There seems to be no news yet. The recent 40th anniversary meeting at the Smithsonian on the publication of “The Limits to Growth” and the clearly most urgent of our many dire environmental dilemmas of our time, with little exception, has gotten almost no attention in the mainstream popular or environmental press. So you’ll have to hear it from a real scientist as to why.
The reason is that the mainstream press is limited to discussing social issues. That our means of sustaining our prosperity is rapidly exhausting the earth just isn’t one of them, as the resource scientists who study “the blue ball” actually “have no social standing”. There’s a fascinating history to that, that reveals some eye opening new science.
A nice place to visit,
Was a wonderful place to live,
with tremendous open spaces, and overflowing with natural wealth
“Endless exploding energy” is quite temporary, of course.
Think of any example, any case where it’s not just the start of things. We might start our day or a new business effort with a burst of “endless exploding energy”, but not really mean that literally. “Endless exploding energy”, if you mean it literally, generally causes things to rip themselves apart, destructively. With our economy there’s little doubt we mean it literally, is the problem, inherent in the universal plan for “real growth” at stable positive exponential rates.
Think of any of the quite common examples, and then wonder: Why haven’t people been curious about it? Our whole design for economic prosperity involves using energy to multiply energy use, to take endless exploding control of the earth’s energy resources, for empowering our social relationships,
…to “take off”, and keep using ever more, ever faster,
the more we use.
The idea of our ever exploding future... literally!
I don’t know why I am perhaps one of the only living people to have had the curiosity to break free of the misconceptions leading our culture to be so committed to increasing our energy use by bigger steps the more we use, forever. Somehow I both:
noticed the signs of there being something deeply wrong with our knowledge of life, and
discovered the universal solution for how to respond upon finding one’s own life rides on an exploding bomb of energy use, with no built in method of turning it off.
Survival is only possible if we use the energy it grows by… for something better,
The use of our own and the earth’s energies for further multiplying our energy uses, managed to explode at maximum rates forever,… is very explicitly managed for doing just that. It’s readily apparent in our normal uses of money, if you look, found to be innocently posing as if designed to serve everyone’s “self-interest”. Continue reading With endless exploding energy…→
It’s wonderful that you’re addressing this topic, long overlooked in the “alternative” as well as the mainstream scientific communities. Gratefully there is a long trail of ecologists that bucked even their own peers in keeping the question alive. Simple observation tells you that in nature “something goes wrong”, quite a lot!
How’s this, for cracking “the mind wall”…??
(the supreme arrogance of treating knowledge as reality)
I’ve been showing people interesting ways to make use the difference between our mental and physical worlds for many years. Here’s another. If it hits an important principle, or suggests any way you might use it, I’d be glad to know and to see if I can adjust my language to fit your idea.
The natural end of “low hanging fruit” is “falling off the ladder”, a universal trap at the natural limits of reach, where rising risks meet declining energy to respond to them (if your plan is to keep climbing).
(as increasing your control of the unknown exposes environmental hazards naturally first omitted from any model)
The natural limit of "low hanging fruit", meeting the rising risks at the limits of reach, with declining ability to respond to them
Intellectuals in particular, have had difficulty accepting we can be quite certain of finding some things in the unknown, like the dual reality confronted in any observer’s mind, as it finds its world works differently than they think.
Living by a social construct of reality at wide divergence from the physical one is a good working definition of “societal madness”. Of course no social network will admit to that, but evidence of communities not getting along because they live by starkly different realities does develop.
In America today we seem to have a wide variety of mad social realities to choose from. It might even be a perennial human condition… Now they’ve come to clearly interfere with our adapting to changes in the physical world confronting us.
Uroboros is the symbol of a system that consumes itself, either literally or symbolically. There are many kinds of feedback processes you could liken to a serpent eating its own tail. The compost from one generation of plants nourishes the next, for example, so the new generation is partly consuming the decay of the last generation, the “tail” of the cycle of growth and decay.
You definitely would not call plants growing in their own compost “self-cannibalistic”. Consuming ones’ own living parts, however, is quite an apt description of what happens at the natural limits of a growth system that ends its growth only because it exhausts its free resources. In economies the more competitive parts may then find nothing more interesting left to consume other than their own system’s weaker or less familiar living parts… (discussion contued at end)
The authors of “The Story of Stuff” published a nice little update called “The Story of Broke”, about the vast sums of money the government spends on subsidizing private business…. This sequel “Part II (the end of broke)” was first posted in a comment, on how the still bigger story of broke, debt piling on top of debt, both was missing from the list of now overwhelming government costs, and has a … very natural end. Government debt provides guaranteed growing returns, whether the economy grows or not. Lenders take government interest payments and add them to what they lend back, multiplying their lending and returns. It builds up, slowly at first then explosively, as the world’s debt burden
grows on little but the good faith and credit of government guarantees.
