to forecast what post-hydrocarbon style will look like, as people will have to make it up as they go along — and creativity is, almost by definition, difficult to predict. It will, by necessity, be true post-modernism — though the use of the term may be more confusing than helpful. In any case, the following are a few of the characteristics that must inevitably be part of the new aesthetic.

  1. Workers will incorporate no or minimal fossil fuels, either as raw material or as energy source, in production processes. This is the defining condition for all that follows, and its implications will be profound.

  2. Construction of buildings and objects will depend substantially on the application of muscle power and handcraft. This necessarily follows from (1).

  3. Pride in workmanship will therefore return.

  4. Previously cheap petrochemical-based materials (such as plastics) will gradually disappear, necessitating the use of natural materials; however, many of the latter (such as wood) will also become more rare and expensive (as is already happening). Thus workers will inevitably develop more respect for natural materials.

  5. Because buildings and objects being produced will require more hand labor and scarce raw materials, the throwaway mentality and the phenomenon of planned obsolescence will disappear. Durability will be a required attribute of all products.

  6. For the same reasons, reparability will also be requisite: the average person will need to be able to fix anything that breaks.

  7. Since products themselves will need to be durable and reparable, continued rapid changes of fashion and style will seem nonsensical and counterproductive. Planned aesthetic obsolescence will be replaced by the imperative to lend an enduring artistic quality to all design.

  8. Because the transitional era (i.e., the coming century) will be one in which species will continue to vanish, and because people will no longer be insulated from weather and other natural conditions by high-energy buildings and machines, workers will probably be inspired to incorporate themes from nature into their products.

  9. In their efforts to identify aesthetic themes appropriate to hand labor and natural materials, workers will likely end up drawing upon vernacular design traditions.

  10. Because people living in the transitional era will be witnessing the passing of the fossil-fueled machine culture of their youth, they will probably be inspired to incorporate occasional ironic or nostalgic comments on that passing into their artistic output.

  11. Beauty may to a certain extent be in the eye of the beholder, but there are universal principles of harmony and proportion that perennially reappear. Given that workers will be required to invent much of their aesthetic vocabulary from scratch, they will no doubt fall back on these principles frequently.

  12. Since we are entering an era of declining availability of raw materials, the new aesthetic will by necessity emphasize leanness and simplicity, and will eschew superfluous decoration. The Zen architecture of Japan may serve as an inspiration in this regard.

  These are, of course, only the most general of parameters within which specific new regional styles may emerge over the coming decades. What exactly these styles will look like won’t be known until millions of craftspeople and builders undertake the processes of (re-)learning skills and producing large numbers of buildings, tools, furnishings, and artworks. However, one can hardly help noting that most of the characteristics listed above apply to the products of the Arts and Crafts movement.

  Perhaps the way down the hydrocarbon curve will, at least in the best instances, indeed look a little like the way up.

  ON NATURE’S LIMITS AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

  4

  Five Axioms of Sustainability

  MY AIM IN THIS CHAPTER is to explore the history of the terms sustainable and sustainability, and their various published definitions, and then to offer a set of five axioms (based on a review of the literature) to help clarify the characteristics of a durable society.

  The essence of the term sustainable is simple enough: “that which can be maintained over time.” By implication, this means that any society, or any aspect of a society, that is unsustainable cannot be maintained for long and will cease to function at some point.

  It is probably safe to assume that no society can be maintained forever: astronomers assure us that in several billion years the sun will heat to the point that Earth’s oceans will boil away and life on our planet will come to an end. Thus sustainability is a relative term. It seems reasonable to take as a temporal frame of reference the durations of prior civilizations, which ranged from several hundred to several thousand years. A sustainable society, then, would be one capable of maintaining itself for many centuries into the future.

  However, the word sustainable has become widely used in recent years to refer, in a general and vague way, to practices that are reputed to be more environmentally sound than others. Often the word is used so carelessly as to lead some environmentalists to advise abandoning its use.1 Nevertheless, I believe that the concept of sustainability is essential to understanding and solving our species ecological dilemma, and that the word is capable of rehabilitation, if only we are willing to expend a little effort in arriving at a clear definition.

  History and Background

  The essential concept of sustainability was embodied in the world-views and traditions of many indigenous peoples; for example, it was a precept of the Gayanashagowa, or Great Law of Peace (the constitution of the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy) that chiefs consider the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation to come.

