Today’s debates over hydrofracturing (“fracking”)
oil-bearing shales, the theme of last week’s post here on The
Archdruid Report, have dimensions that go well beyond the world of
ritual theater discussed there. To begin with, of course, a great deal of money
is being made off the current fracking boom by assorted Wall Street office
fauna, and their efforts to keep the gravy train rolling for their benefit
doubtless have quite a bit to do with the remarkable disregard for mere geological
reality to be found in so much pro-fracking propaganda these days.
That sort of strained relationship with fact is a sufficiently standard feature of speculative bubbles that it ought to be high up there on the checklist of any connoisseur of financial lunacy. Those of my readers who recall the details of the late housing bubble will doubtless think of the enthusiasm shown then for what were called NINJA loans—that is, loans given to borrowers who had no income and no jobs or assets, but who would one and all, so bankers insisted with straight faces, pay back those loans religiously out of the money they were sure to make flipping properties. The same logic doubtless governs the equally earnest insistence that the ferocious depletion rates that afflict fracked wells simply don’t matter, that kerogen shales like the Green River formation that have resisted every previous attempt to get oil out of them have suddenly transformed themselves into nice extractable oil shales for our benefit, and that the results of wells drilled in the best possible “sweet spots” in each formation must inevitably be repeated by every available wellsite in the region.
Here, as with the countless other examples that might be put
on display by some Dickensian Spirit of Speculative Bubbles Past, the
understandable desire to make a fast buck off other people’s cluelessness might
seem to offer an adequate explanation for the bumper crop of fatuous twaddle
that’s being pushed by the pundits and splashed around so freely by the media
these days. Still, I’ve come to think that there’s more going on here than the
passion for emptying the pockets of chumps that sets the cold sick heart of
Wall Street throbbing, and indeed that there’s even more at work than our
culture’s touching habit, discussed over the last two weeks, of reenacting the
traditional morality plays of the civil religion of progress in order to
console the faithful in difficult times.
Plunge into the heart of the fracking storm, rather, and
you’ll find yourself face to face with a foredoomed attempt to maintain one of
the core beliefs of the civil religion of progress in the teeth of all the
evidence. The stakes here go far beyond making a bunch of financiers their
umpteenth million, or providing believers in the myth of progress with a
familiar ritual drama to bolster their faith; they cut straight to the heart of
that faith, and thus to some of the most fundamental presuppositions that
are guiding today’s industrial societies
along their road to history’s scrapheap.
Since the days of Sir Francis Bacon, whose writings served
as the first draft of the modern mythology of progress, one of the central
themes of that mythology has been the conquest of Nature by humanity—or rather,
in the more revealing language of an earlier day, by Man. You aren’t Man, in
case you were wondering, and neither am I; neither is Sir Francis Bacon, for
that matter, nor is anyone else who’s ever lived or will ever live. This person called Man, rather, is a mythical
hero who gives the civil religion of progress its central figure. Just as devout Christians participate
vicariously in the life of Christ through the celebration of the sacraments and
the seasons of the liturgical year, believers in progress are supposed to
participate vicariously in Man’s heroic journey from the caves to the stars by
purchasing hot new products, and oohing and aahing appreciatively whenever the
latest shiny technological trinket is unveiled by Man’s lab-coated priesthood.
Man’s destiny is to conquer Nature. That’s his one and only
job, according to the myth, and when Man’s not doing that, he’s not doing
anything worthwhile at all. Read any of the standard histories of Man written
by true believers in the civil religion of progress, and you’ll see that
societies and eras that devoted their energies to art, music, religion,
literature, or anything else you care to name other than extending Man’s
dominion over Nature are dismissed as irrelevant to Man’s history, when they’re
not critiqued outright for falling down on the job.
You may be thinking by this point, dear reader, that a
belief system that likes to portray humanity as a tyrant and conqueror rightfully entitled to view the entire
cosmos as its own private lebensraum may not be particularly sensible,
or for that matter particularly sane. You may well be right, too, but I’d like
to focus on a somewhat more restricted point:
according to this way of looking at things, Nature is not supposed to
put up more than a pro forma struggle or a passive resistance. Above all, once any part of Nature is
conquered, it’s supposed to stay conquered—and of course that’s where the
trouble creeps in, because a great many of the things we habitually lump
together as Nature are refusing to go along with the script.
Examples come to mind by the dozens, but one of the most
significant and frightening just now is the collapse of the most important
health revolution of modern times, the conquest (that word again) of bacterial
disease by antibiotics. I’m not sure how many of my readers realize what an
immense change in human life followed Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery that a
substance excreted by bread mold killed most bacteria without harming human
cells. A century ago, dysentery and bacterial pneumonia were leading causes of
death in most industrial countries, killing far more people than heart disease
or cancer, and the odds of living from birth to age five had an uncomfortable
resemblance to a throw of the dice even in wealthy countries. Penicillin and
the antibiotics that followed it changed that decisively, enabling doctors to
stop bacterial diseases in their tracks. It’s because of antibiotics that I’m
here to write this blog; the scarlet fever that had me flat on my back for
weeks when I was seven years old would almost certainly have killed me if
antibiotics hadn’t been available.
