I've talked more than once in these essays about the
challenge of discussing the fall of civilizations when the current example is
picking up speed right outside the window.
In a calmer time, it might be possible to treat the theory of catabolic
collapse as a pure abstraction, and contemplate the relationship between the
maintenance costs of capital and the resources available to meet those costs
without having to think about the ghastly human consequences of shortfall. As
it is, when I sketch out this or that detail of the trajectory of a
civilization’s fall, the commotions of our time often bring an example of that
detail to the surface, and sometimes—as now—those lead in directions I hadn’t
planned to address.
This is admittedly a time when harbingers of disaster are
not in short supply. I was amused a few days back to see yet another denunciation
of economic heresy in the media. This time the author was one Matt
Egan, the venue was CNN/Money, and the target was Zero Hedge, one of the
more popular sites on the doomward end of the blogosphere. The burden of the
CNN/Money piece was that Zero Hedge must be wrong in questioning the giddy
optimism of the stock market—after all, stock values have risen to record
heights, so what could possibly go wrong?
Zero Hedge’s pseudonymous factotum Tyler Durden had nothing
to say to CNN/Money, and quite reasonably so.
He knows as well as I do that in due time, Egan will join that long list
of pundits who insisted that the bubble du jour would keep on inflating
forever, and got to eat crow until the end of their days as a result. He's
going to have plenty of company; the chorus of essays and blog posts denouncing
peak oil in increasingly strident tones has built steadily in recent months. I
expect that chorus to rise to a deafening shriek right about the time the
bottom drops out of the fracking bubble.
Meanwhile the Ebola epidemic has apparently taken another
large step toward fulfilling its potential as the Black Death of the 21st century. A month
ago, after reports surfaced of Ebola in a southwestern province, Sudan slapped
a
media blackout on reports of Ebola cases in the country. Maybe
there’s an innocent reason for this policy, but I confess I can’t think of one.
Sudan is a long way from the West African hotspots of the epidemic, and unless
a local outbreak has coincidentally taken place—which is of course
possible—this suggests the disease has already spread along the ancient
east-west trade routes of the Sahel. If the epidemic gets a foothold in Sudan,
the next stops are the teeming cities of Egypt and the busy ports of East
Africa, full of shipping from the Gulf States, the Indian subcontinent, and
eastern Asia.
I’ve taken a wry amusement in the way that so many people
have reacted to the spread of the epidemic by insisting that Ebola can’t possibly
be a problem outside the West African countries it’s currently devastating.
Here in the US, the media’s full of confident-sounding claims that our
high-tech health care system will surely keep Ebola at bay. It all
looks very encouraging, unless you happen to know that diseases spread by
inadequate handwashing are common in US hospitals, only a small minority of
facilities have the high-end gear necessary to isolate an Ebola patient, and
the Ebola patient just found in Dallas got misdiagnosed and sent home with a
prescription for antibiotics, exposing plenty of people to the virus.
More realistically, Laurie Garrett, a respected figure in
the public health field, warns that ”you are not nearly scared enough about Ebola.” In the peak oil community, Mary Odum, whose
credentials as ecologist and nurse make her eminently qualified to discuss the
matter, has tried
to get the same message across. Few people are listening.
Like the frantic claims that peak oil has been disproven and
the economy isn’t on the verge of another ugly slump, the insistence that Ebola
can’t possibly break out of its current hot zones is what scholars of the
magical arts call an apotropaic charm—that is, an attempt to turn away an
unwanted reality by means of incantation. In the case of Ebola, the incantation
usually claims that the West African countries currently at ground zero of the
epidemic are somehow utterly unlike all the other troubled and impoverished
Third World nations it hasn’t yet reached, and that the few thousand deaths
racked up so far by the epidemic is a safe measure of its potential.
Those of my readers who have been thinking along these lines
are invited to join me in a little thought experiment. According to the World
Health Organization, the number of cases of Ebola in the current epidemic is
doubling every twenty days, and could reach 1.4 million by the beginning of
2015. Let’s round down, and say that there are one million cases on January 1,
2015. Let’s also assume for the sake of
the experiment that the doubling time stays the same. Assuming that nothing
interrupts the continued spread of the virus, and cases continue to double every
twenty days, in what month of what year will the total number of cases equal
the human population of this planet? Go ahead and do the math for
yourself. If you’re not used to
exponential functions, it’s particularly useful to take a 2015 calendar, count
out the 20-day intervals, and see exactly how the figure increases over time.
Now of course this is a thought experiment, not a realistic
projection. In the real world, the spread of an epidemic disease is a complex
process shaped by modes of human contact and transport. There are bottlenecks that slow propagation
across geographical and political barriers, and different cultural practices
that can help or hinder the transmission of the Ebola virus. It’s also very
likely that some nations, especially in the developed world, will be able to
mobilize the sanitation and public-health infrastructure to stop a
self-sustaining epidemic from getting under way on their territory before a
vaccine can be developed and manufactured in sufficient quantity to matter.