  The first known European use of sustainability (German: Nachhaltigkeit) occurred in 1712 in the book Sylvicultura Oeconomica by German forester and scientist Hanns Carl von Carlowitz. Later, French and English foresters adopted the practice of planting trees as a path to “sustained yield forestry.”

  The term gained widespread usage after 1987, when the Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and De-velopment defined sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”2 This definition of sustainability has proven extremely influential, and is still widely used; nevertheless, it has been criticized for its failure to explicitly note the unsustainability of the use of non-renewable resources, and for its general disregard of the problem of population growth.3

  Also in the 1980s, Swedish oncologist Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt brought together leading Swedish scientists to develop a consensus on requirements for a sustainable society. In 1989 he formulated this consensus in four conditions for sustainability, which in turn became the basis for an organization, The Natural Step.4 Subsequently, 60 major Swedish corporations and 56 municipalities, as well as many businesses in other nations, pledged to abide by Natural Step conditions. The four conditions are as follows:

  1. In order for a society to be sustainable, nature’s functions and diversity are not systematically subject to increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the earth’s crust.

  2. In order for a society to be sustainable, nature’s functions and diversity are not systematically subject to increasing concentrations of substances produced by society.

  3. In order for a society to be sustainable, nature’s functions and diversity are not systematically impoverished by physical displacement, over-harvesting, or other forms of ecosystem manipulation.

  4. In a sustainable society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

  Seeing the need for an accounting or indicator scheme by which to measure sustainability, in 1992 Canadian ecologist William Rees introduced the concept of the ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and water area a human population would hypothetically need in order to provide the resources required to support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology.5 Implicit in the scheme is
the recognition that, for humanity to achieve sustainability, the total world population’s footprint must be less than the total land/water area of the Earth. That footprint is currently calculated by the Footprint Network as being about 23 percent larger than what the planet can regenerate, indicating that humankind is to this extent operating in an unsustainable manner.

  In a paper published in 1994 (and revised in 1998), physics professor Albert A. Bartlett offered 17 Laws of Sustainability, with which he sought to clarify the meaning of sustainability in terms of population and resource consumption.6 Bartlett’s criticisms of the careless use of the term, and his rigorous demonstration of the implications of continued growth, were important influences on the present author’s efforts to define what is genuinely sustainable.

  A truly comprehensive historical survey of the usage of the terms sustainable and sustainability is not feasible. A search of Amazon.com for sustainability (January 17, 2007) yielded nearly 25,000 hits — presumably indicating several thousand distinct titles containing the word. Sustainable yielded 62,000 hits, including books on sustainable leadership, communities, energy, design, construction, business, development, urban planning, tourism, and so on. A search of journal articles on Google Scholar turned up 538,000 hits, indicating thousands of scholarly articles or references with the word sustainability in their titles. However, my own admittedly less-than-exhaustive acquaintance with the literature (informed, among other sources, by two books that offer an overview of the history of the concept of sustainability) 7 suggests that much, if not most of this immense body of publications repeats, or is based on, the definitions and conditions described above.

  Five Axioms

  As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I have formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. I have not introduced any fundamentally new notions in any of the axioms; my goal is simply to distill ideas that have been proposed and explored by others, and to put them into a form that is both more precise and easier to understand.

  In formulating these axioms I endeavored to take into account previous definitions of sustainability, and also the most cogent criticisms of those definitions. My criteria were as follows:

  • To qualify as an axiom, a statement must be capable of being tested using the methodology of science.

  • Collectively, a set of axioms intended to define sustainability must be minimal (with no redundancies).

  • At the same time, the axioms must be sufficient, leaving no glaring loopholes.

  • The axioms should be worded in terms the layperson can understand.

  Here are the axioms, each followed by a brief discussion:

  1. Tainter’s Axiom: Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.

  Exception: A society can avoid collapse by finding replacement resources.

  Limit to the exception: In a finite world, the number of possible replacements is also finite.

  I have named this axiom for Joseph Tainter, author of the classic study, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which demonstrates that collapse is a frequent if not universal fate of complex societies. He argues that collapse is directly related to declining returns on efforts to support growing levels of societal complexity with energy harvested from the environment. Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed similarly makes the argument that collapse is the common destiny of societies that ignore resource constraints.8

  This axiom defines sustainability by the consequences of its absence, i.e., collapse. Tainter defines collapse as a reduction in social complexity — i.e., a contraction of society in terms of its population size, the sophistication of its technologies, the consumption rates of its people, and the diversity of its specialized social roles. Often, historically, collapse has meant a precipitous decline in population brought about by social chaos, warfare, disease, or famine. However, collapse can also occur more gradually over a period of many decades or even several centuries. There is also the theoretical possibility that a society could choose to “collapse” (i.e., reduce its complexity) in a controlled as well as gradual manner.

