Inertia or Change (Is There Hope?): A Treatise on the State of the World From 1998 to 2008

Jim Swann practiced architecture in Chicago at Swann and Weiskopf for 30 years before moving to Bellingham in 1992. His book on human rights and the environment, “Human Rights and the Ecological Imperative” is available. Please contact Mr. Swann at jerryswann@hotmail.com for a copy.

Part 6

Editor’s Note: Whatcom Watch published early chapters of Mr. Swann’s book “Human Rights and the Ecological Imperative” as a series in July, August and September 2004. The next few months, we’ll publish chapters VIII and IX as a series. The chapters deal with the ecological imperative.

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” — Thomas Paine

I don’t expect to be around for the results of our current collective decision or indecisions. And, I don’t have a road map for this trip.

Needless to say no one else does. Perhaps we are at the end of technological solutions? Henry Adams was worried, and that was in 1900. Odum was hoping we could use dwindling supplies of fossil fuel allowing ourselves time to adjust to a renewable energy economy plus some hydroelectric power but that option seems to have been eliminated.

Given the current mindsets of those in charge and the lifestyles of most others, inertia seems most likely to prevail. The complications are many. We cannot support present global population. Migrations confirm it. Pandemics are out of control, threatening the stability of countries. Water shortages are increasing. Terrorists emerge when hopelessness sets in. Rights are replaced by security mandates.

We may have bought into Faust’s deal with the devil, have had a great orgy with technology and fossil fuels, and now it’s payback time? We may be drowning in the sorcerer’s apprentice soup without any magic words to reverse the process. Or we may be participants in a great convoluted tragedy centered on black gold, greed, growth and conflict wherein we the protagonists are consumed by our own excesses and omissions and wherein the weak inherit an uninhabitable earth courtesy of the rich.

And where Noah’s Ark does not arrive in time to save what was left of our biodiversity. We have lost the operating manual for Boulding’s spaceship earth, and are being gassed within by our own sequestered waste. Sherrington’s great religions bringing their altruism has not materialized, and somewhere a voice is calling, probably by cell phone, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

What of democracy purified, freed of corporate greed, constrained from exponential growth, all candidates given free direct access to the media, citizens protected by the courts and all regulatory agencies and freed from partisan control? The question of property resolved for all living things, the biosphere and the geosphere becoming a commons, Government truly liberated from all special interests, and population and consumption restrained by all nations.

It this utopian or necessity? If utopian, then we are doomed not just to make mistakes but to make fatal mistakes. When a whaling ship removed the last desperate survivors from Easter Island did the islanders wonder how it all happened? Those great inscrutable stone heads they had worked on so long and hard, to chisel and move into place, or the last trees that they had cut down to move the great rock? Did it occur to them that these acts sealed their own fate? Probably not. They were too weak and confused to care.

When the last starving Norwegians sailed from Greenland one bitter winter in a fated craft for their homeland, did it occur to them that their primitive neighbors, the Inuit, were thriving on seal meat and fish while their own cattle and sheep starved for lack of feed and they from an inability to change habits or diets? Did they realize that building the bishop’s stone church, or prayer, would not suffice to save them but only help destroy them?

Were these both examples of an inability to overcome past habits, i.e., inertia? (These two examples of failure are from Jared Diamond’s thesis on failure in “Report from the Storm.”)

Is the concept of a strong United Nations utopian or a necessity? Chief Seattle told us but we weren’t listening, the ecologists also but we still weren’t listening.

Are the biologists right? British ecologist Norman Myers wrote, “Since new species evolve from old ones our extinctions are depleting evolution’s capacity to generate replacement species.”

I do not see any light at the end of the tunnel, only a dense black pall, probably CO2. Inertia has prevailed, I concede. Simon Tett is right. Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” will have to await another long day.

We are at the end of growth — economic and population. We should be at the end of competition and the start of co-operation; we should be at the turning place, but I fear that will be too big a leap, too many will not make it. We might make that lower population target, but it’s going to be ugly.