Most members of our species, though, live in societies that
don’t have those resources, and the steps that could keep Ebola from spreading
to the rest of the Third World are not being taken. Unless massive resources
are committed to that task soon—as in before the end of this year—the possibility
exists that when the pandemic finally winds down a few years from now, two to
three billion people could be dead. We need to consider the possibility that
the peak of global population is no longer an abstraction set comfortably off
somewhere in the future. It may be knocking at the future’s door right now,
shaking with fever and dripping blood from its gums.
That ghastly possibility is still just that, a possibility.
It can still be averted, though the window of opportunity in which that could
be done is narrowing with each passing
day. Epizootic disease is one of the standard ways by which an animal species
in overshoot has its population cut down to levels that the carrying capacity
of the environment can support, and the same thing has happened often enough
with human beings. It’s not the only way for human numbers to decline; I’ve
discussed here at some length the possibility that that could happen by way of ordinary
demographic contraction—but we’re now facing a force that could make
the first wave of population decline happen in a much faster and more brutal
way.
Is that the end of the world? Of course not. Any of my
readers who have read a good history of the Black Death—not a bad idea just
now, all things considered—know that human societies can take a massive
population loss from pandemic disease and still remain viable. That said, any
such event is a shattering experience, shaking political, economic, cultural, and
spiritual institutions and beliefs down to their core. In the present case, the
implosion of the global economy and the demise of the tourism and air travel
industries are only the most obvious and immediate impacts. There are also
broader and deeper impacts, cascading down from the visible realms of economics
and politics into the too rarely noticed substructure of ecological
relationships that sustain human existence.
And this, in turn, has me thinking of buffalo.
In there among all the other new stories of the last week,
by turns savage and silly, is a report from Montana, where representatives of
Native American peoples from the prairies of the United States and Canada
signed a treaty pledging their tribes to cooperate in reintroducing wild
buffalo to the Great Plains. I doubt most people in either country heard of it,
and fewer gave it a second thought. There have been herds of domesticated
buffalo in North America for a good many decades now, but only a few very small
herds, on reservations or private nature sanctuaries, have been let loose to
wander freely as their ancestors did.
A great many of the white residents of the Great Plains are
furiously opposed to the project. It’s hard to find any rational reason for
that opposition—the Native peoples have merely launched a slow process of
putting wild buffalo herds on their own tribal property, not encroaching on
anyone or anything else—but rational reasons are rarely that important in human
motivation, and the nonrational dimension here as so often is the determining factor. The entire
regional culture of the Great Plains centers on the pioneer experience, the
migration that swept millions of people westward onto the prairies on the quest
to turn some of North America’s bleakest land into a cozy patchwork of farms
and towns, nature replaced by culture across thousands of miles where the buffalo
once roamed.
The annihilation of the buffalo was central to that mythic
quest, as central as the dispossession of the Native peoples and the
replacement of the tallgrass prairie by farm crops. A land with wild buffalo
herds upon it is not a domesticated land. Those who saw the prairies in their
wild state brought back accounts that sound like something out of mythology:
grass so tall a horseman could ride off into it and never be seen again,
horizons as level and distant as those of the open ocean, and the buffalo: up
to sixty million of them, streaming across the landscape in herds that
sometimes reached from horizon to horizon.
The buffalo were the keystone of the prairie ecosystem, and their
extermination was an essential step in shattering that ecosystem and extracting
the richness of its topsoil for temporary profit.
A little while back I happened to see a video
online about the ecological effects of reintroducing wolves to
Yellowstone Park. It’s an interesting story:
the return of wolves, most of a century after their extermination,
caused deer to stay away from areas of the park where they were vulnerable to
attack. Once those areas were no longer
being browsed by deer, their vegetation changed sharply, making the entire park
more ecologically diverse; species that had been rare or absent in the park
reappeared to take advantage of the new, richer habitat. Even the behavior of the park’s rivers
changed, as vegetation shifts slowed riverine erosion.
All this was narrated by George Monbiot in a tone of
gosh-wow wonderment that irritated me at first hearing. Surely it would be
obvious, I thought, that changing one part of an ecosystem would change
everything else, and that removing or reintroducing one of the key species in
the ecosystem would have particularly dramatic effects! Of course I stopped
then and laughed, since for most people it’s anything but obvious. Our entire
culture is oriented toward machines, not living systems, and what defines a
machine is precisely that it’s meant to do exactly what it’s told and nothing
else. Push this button, and that happens; turn this switch, and something else
happens; pull this trigger, and the buffalo falls dead. We’re taught to think of the world as though
that same logic controlled its responses to our actions, and then get
blindsided when it acts like a whole system instead.
I’d be surprised to hear any of the opponents of
reintroducing wild buffalo talk in so many words about the buffalo as a
keystone species of the prairie ecosystem, and suggesting that its return to the
prairies might set off a trophic cascade—that’s the technical term for the
avalanche of changes, spreading down the food web to its base, that the
Yellowstone wolves set in motion once they sniffed the wind, caught the tasty
scent of venison, and went to look. Still, it’s one of the basic axioms of the
Druid teachings that undergird these posts that people know more than they
think they know, and a gut-level sense of the cascade of changes that would be
kickstarted by wild buffalo may be helping drive their opposition.
