Cyclical Socionatural Collapses vs. Ecotopian Steady-State: Who Decides?

Cyclical Socionatural Collapses vs. Ecotopian Steady-State: Who Decides? News Analysis: “Nasa-Funded Study: Industrial Civilisation Headed for 'Irreversible Collapse'?” by Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian (March 14, 2014) By Jonathan Brooks June 5, 2014 GEOG 358: Political Ecology Professor Lindsay Skog Cyclical Socionatural Collapses vs. Ecotopian Steady-State: Who Decides? The Guardian published a news report online titled, “Nasa-Funded Study: Industrial Civilisation Headed for 'Irreversible Collapse'?” in March (2014, hereafter ‘news report’). Therein, Nafeez Ahmed explains the recent study, “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies,” by Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas, & Eugenia Kalnay, originally published in the journal Ecological Economics in April (2014, hereafter ‘the study’). Ahmed clarifies that the HANDY method of modeling socionatural change was developed by Motesharrei with a “minor NASA grant,” however the subsequent collaborative study with Rivas and Kalnay was conducted independently and peer-reviewed for publication by the Elsevier journal. The Guardian report is brief and succinct. Ahmed writes, “By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.” To these we shall return, and while he notes the exigent need for “policy and structural changes,” I must critique Ahmed: he adorns his framing of the study with excerpts of its most compelling claims, reiterating that it implicates accumulative capitalism (producing extreme socioeconomic disparity) as one of two primary drivers of anthropogenic degradation in the uncontrived environment. Though he initially strikes at the roots of capitalism, Ahmed then concludes his report by passing the responsive onus to politicoeconomic elites, to radically reform ‘business-as-usual,’ and to consumers. That individual actors and social movements can or perhaps must catalyze the requisite political ecological change—by acting outside the contexts of formal politics, business and consumerism—is omitted by Ahmed. Such activism is analogous to everyday resistance (Robbins 2012), as elites tend to ignore environmental imperatives and buffer themselves against degradation with their wealth, according to the study’s chronography of cyclical socionatural collapses. In this paper, I focus on the content of Ahmed’s excerpts and supplement them out of the study, our course materials, and a few other sources. The study is premised, as mentioned above, on the precedential pattern of socionatural collapses around the globe, spanning thousands of years. An excerpt from their abstract: There are widespread concerns that current trends in resource-use are unsustainable, but possibilities of overshoot/collapse remain controversial. Collapses have occurred frequently in history, often followed by centuries of economic, intellectual, and population decline. Many different natural and social phenomena have been invoked to explain specific collapses, but a general explanation remains elusive. (Motesharrei, Rivas, & Kalnay 2014) The authors cite specific cases of societal collapse and identify two universal features, in order to support their general theory upon the pattern. Their foci are: “(1) the stretching of resources due to strain put on the carrying capacity, [and] (2) the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses (or ‘commoners’).” Also excerpted from the abstract, they write: In this paper, we build a human population dynamics model by adding accumulated wealth and economic inequality to a predator-prey model of humans and nature. The model structure, and simulated scenarios that offer significant implications, are explained. Four equations describe the evolution of Elites, Commoners, Nature, and Wealth. The model shows Economic Stratification or Ecological Strain can independently lead to collapse, in agreement with the historical record. (Motesharrei, Rivas, & Kalnay 2014) They argue that contemporary industrial capitalism, its unprecedented metabolic frenzy and accumulative stratification, is less unique among societies of antiquity than is popularly imagined. The technocratic discourse of ecological modernization asserts that technological solutions must outpace socionatural degradation and circumvent societal collapse (Pearce 2013), a position which ignores the evidence that emergent types and instances of degradation are frequently the latent functions of prior technological solutions, which had treated the side-effects of prior solutions, ad nauseum. Its weakest point is the presumed modern exceptionalism against a long record of collapsed societies, which too were exceptional for their eras. It also ignores that technological breakthroughs can often be applied in ways which variously help or harm. Are parking garages in Hell not paved with the finest intentions? Proportional to increases in the stratification of wealth and power, facilitated by advents in technology, is the probability that new technologies will disproportionally help elites and harm commoners, thus exacerbating further stratification and accelerating the cycle: ‘business-as-usual.’ Technological change has, on the whole, tended to expedite both resource extraction from and degradation of environments. Elites, those who wield the wealth and power necessary to develop new technologies, tend to deploy degrading technologies in environments inhabited by commoners with the least degree of control over and/or access to the resources required to mount effective resistance. Attempting to resist and survive, the poor intensify their extractive labors and further degrade their habitats and healthfulness. That summarizes technological advancement in the degradation and marginalization frame, explicated by Robbins (2012). Specific technological developments and implementations aren’t all equivalent in their manifest and/or latent functions and effects, hence a worshipful or distrustful attitude toward ‘technology,’ as a lump-sum category, severely oversimplifies the subject. One salient argument is that technology is outpacing policy (Hardin 1968). The political ecological imperative is, therefore, one of appropriate technologies and proper applications thereof, and policies regulating proper appropriateness; in short, socionatural technoethics ought to guide policy. Technological change is emphasized in the study and news report, as a fundamental issue when debating the degree of difference between globalized industrial capitalism and ancient societies, which is why Ahmed excerpts this point from the study, "technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use" (93). It ought also be noted that societal collapses, due to ecological factors and economic stratification, extend from the local scale, beginning in the most impoverished and degraded areas, destabilizing the foundations of broader geographies, and elites are among the last to face the delayed humiliation of their accumulative legacies, according to the study. The study implicates accumulative individualism, capitalism proper, in the pattern of socionatural collapse. However, again excerpting the abstract, they introduce a common ecological concept and political principles which may help to curtail the collapse cycle: The measure “Carrying Capacity” is developed and its estimation is shown to be a practical means for early detection of a collapse. Mechanisms leading two types of collapses are discussed. The new dynamics of this model can also reproduce the irreversible collapses found in history. Collapse can be avoided, and population can reach a steady state at maximum carrying capacity if the [per capita] rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level and if resources are distributed equitably. (Motesharrei, Rivas, & Kalnay 2014) The HANDY mathematical model is also predictive, “to test changes that would avoid [collapse],” and it gives hope for averting a collapse if societies mitigate anthropogenic degradation of ecosystems, primarily by redistributing wealth equitably. Ahmed quotes the study on this point, "accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels." The study applies a predator-prey metric to economics; they write, “This adds a different dimension of predation whereby Elites ‘prey’ on the production of wealth by Commoners,” lending smiles to the faces of Marxist political ecologists. Let’s now return to “Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy,” which Ahmed foregrounds early in his news report. The entire population is dependent upon the others, yet commoners have little (if any) final decision-making capacity in the development and implementation of technologies which manipulate the latter four to influence socionatural change. The authors of the study write, “There are a variety of mechanisms which can reduce population when it exceeds carrying capacity, including everything from emigration, increased disease susceptibility, and outright starvation to breakdowns in social order and increased social violence, such as banditry, riots, rebellions, revolutions, and wars” (94). Elites have control over and access to the means of extraction, production, distribution, and (lest we forget) bureaucratic and brutish state apparati which legitimate and enforce propertarian politicoeconomic regimes. The study and news report explain that, unless reform is radical and swift, the tides of turmoil are going to rise, rather to continue rising. In 1993, William H. Kötke published The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future, clearly ahead of the curve. He lived in several Native American communities and researched societal collapses which the HANDY study reviews. The socionatural collapse discourse is old news. On one hand is the continuity of humanity—surviving nuclear reactors and stockpiles of bombs, amid residuals of DDT and dioxin, still clenching the hubristic ‘might given right’ to supremacy over all of nonhuman nature—and on the other hand is the modern human condition, dislocated from nonhuman nature, perfecting routinization of the heterospecific and conspecific exploitation of nonhuman and human ‘others.’ Should we anticipate that changes adequate to avert global socionatural collapses will be implemented by corporate and political elites or consumer-driven change, thanks to this new HANDY (dandy) model? If that happens, wow! What other options are there? Voting legitimates the same political regime which is largely culpable for degradation. The study is a hopeful new development, if indeed it makes the socionatural logic of collapse legible to mathematical minds in positions of power, wherefrom to implement its prescribed change. The model is inchoate and nascent, simply outlining general trends and dichotomizing variegated differentials. Similarly oversimplifying, in the news report, Ahmed (2014) narrowly contextualizes the political and socionatural implications of the study. His entire politicization is the mere suggestion that elites and commoners, (politicians, businesses, and consumers) all must act in unison to prevent the pattern of socionatural collapse from repeating. What are appropriate actions for these groups? By what means can population be reduced? Past strategies include, though aren’t limited to, the forced or coerced sterilization of women, yet it most often is women among the poorest commoners and ethnic minorities whom it happens to, and theirs is less a part of the per capita depletion and degradation problem than is elite fertility (Zampas & Lamačková 2011). As noted above, the study lists a few among the variety of ways in which human populations are kept within the carrying capacity of our environs. A ‘continuity-of-the-species’ discourse may argue that all such population reducing phenomenon are ultimately good, however ostensibly awful, and that contemporary human suffering is justifiable for future human survival. That is a complicated and extreme position, and many other arguments and policies are worth considering ahead of enforced population controls. One of the best arguments for an ecological, socialized, egalitarian, nonmarket, resource-based economy is that we value most consumer goods for their utility, and we only utilize them a small fraction of the total time we own them for (Joseph 2011). Systems and customary traditions of socialized access to the means of production are already extant in many places. Here in Portland, Oregon, for instance, tool libraries are paragons of this concept. Rather than every person owning, for example, a tile saw which they rarely use, if ever, several of them are kept at libraries which lend out tools on a reservation basis. The resource savings and pollution mitigation of that system is clearly preferable to the much advertized imaginary of individuated empires with one of everything. The moral trialectic of the study and news report is: (1) reducing total population, (2) reducing per capita consumption, and (3) distributional equity. What other policy mechanisms would incentivize those imperatives? The cornerstone of propertarian lineage is the bequeathing of unearned advantage through inheritance. Limiting transfers of wealth from each generation to the next, and socializing the surplus, is a logical way of implementing distributional equity. If directly apportioned, redistribution would probably increase per capita consumption levels; alternately, it could subsidize the proliferation of, inter alia, lending centers, clean and renewable energy technologies, voluntary sterilization programs, public transportation, and make all of those free for everyone. That may also circumscribe middle-class lamentations about free handouts to lazy freeloaders, a narrative which naturalizes stratification. I believe, as the study and news report claim, that our options are egality and communality or socionatural collapse. References Top of Form Joseph, P. (2011). Zeitgeist: Moving forward. S.l.: Gentle Machine Productions. Kötke, W. H. (1993). The final empire: The collapse of civilization and the seed of the future. Portland, Or: Arrow Point Press. Motesharrei, S., Motesharrei, S., Rivas, J., Rivas, J., & Kalnay, E. (January 01, 2014). Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Ecological Economics, 101, 90-102. Nafeez, A. (2014, March 14). Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists Pearce, F. (2013, July 15). Technology as our planet’s last best hope. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/15/technology-planet-ecological-modernism-environmental Robbins, P. (2012). Political ecology: A critical introduction. Chichester, U.K: J. Wiley & Sons. Zampas, C., & Lamačková, A. (January 01, 2011). Forced and coerced sterilization of women in Europe. International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics: the Official Organ of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, 114, 2, 163-6.