Quilley: A New Great Transformation

Stephen Quilley, using primarily the work of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, makes a case for a new Great Transformation in the context of economic degrowth. He explains Polanyi's thesis of the 'disembedding' of the free market economy from non-economic social relations and how that led to two conflicting policies: an unregulated and predatory free market and a nationalized attempt to redistribute some private wealth as public benefits in the form of welfare states. Quilley's thesis is that conditions of degrowth might mean a return to re-embedding of a more localized economy within localized social relations that influence the market with non-economic social values, such as a concern for local skilled production and ecological impacts. Quilley's article, though dense, is a nice work of classical sociological argument. He references the work of the Social Innovation Generation at the University of Waterloo, a good source of research in this ares. [Check out "Pathways to System Change" as an example of their excellent work.] Following Polanyi, Quilley proposes that:

"The disembedding of economic activity involves the systematic loosening of the relationship between processes of production and consumption on the one hand, and particular place-bound communities on the other. Globalization is but the latest phase in the subordination of specific places as generic, interchangeable nodes in an abstract economic space (Lash and Urry 1994). By contrast, in the context of regeneration and community development, social innovation frequently seeks:

• to foster recursive and circular economic flows within communities and places
• to link economic activity to the enhancement of social and cultural capital of local community members
• to reduce the vulnerability of place-bound communities to the vagaries of market forces by embedding economic activity in the wider matrix of local social, cultural and political activity.^8"

What I liked best about the piece is his conclusion that in a period of crisis and transformation, which I agree is certainly underway, we must not try to look for or latch on to any one or one set of possible solutions. Rather we should allow for maximum diversity and experimentation of as many social innovations as possible, in order to select out those that work under a variety of localized conditions.

Heinberg: Conflict In a Declining World System

MuseLetter #247 / December 2012 by Richard Heinberg

This month's Museletter comes from an address which I gave to the International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change in November. Part two 'A theory of change for a century of crisis' will appear in January's Museletter.

Conflict and Change in the Era of Economic Decline: Part 1

Address to the International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change, November 16, 2012, by Richard Heinberg

The speakers at this conference and, I would guess, most of the attendees broadly share a certain view of the world. It’s probably fair to say that, as a group, we see resource depletion, financial chaos, and environmental disasters (principally associated with global climate change) as looming storms converging on industrial civilization. We also tend to agree that the unprecedented level of complexity of our society today is due to the historically recent energy subsidies of fossil fuels, and to a certain extent the enabling factor of financial innovation. Thus, as the quality and quantity of our energy sources inevitably decline, and as financial claims melt away with the ongoing burst of history’s greatest credit bubble, a simplification and decentralization of societal systems is inevitable.

What are the social implications of all this? Will wars and revolutions break out with ever-greater frequency? Will democracy thrive, or will traumatized masses find themselves at the mercy of tyrants? Will nation states survive, or will they break apart? Will regional warlords rule over impoverished and enslaved survivors? Or will local food networks and Occupy groups positively transform society from the ground up?

I don’t claim to have a functioning crystal ball. But tracing current trends, and looking to historic analogies, may help us understand our prospects better, and help us make the most of them.

The 21^st century landscape of conflict

Looking forward, four principal drivers of conflict are easily apparent. More may be lurking along the way.

First is the increasing prospect of conflict between rich and poor—i.e., between those who benefitted during history’s biggest growth bash on one hand, and on the other hand those who provided the labor, sat on the sidelines, or were pushed aside in resource grabs.

Economic growth produces inequality as a byproduct. Not only do industrialists appropriate the surplus value of the labor of their workers, as Marx pointed out, but bankers accumulate wealth from the interest paid by borrowers. We see inequality being generated by economic growth in real time in China, where roughly six hundred million people have been lifted from poverty in the last thirty years as a result of nine percent annual economic growth—but where economic inequality now surpasses levels in U.S. and even Eastern Europe.

Just as economic growth produces winners and losers domestically, the level of wealth inequality between nations grows as the global economy expands. Today the disparity between average incomes in the world’s richest and poorest nations is higher than ever.

The primary forces working against inequality as economies grow consist of government spending on social programs of all sorts, and on international aid projects.

As economic growth stops, those who have benefitted the most have both the incentive to maintain their relative advantage and, in many cases, the means to do so. Which means that in a contracting economy, those who have the least tend to lose the most. There are exceptions, of course. Billionaires can in theory go broke in a matter of hours or even seconds as a result of a market crash. But in the era of “too-big-to-fail” banks and corporations, government provides a safety net for the rich as well as the poor.

High and increasing inequality is usually bearable during boom times, as people at the bottom of the wealth pyramid are encouraged by the prospect of its overall expansion. Once growth ceases and slips into reverse, inequality becomes socially unsustainable. Declining expectations lead to unrest, while absolute misery (in the sense of not having enough to eat) often results in revolution.

We’ve seen plenty of examples of these trends in the past two years in Greece, Ireland, Spain, the U.S., and the Middle East.

In many countries, including the U.S., government efforts to forestall or head off uprisings appear to be taking the forms of criminalization of dissent, the militarization of police, and a massive expansion of surveillance using an array of new electronic spy technologies. At the same time, intelligence agencies are now able to employ up-to-date sociological and psychological research to infiltrate, co-opt, misdirect, and manipulate popular movements aimed at achieving economic redistribution.

However, these military, police, public relations, and intelligence efforts require massive funding as well as functioning grid, fuel, and transport infrastructures. Further, their effectiveness is limited if and when the nation’s level of economic pain becomes too intense, widespread, or prolonged.