That said, there’s a further dimension. It’s not just in an
ecological sense that a land with wild buffalo herds upon it is not a
domesticated land. To the descendants of the pioneers, the prairie, the
buffalo, and the Indian are what their ancestors came West to destroy. Behind
that identification lies the whole weight of the mythology of progress, the
conviction that it’s the destiny of the West to be transformed from wilderness
to civilization. The return of wild buffalo is unthinkable from within the
pioneer worldview, because it means that “the winning of the West” was not a
permanent triumph but a temporary condition, which may yet be followed in due
time by the losing of the West.
Of course there were already good reasons to think along
those unthinkable lines, long before the Native tribes started drafting their
treaty. The economics of dryland farming
on the Great Plains never really made that much sense. Homestead acts and other
government subsidies in the 19th century, and the economic impacts of two world
wars in the 20th, made farming the Plains look viable, in much the same way
that huge government subsidies make nuclear power look viable today. In either
case, take away the subsidies and you’ve got an arrangement without a future.
That’s the subtext behind the vacant and half-vacant towns you’ll find all over
the West these days. That the fields and farms and towns may be replaced in
turn by prairie grazed by herds of wild buffalo is unthinkable from within the
pioneer worldview, too—but across the West, the unthinkable is increasingly the
inescapable.
Equally, it’s unthinkable to most people in the industrial
world today that a global pandemic could brush aside the world’s terminally
underfunded public health systems and snuff out millions or billions of lives
in a few years. It’s just as unthinkable to most people in the industrial world
that the increasingly frantic efforts of wealthy elites to prop up the global
economy and get it to start generating prosperity again will fail, plunging the
world into irrevocable economic contraction. It’s among the articles of faith
of the industrial world that the future must lead onward and upward, that the
sort of crackpot optimism that draws big crowds at TED Talks counts as realistic
thinking about the future, and that the limits to growth can’t possibly get in
the way of our craving for limitlessness. Here again, though, the unthinkable
is becoming the inescapable.
In each of these cases, and many others, the unthinkable can
be described neatly as the possibility that a set of changes that we happen to
have decked out with the sanctified label of “progress” might turn out instead
to be a temporary and reversible condition. The agricultural settlement of the
Great Plains, the relatively brief period when humanity was not troubled by
lethal pandemics, and the creation of a global economy powered by extravagant
burning of fossil fuels were all supposed to be permanent changes, signs of
progress and Man’s Conquest of Nature. No one seriously contemplated the chance
that each of those changes would turn out to be transient, that they would
shift into reverse under the pressure of their own unintended consequences, and
that the final state of each whole system would have more in common with its
original condition than with the state it briefly attained in between.
There are plenty of ways to talk about the implications of
that great reversal, but the one that speaks to me now comes from the writings
of Ernest Thompson Seton, whose nature books were a fixture of my childhood and
who would probably be the patron saint of this blog if Druidry had patron
saints. He spent the whole of his adult career as naturalist, artist, writer,
storyteller, and founder of a youth organization—Woodcraft, which taught
wilderness lore, practical skills, and democratic self-government to boys and
girls alike, and might be well worth reviving now—fighting for a world in which
there would still be a place for wild buffalo roaming the prairies: fought, and
lost. (It would be one of his qualifications for Druid sainthood that he knew
he would lose, and kept fighting anyway. The English warriors at the battle of
Maldon spoke that same language: “Will shall be sterner, heart the stronger,
mood shall be more as our might falters.”)
He had no shortage of sound rational reasons for his
lifelong struggle, but now and again, in his writings or when talking around
the campfire, he would set those aside and talk about deeper issues. He spoke
of the “Buffalo Wind,” the wind off the open prairies that tingles with life
and wonder, calling humanity back to its roots in the natural order, back to
harmony with the living world: not rejecting the distinctive human gifts of
culture and knowledge, but holding them in balance with the biological
realities of our existence and the needs of the biosphere. I’ve felt that wind;
so, I think, have most Druids, and so have plenty of other people who couldn’t
tell a Druid from a dormouse but who feel in their bones that industrial
humanity’s attempted war against nature is as senseless as a plant trying to
gain its freedom by pulling itself up by the roots.
One of the crucial lessons of the Buffalo Wind, though, is
that it’s not always gentle. It can also rise to a shrieking gale, tear the
roofs off houses, and leave carnage in its wake. We can embrace the lessons
that the natural world is patiently and pitilessly teaching us, in other words,
or we can close our eyes and stop our ears until sheer pain forces the lessons
through our barriers, but one way or another, we’re going to learn those
lessons. It’s possible, given massively funded interventions and a good helping
of plain dumb luck, that the current Ebola epidemic might be stopped before it
spreads around the world. It’s possible that the global economy might keep
staggering onward for another season, and that wild buffalo might be kept from
roaming the Great Plains for a while yet. Those are details; the underlying
issue—the inescapable collision between the futile fantasy of limitless economic
expansion on a finite planet and the hard realities of ecology, geology, and
thermodynamics—is not going away.