Outside the public health and infectious disease fields,
most people remain serenely convinced that the relative freedom from bacterial
disease that’s characterized the recent past in the industrial world is
destined to remain fixed in place for the rest of time. Within those fields, by
contrast, that comfortable conviction finds few takers. Penicillin, the
antibiotic that saved my life in 1969, won’t even slow down most microbes now.
Diseases that used to yield readily to an injection or two now have to be
treated with complex cocktails of increasingly toxic antibiotics, and every
year more pathogens turn up that are resistant to some, most, or all available
antibiotics.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, at least for those who
want to play the blame game. It’s been common since the 1950s for physicians to
prescribe antibiotics for conditions antibiotic therapy can’t treat—for
example, the common cold. It’s been equally common since the 1950s for livestock
farms to give their animals daily doses of antibiotics, since (for complex
biochemical reasons) this causes the animals to gain weight more quickly, and
thus be worth more money at slaughtering time. Both these bad habits helped
give bacteria the widest possible range of opportunities to develop resistance.
Still, these and other contributing factors simply help feed the main issue,
which is that bacterial evolution didn’t come to a sudden stop when Fleming
started paying attention to bread mold.
I’ve commented several times in this blog that understanding
evolution is crucial for making sense of the predicament of the industrial
world, and the approaching end of the antibiotic era offers a solid example of
the reasons why. Evolution through natural
selection is the process by which living things adapt themselves to
environmental changes; it works through individual organisms, but its effects
are not limited to the individual scale. In the case of the spread of
antibiotic resistance among microbes, there are at least three patterns at
work. First, microbes are being selected for their resistance to individual
antibiotics. Second, as new antibiotics are brought out to replace old ones,
microbes are being selected for their ability to develop resistance to one
antibiotic after another as quickly as possible. Finally, the pressure exerted
on the entire microbial biosphere by the pervasive presence of antibiotics in
the modern environment is giving a huge selective advantage to species that
have the ability to exchange genes for resistance with other species.
The results are being documented in increasingly worried
articles in public health journals. A large and growing number of pathogenic
microbes these days are already resistant to the antibiotics that used to treat
them; new antibiotics brought onto the market start running into problems with
resistant bacteria in a fraction of the time that was once necessary for
resistance to emerge; and the transfer of antibiotic resistance from one
species to another is becoming an increasingly troubling problem. The
possibility of a return to pre-1928 conditions, when a simple bacterial
infection could readily turn into a death sentence and most families buried at
least one child before the age of five, is seeing serious discussion in the
professional literature.
As already mentioned, though, such worries are falling on
deaf ears outside the public health and infectious-disease fields. There’s a
mordant irony in the reason why, though I suspect it’s not often relished
outside of the peak oil scene and a few other places where the same logic
appears. Faced with the prospect of the end of the antibiotic era and the
return of bacterial illnesses as major threats to public health, most politicians, like the people they’re supposed
to serve, respond with an overfamiliar sentence: “Oh, I’m sure they’ll think of
something.” The increasingly frantic
efforts of researchers to find new antibiotics and stay ahead of the
remorselessly rising tide of microbial resistance get no more attention than
the equally frantic efforts, say, of drilling companies to find petroleum
deposits to make up for the increasingly rapid depletion of existing oil
fields.
In both cases, and in any number of others, the myth of
progress is the most important barrier in the way of a meaningful response to
our predicament. According to the myth,
we can’t go backwards to any condition encountered in the past; what Man
conquers is supposed to stay conquered, so he can continue his ever-victorious
journey from the caves to the stars. It’s unthinkable, in terms of the myth,
that the supposed conquest of some part of nature—say, bacterial disease—might
represent nothing more than a temporary advantage that the pressures of natural
selection will soon erase. Thus when this latter turns out to be the case,
those believers in the religion of progress who aren’t forced to confront such
awkward realities in their work or their daily lives simply repeat the sacred
words “Oh, I’m sure they’ll think of
something,” to invoke the blessing of the great god Progress on His only
begotten son, Man, and then proceed to act as though nothing could possibly go
wrong.
The difficulty, of course, is that an embarrassingly large
portion of the territory supposedly conquered by Man over the last three
centuries is showing an awkward propensity to ignore Man’s overlordship and do
what it wants instead. The much-ballyhooed Green Revolution of the mid-20th
century is another case in point. The barrage of fertilizers and poisons the
proponents of that movement turned on agriculture won a temporary advantage
over the hard subsistence limits of earlier eras, but it was only temporary.