  While it could be argued that a society can choose to change rather than collapse, the only choices that would prevent collapse would be either to cease using critical resources unsustainably or to find alternative resources.

  A society that uses resources sustainably may collapse for other reasons, some beyond the society’s control (an overwhelming natural disaster, or conquest by another, more militarily formidable and aggressive society, to name just two of many possibilities), so it cannot be said that a sustainable society is immune to collapse unless many more conditions for sustainability are specified than in this axiom. This first axiom focuses on resource consumption because that is a decisive, quantifiable, and, in principle, controllable determinant of a society’s long-term survival.

  The question of what constitutes sustainable or unsustainable use of resources is addressed in Axioms 3 and 4.

  Critical resources are those essential to the maintenance of life and basic social functions, including (but not necessarily limited to) water and the means and materials necessary to produce food and usable energy.

  The exception and limit to the exception address the common argument of free-market economists that resources are infinitely substitutable, and that therefore modern market-driven societies need never face a depletion-led collapse, even if their consumption rates continue to escalate.9 In some instances, substitutes for resources do become readily available and are even superior, as was the case in the mid-19th century when kerosene from petroleum was substituted for whale oil as a fuel for lamps. In other cases, substitutes are inferior, as is the case with tar sands as a substitute for conventional petroleum, given that tar sands are less energy-dense, require more energy input for processing, and produce more carbon emissions. As time goes on, societies will tend first to exhaust substitutes that are superior and easy to get at, then those that are equivalent, and increasingly will have to rely on ever more inferior substitutes to replace depleting resources — unless rates of consumption are held in check (see Axioms 2-4).

  2. Bartlett’s Axiom: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

  I have named this axiom for Albert A. Bartlett because it is his First Law of Sustainability, reproduced verbatim (I found it impossible to improve upon).10

  The world has seen the human population grow for many decades and therefore this growth has obviously been sustained up to the present. How can we be sure that it cannot be sustained into the indefinite future? Simple arithmetic shows that even small rates of growth, if continued, add up to absurdly large — and plainly unsupportable — population sizes and rates of consumption. For example, a simple one percent rate of growth in the present human population (less than the actual current rate) would result in a doubling of population each 70 years. Thus in 2075, the Earth would be home to 13 billion humans; in 2145, 26 billion; and so on. By the year 3050, there would be one human per square meter of the Earth’s land surface (including mountains and deserts).

  Essentially the same thing is true with regards to consumption. Just one example: there are 330 million cubic miles of water on Earth and, while it is difficult to say just how much of that humans use annually (because many uses, such as fishing, are indirect), it would probably be fair to estimate that we use one million cubic miles. Let us assume that future humans will find a way to make all of the Earth’s water usable, that human population stays as it is, but that per capita use of water grows one percent annually. By the year 2600 humans would be using every drop of water on the planet.

  3. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.

  Renewable resources are exhaustible. Forests can be over-cut, resulting in barren landscapes and shortages of wood (as occurred in many parts of Eu
rope in past centuries), and fish can be over-harvested, resulting in the extinction or near-extinction of many species (as is occurring today globally).

  This axiom has been stated, in somewhat differing ways, by many economists and ecologists, and is the basis for “sustained yield forestry” (see above) and “maximum sustainable yield” fishery management. Efforts to refine this essential principle of sustainability are ongoing.11

  The term “rate of natural replenishment” requires some discussion. The first clue that harvesting is proceeding at a rate greater than that of natural replenishment is the decline of the resource base. However, a resource may be declining for reasons other than over-harvesting; for example, a forest that is not being logged may be decimated by disease. Nevertheless, if the resource is declining, pursuit of the goal of sustainability requires that the rate of harvest be reduced, regardless of the cause. Sometimes harvests must drop dramatically, at a rate far greater than the rate of resource decline, so that the resource has time to recover. This has been the case with regard to whale and fish species that have been overharvested to the point of near exhaustion, and have required complete harvest moratoria in order to re-establish themselves — though in cases where the remaining breeding population is too small even this is not enough and the species cannot recover.