You’ve heard of government debt called a “safe haven”. It’s where investors put money to be “safely assured of ever multiplying returns” when they can’t find even better growing returns elsewhere. Where that debt spiral comes from and goes to has been a subject of many have tried to explain. The view Keynes came to, that I think is the most clear headed of all, outlines the necessities for surviving a debt spiral for a market economy. Nature would surely not shape her facts of life on earth for our approval, but most people react to the facts of life for surviving debt spirals as if to reject nature’s requirements as “socially unacceptable”, … apparently not seeing Keynes’ elegantly clear logic. So this is written in the story telling style of Free Range Studio in their Story of Stuff. —
The End of Broke, the True Whole Story of Debt!
The BIGGER “Story of Broke” is one that starts quite small, but is designed to actually keep growing ever bigger. As it does so it also casts its own vote in the story of business influence in government and demand for subsidies and preferential services, persuading government that’s the way to get money to pay its ever growing debt! It’s the story of how a small amount of debt naturally grows relentlessly big, with no natural end other than either creditors spending it or both government finance and economic collapse.
Drowning in the spiral of dreams
The whole story of debt is a very very simple little thing. It’s that some of us earn by $units and others by $%’s… and by providing guaranteed returns to lenders, in an economy you can actually earn by $%’s till the economy collapses. What seems like a totally innocent “little difference” in measurement, between units and ratios, makes AN INFINITE DIFFERENCE over time in life. Some people have called it “our misunderstanding of the exponential curve”, others simply call it “greed”. The problem with this kind of greed is how very addictive it is and that it grows explosively, making a “little greed” become SO.. GREEDY, with its promise to multiply the rewards of greed forever. Continue reading the Story of Broke – Part II (the end of broke)→
An OP-Ed in today’s Sunday Review section of the NY Times, by Sylvia Nasar, Keynes: The Sunny Economist missed the real source of Keynes ability to see silver linings where most others saw failure. Keynes faced economic failures having studied how nature uses the end of one thing to begin another.
He saw sunshine by seeing through the darkness,
not by denying it.
Sylvia,
It’s fun to play up myths, but yours would be spoiled by the reality of a strange intellect like J M Keynes. In order to see the “sunny side” of things Keynes unabashedly faced the deepest darkness behind what ailed the economy. He smashed or poked holes in the darkness he saw, as a way to find the light, rather than by clinging blindly to some faith in optimism, as you suggest, a kind of sunny silliness.
To be alive in nature is itself, a world of bright light in a vast darkness
You have not read Chapter 16 of The General Theory. It’s quite obvious. You’re in good company, of course, as virtually no one has. In Chapter 16 Keynes steps right into and through the deepest darkness, the end of the road for his own growth theory. Of course, there is also an extremely sunny side too, but if you don’t face the “darkness” of the natural facts at hand, you won’t see it. Continue reading Keynes saw through his fears… by facing them.→
A 1995 article in the Wall Street Journal offered this vivid image and a good discussion of the waves of immigration to the US from various other parts of the world during the past two centuries. They coincide with the great period of economic growth, and the radical changes in the economic environment as we went from the beginning of growth to its end.
Growth has changed from creating limitless opportunity for all, to creating unmanageable conflicts with the environment and within a society no longer upwardly mobile, perhaps in decline. That’s a very different world for immigrants to come into.
It’s no reflection on their different cultures, necessarily, as each wave of immigration seems to represent an old culture becoming adventurous. It may well also not benefit a society to accept waves of immigrants as it is no longer creating expanding opportunity for itself. That seems likely to have little to do with the immigrants themselves, though. Still, the wave of the 1900’s came to build a great society, and the wave of today is picking up scraps in a society losing its way and coming into great conflict with its own success.
One of the great stories of modern economic growth and its tragedy
The sad story of modern economic growth is that its formula for great success became its formula for tragic failure, all by itself, almost overnight, caused only by our neglecting to read nature’s signal to respond to our limits. That formula for success during growth is the self-investment or “seed” principle. You plant your seed to get more seed to plant. You use your profits to multiply your projects. Continue reading Waves of immigration, at growth’s beginning and end→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