The ecological imperative has been ignored. Corporate technology has prevailed over science. Human rights have not been linked to responsibilities. Lastly, ideology has prevailed over reality and power over justice.

P.S. It’s getting late. I am weary and I fear my task has been for naught. When I began writing back in 1970, though all was not perfect then, there was plenty of hope, much of which I included herein. I was encouraged by many I quoted, who though skeptical held out serious hope.

And why all the quotes? Frankly I was sure they said it better or with more authority then. Today, February 2007, I do not hear the same optimism nor even one great statesman who might paraphrase another’s anxiety, “Our case is new, so we must think and act anew … We must disenthrall ourselves, then we will save our civilization.”

We are at the end of growth — economic and population. We should be at the end of competition and the start of co-operation.

The following is an excerpt from the late Howard Odum’s book, “Environment, Power and Society,” 1971:

In the agrarian system with man and his animals living off the land, there was often a balance of primary production (P) and total consumption (R) in the course of a year. Man’s net annual effect on the gases of the atmosphere, on the concentration of minerals, or on the future was small, for the system was balanced as an aquarium is balanced. As agrarian systems multiplied the world over, the biosphere also remained approximately the same. Some organic matter was stored as fuel and oil, but the amount per year was tiny indeed.

In the industrial system with man living off a fuel, he manages all his affairs with industrial machinery, all parts of which are metabolically consumers. Even agriculture is dominated by machinery and industries supplying equipment, poisons, varieties and services. The system of man has consumption in excess of production. The products of respiration — carbon dioxide, metabolic water and mineralized inorganic wastes — are discharged in rates in excess of their incorporation into organic matter by photosynthesis.

If the industrialized urban system were enclosed in a chamber with only the air above it at the time, it would quickly exhaust its oxygen, be stifled with waste and destroy itself since it does not have the recycling pattern of the agrarian system. The problems with life support in 1970 on the space flight of Apollo 13 dramatized this principle to the world … .

The biosphere with industrial man suddenly added is like a balanced aquarium into which large animals are introduced. Consumption temporarily exceeds production, the balance is upset, the products of respiration accumulate and the fuels for consumption become scarcer and scarcer until production is sufficiently accelerated and respiration is balanced. In some experimental systems balance is achieved only after the large consumers, which originally started the imbalance, are dead. Will this happen to man?

In a thousand ways, the accelerating changes accompanying an increasing budget of energy for man raise questions of his ultimate role and survival. The pessimist talks of man as the next in line of the extinct dinosaurs and other predominant types that once inherited the earth. Like the dinosaurs, man is developing a system of specialists and giant mechanisms. The extinction of the dinosaurs serves as a warning that our so-called progress may not be a safe plan for survival.

As the industrialized areas increase, how much longer will the biological cycles in the uninhabited environments be able to absorb and regenerate the wastes and thus prevent self-poisoning of waters and atmosphere? As man’s system becomes large enough to control and prevail in the flows of the biosphere, will he understand it well enough to prevent disaster? If his energy sources begin to decline, can he return to a minor energetic position in the earth system without a collapse and extinction of culture as we now know it?

Critical issues in public and political affairs of human society ultimately have an energetic basis, and the increasing number of urgent energy demands measures the accelerating changes in the system containing man. The action programs needed on such public issues as birth control, land ownership, man in space, war prevention costs, nuclear power, zoning of land space, human medical maintenance, and world economics must each be limited and fitted into the overall energetic budget for a successful system of nature.

Energetic budgeting in simpler systems of nature that do not include man is readily discernible and has often been described. The same principles apply to the vast industrialized system yet how seldom is the energetic budget discussed or its rules applied to human society? Subconscious attempts to use economic data as a substitute for energy data may be misleading.

The energetic processes in a dense reef of oysters in a bay on the Gulf Coast of the United States are basically the same as those of an industrial city. The fossil record too is beautiful with its magnificent chronology of ancient reef systems. But the energy networks of these mineral reef systems are gone and with them the component species that dominated. What about the future of man’s industrial reefs? §