The reckless use of artificial fertilizers turned out to have drastic
downsides, while the poisons drove insects and weeds into exactly the same
frenzy of intensive natural selection that antibiotics brought to the microbial
world. Insects and weeds don’t reproduce as quickly or swap genetic material
with the same orgiastic abandon as microbes, but the equivalent changes are
happening at a slightly slower pace; one of the dirty secrets of conventional
agriculture is that herbicide resistance among weeds and pesticide resistance
among insects and other agricultural pests are spreading rapidly, erasing the
short-term gains of the Green Revolution while leaving the long-term costs in
lost topsoil and poisoned water tables to be paid by generations to come.
Farmers faced by resistant weeds and pests, like physicians
faced by resistant microbes, are turning to increasingly desperate measures to
get the same results that their equivalents got with much less trouble. That’s
exactly the situation that’s driving the current fracking boom and bubble, too.
Back in the glory days of petroleum exploration and discovery, drillers could
punch a well a few hundred feet into the ground and hit oil; now it takes
hugely expensive deepwater drilling, tar sands extraction, or hydrofracturing
of shale and other “tight oil” deposits to keep the liquid fuel flowing, and
the costs keep rising year after year.
The implication that has to be faced is that the age of
petroleum, and everything that unfolded from it, was exactly the same sort of
temporary condition as the age of antibiotics and the Green Revolution.
Believers in the religion of progress like to think that Man conquered distance
and made the world smaller by inventing internal combustion engines, aircraft,
and an assortment of other ways to burn plenty of petroleum products. What
actually happened, though, was that drilling rigs and a few other technologies
gave our species a temporary boost of cheap liquid fuel to play with, and we
proceeded to waste most of it on the assumption that Nature’s energy resources
had been conquered and could be expected to fork over another cheap abundant
energy source as soon as we wanted one.
That follows logically from the myth, but it doesn’t follow
in reality. Instead, the temporary advantage our species gained by exploiting
all that cheap, easily accessible petroleum is being brought to an end by
factors even more implacable than the constant pressure of natural selection on
niche boundaries: the simple facts that a finite planet by definition only
contains a finite amount of any given resource, and that deposits of every
resource are distributed according to the power law—the rule, consistently true
across an impressive range of fields, that larger deposits are much less common
than smaller ones. Those factors are not going away; the fact that Wall Street
office fauna are shoveling smoke about, ahem, “limitless amounts of oil and
natural gas” from fracked wells, may make them their umpteenth million and keep
the clueless neatly sedated for a few more years, but it’s not going to do a
thing to change the hard facts of the predicament that’s closing around us all.
Seen in this light, the mythology of Man’s conquest of
Nature bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a certain other campaign of
conquest launched to the sound of blaring brass bands and overconfident pronouncements in the not too distant past.
Like German civilians tuning in to news broadcasts from Berlin in the
heady summer of 1941, people in the world’s industrial nations have taken in
any number of proclamations about Man’s latest glorious victories in the war
against Nature. The conquest of disease,
the conquest of hunger, the conquest of air and space and distance itself—is
there any scientific or technological success, however
temporary, that hasn’t been praised in those fatuous terms?—each had its
fifteen minutes of fame as Man’s heroic legions of science and progress pursued
their allegedly invincible Drang nach Sternen.
Some time ago, though, the content of the propaganda
broadcasts began to change, though their tone did not. Nuclear fusion seems to
have played much the same role in Man’s conquest of Nature that Moscow played
in that other campaign, the goal that seemed almost in reach time and again,
but never quite fell into the hands so greedily outstretched for it. Other campaigns meant to push the frontiers
of Man’s dominion further out into Nature’s unconquered territory have had
equally mixed luck, and even the immense effort that put an American flag on
the Moon turned out to have no more influence on the course of events than the
rather less challenging campaign by an SS mountain battalion that put a different flag on the summit of the highest
mountain in the Caucasus range.
It’s what followed that relative stalemate, though, that’s
of importance here. Beginning in 1943, the German civilians tuning in to those
radio broadcasts from Berlin had to deal with an increasing burden of cognitive
dissonance, as the heroic battles and triumphant victories breathlessly
announced by Goebbels’ acolytes stopped moving eastwards on the map and started
shifting back toward the west. The forces that had been sweeping everything
before them in the suburbs of Moscow were now doing the same thing in the
vicinity of Smolensk, with no explanation of the change. Nor was there any clearer explanation to be
had as Germany’s glorious victories shifted steadily westwards, past Minsk and
Warsaw and Breslau, until nervous listeners in the Berlin suburbs, just before
the broadcasts stopped for good, could hear the sound of artillery rattling
their own windows.
The question that all
would-be conquerors need to ask themselves, in other words, is what will happen
if their planned campaign of conquest fails. None of the 17th-century thinkers
who played a role in launching humanity on its assault on Nature seems to have
posed that question, even in private, much less tried to think through the
answers. I’d encourage my readers to have this in mind when the latest reports
of glorious victories place these latter more and more often in territory that
was supposedly conquered in earlier campaigns. I’d also encourage them, to push
the metaphor a step further, to think about what terms of surrender might be
demanded of us when Man’s grand attempt to conquer Nature ends in
defeat—something we’ll discuss further next week.
