Apocalypse Now

I’m thinking that most of the journal and magazine articles I read, and the news reports of politicians' and think tanks’ outputs, desires and forecasts, are irrelevant. I can only relate them to imagining the Captain of the Titanic at the dinner table, blandly regaling to his special guests his stories of this great ship’s exceptional functioning, all the while as they rush towards that iceberg...... out of sight, just over the horizon, in the dark.

What’s the point now of my adding another rant against the  heedless ignorance of our times, adding to the g growing yet still feeble pile of clear eyed visions published?

It’s time to read, to write,  what i can do to prepare to live in a different land,   
under a different climate, where the basics, food, shelter, community, cannot be taken for granted, have to be built from the ground up, by us as newcomers, who do not yet know the language we must use. In the land we will all shortly occupy we will have to acquire new skills to do the work necessary . We will find few teachers, and so have to invent, or re-invent our own skills of basic survival. We will have greater reasons to fear the predators and  power-seekers among us.

How it has come to this...

Everything we have come to rely on as if of course that is what sensible people do , all the articles and faiths of our present consumerist oil based culture, all are irrelevant and will be swept away by the coming tsunami of global scarcity.

We have overpopulated the planet and are running out of the cheap oil and the readily available resources, of metals, and chemicals (think fertiliser) , and pure water and clean benevolent air, that fuelled our population growth since the 1700’s. The global economic scheme that started with the Industrial Revolution is ending. 80% of what we do, or eat, or wear, or use for medical care, is fuelled by cheap oil. Which will soon be gone. Our children will have to stay close to home, get everything they need for survival near by. Medical care will be seen as the fraud it is, based on the wrong kind of science, a mechanical science, instead of what would work, an ecological and biological science. We are members of a culture, we are not mechanisms with interchangeable, replaceable parts, and will soon have to relearn that fact, forgotten for a mere century. All the speeches and prognostications claiming what we must do to save our education systems, our medical care systems, our economic systems, our democratic organisations, are now all irrelevant. No one knows what the coming collapse will look like, or how to survive it. All we can do to prepare, is to try now to learn to live as if we had no oil, nor any food except local food, nor any medical care or education save that we could  provide ourselves.
with love from Donato

http://www.donatopoetry.com
http://www.postcarbon.org

Chaos Dynamics, Cybernetics, and the Interaction of Humans and the Biosphere

Chaos Dynamics, Cybernetics, and the Interaction of Humans and the Biosphere

Control

A boat by fitting with a rudder, thus limiting its freedom of action, its “variety”. Every type of control is a effort to reduce the “variety” presented by the object we want to control. In the mathematical discipline called “cybernetics”, the study of control mechanisms is begun with the “Law of Requisite Variety” which states that to control something, we must match its variety, or reduce its variety to that which we possess. An example would be a football team. If we want to control it, we have to put in another equal team. Another example is the service queue problem at a bank or a performance ticket counter where to provide efficient service and avoid chaos they limit the variety they are faced with by having a limited number of service points and then sorting people into that number of queues, which in turn are fed by only one queue.

Competition

to get ahead of others, to seize” control”, to win. Seems the aim is always to control access to a particular space, limit it to the controller and whom he designates. To control by setting the rules and enforce them, hence a “game”. A strategy might be to change the rules unilaterally, so as to control access to the space and win the game. In the stock market, an option buyer or a bankster making loans can be bankrupt if the counter parties don’t pay up, thus making loans can put one under the control of the borrower.

China has to support other countries these days, including the US so as to maintain its markets and keep its people from rioting for lack of food money. So others borrow from China without the need to pay back. Of course this game ends when this “something for nothing” Ponzi scheme collapses. The rapidly growing complex structure of finance, factories, roads, interacting expertise, education, health and elder care, etc. that is Chinese society today, cannot be kept going on the work and purchases of the Chinese people alone. And if others can only supply it with paper promises in return for its products, it must inevitably collapse, from lack of the energy required to keep it expanding. It’s instability is made worse by its necessarily increasing complexity as it grows.

International trade

Note that the role of fiat money, paper money, is only to facilitate the exchange of goods. Countries exchanging different currencies must eventually exchange goods or services equal to the balances of currencies owed, unless one or another country has the spare capacity in its work force to continue supporting others with a free donation of goods and services, in a form of charity, or the system collapses. Imagine a farmer, or anyone with the ability to make or dig out of the ground, something that others want are willing to exchange what they make for his products. He can get all the other things he needs in life from the product of his work. If he has a lot of capacity to do this work, he can support a large family who need do nothing but keep him entertained. In effect, one of his needs is this large family, and his work keeps it going.

This picture is not often presented by whole countries. Saudi Arabia might be an example. They can dig incredible riches of low cost oil out of the ground, for a few more years a least, and thereby earn the money to pay for whatever else they need and have plenty left over to buy toys such as expensive weapons systems and modern buildings, and lifestyle goodies. They could offer their own people a lot more than they do, and the growing poverty (earnings per capita used to be $18 000 and are now $8000) in that country is reaching a tipping point into violence I hear.


Large and growing populations

Large and growing populations that do not have the education, or access to jobs to make goods or provide services they can exchange for the lifestyle goods and services they desire generate unfilled expectations that can tip into sufficient violence to destroy any civility in the society.

Large populations that destroy the habitat around them to meet their needs for food, water, raw material, create conditions for their own collapse from the excess stress of major weather events, drought, flood, hurricanes, or volcanoes, or global warming. They exacerbate their problems if they fail to produce goods that can be traded with others to meet their needs. Sometimes other countries will come to their rescue, but will impose such conditions on them as to effectively make them into slaves, unable to exist except through charity. Haiti and the United States are a good example of this syndrome.

These two paragraphs are part of a positive feedback loop that, as forecast by the mathematical models of Chaos Dynamics, will eventually destroy any society caught in it. Which these days is most of mankind.

The human condition

Humans are programmed to Ponzi scheme addictions,that is, to desiring and believing they can take out more than they put in. Humans are also addicted to status consumption. Consumption to display status, of food, housing, clothing , entertainment, complexity of technological gadgetry, cars, boats, recreational toys. This is particularly a syndrome that emerges with uncontrollable force, similar to any major addiction of the sort we are familiar with, drugs, alcohol, etc. , when they get together in large populations.

Humans also have the thinking capacity to create means of generating and applying work energy, machinery and inventions, far beyond the individual capability of any particular human person. They clearly have the capacity to use the planet’s raw materials beyond the capacity of the planet to replace them, and to grow additional humans at an exponential rate, having no natural predators, except perhaps each other, and some pandemic diseases which may erupt.

The basic human condition, over the millennia, has generated a population load on the planet that is unsustainable by the planet's life support systems.

Chaos Dynamics and Cybernetics applied, see attached diagram.