A second source of conflict consists of increasing competition over access to depleting resources, including oil, water, and minerals. Among the wealthiest nations, oil is likely to be the object of the most intensive struggle, since oil is essential for nearly all transport and trade. The race for oil began in the early 20^th century and has shaped the politics and geopolitics of the Middle East and Central Asia; now that race is expanding to include the Arctic and deep oceans, such as the South China Sea.

Resource conflicts occur not just between nations, but also within societies: witness the ongoing insurgencies in the Niger Delta, where oil revenue fuels rampant political corruption while drilling leads to environmental ravages felt primarily by the Ogoni ethnic group; see also the political infighting in fracking country here in the U.S., where ecological impacts put ever-greater strains on the social fabric. Neighbors who benefit from lease payments no longer speak to neighbors who have to put up with polluted water, a blighted landscape, and the noise of thousands of trucks carrying equipment, water, and chemicals. Eventually, however, boomtowns turn to ghost towns, and nearly everyone loses.

Third, climate change and other forms of ecological degradation are likely to lead to conflict over access to places of refuge from natural disasters. The responsible agencies—including the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security—point out that there are already 12 million environmental refugees worldwide, and that this number is destined to soar as extreme weather events increase in frequency and severity. Typically, when bad weather strikes, people leave their homes only as a last resort; in the worst instances they have no other option. As America learned during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when hundreds of thousand were displaced from farms in the prairies, rapid shifts in population due to forced migration can create economic and social stresses, including competition for scarce jobs, land, and resources, leading to discrimination and sometimes violence.

Where do refugees go when the world is already full? Growing economies are usually able to absorb immigrants and governments may even encourage immigration in order to keep wages down. But when economic growth ceases, immigrants are often seen as taking jobs away from native-born workers.

In this instance as well, conflict will appear both within and between countries. Low-lying island nations may disappear completely, and cross-border weather-driven migrations will increase dramatically. Inhabitants of coastal communities will move further inland. Farmers in drought-plagued areas will pick up stakes. But can all of these people be absorbed into shantytowns in the world’s sprawling megacities? Or will at least some of these cities themselves see an exodus of population due to an inability to maintain basic life-support services?

Lastly, climate change, water scarcity, high oil prices, vanishing credit, and the leveling off of per-hectare productivity and the amount of arable land are all combining to create the conditions for a historic food crisis, which will impact the poor first and most forcibly. High food prices breed social instability—whether in 18^th century France or 21^st century Egypt. As today’s high prices rise further, social instability could spread, leading to demonstrations, riots, insurgencies, and revolutions.

In summary, conflict in the decades ahead will likely center on the four factors of money, energy, land, and food. These sources of conflict will overlap in various ways. While economic inequality will not itself be at the root of all this conflict (one could argue that population growth is a deeper if often unacknowledged cause of strife), inequality does seem destined toplay a role in most conflict, whether the immediate trigger is extreme weather, high food prices, or energy shortages.

This is not to say that no other sources of conflict beyond money, energy, land, and food will exist. Undoubtedly religion will provide the ostensible banner for contention in many instances. However, as so often in history, this is likely to be a secondary rather than a primary driver of discord.

Naomi Klein: Movement Mobilizing in a Crisis

Naomi Klein talks about using climate change crises like Superstorm Sandy to mobilize people politically as a response to the crisis.

Transportation history: Ribbon vs. Square Farms

Overly simplistic but provocative short piece comparing the historical legacy of the way land is parceled up and its implications for how we think about transportation. Argues that square farms have social consequences -- "We feel transportation should come to us instead of the other way around" -- that differ from nations where land is divided in the ribbon format.

A Deeper Definition of Resilience

The following definition of resilience comes from Resilience.org, the new website of the Energy Bulletin, published by the Post-Carbon Institute. 

Bio-Cultural Resilience for Systems Change.

The essential feature of biocultural systems that has ensured their persistence in time and space has been their resilience. Prominent resilience scientist Dr. Brian Walker describes resilience as the propensity of a system to learn, adapt, self-organize (through co-evolution between different sub-systems) and absorb change without losing functional integrity. Resilient systems are characterized by a diversity of patterns, functions, and processes — from nutrient cycles to ecological niches, from inter- and intra-specific variability to between and within the richness of languages, from epistemologies to traditional institutions of governance — that ensures a wide range of responses to external or internal challenges.

Resilient systems are characterized by a diversity of patterns, functions, and processes that ensures a wide range of responses to external or internal challenges.

Another important characteristic of a resilient system is its modularity, the presence of relatively autonomous “nodes” (e.g., local communities, ecological refugia, pastoral networks) throughout a system that reduces its over-connectedness and therefore enhances its ability to resist rapid transmission of environmental and social shocks. Tight feedback mechanisms between various elements of biocultural systems enable detection of approaching thresholds, or tipping points (from coral- to algae-dominated systems, from rainforest to savannah, from commons to private property, from subsistence to market-based economy), long before the system is on the verge of flipping into a new, potentially irreversible state.

Functional overlap is a reflection of redundancy in the system that enhances its continuity when some of its elements experience change (e.g., carbon sequestration is achieved in different parts of an ecosystem; traditional diets include varied sources of protein; wildlife harvest is regulated through different institutional arrangements). Substantial social capital — in the form of trusted social networks, wise leadership, intergenerational transmission of knowledge, an equitable integration of different ways of knowing into decision-making —  also allows for diverse systemic responses to change.

Anderson-Tyndall Centre: Climate Change is Worse Than We Said

Oil Shale: Finally a Bride?

The past few years has seen an explosion in the production of shale gas. The recently released World Energy Outlook 2012 predicts that the US will replace Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer of oil by 2020 as a result of a dramatic increase in production from an unconventional source: shale oil.

How plausible is this? Lets begin with the facts. First, there is a tremendous amount of oil locked up in US shale, particularly in Colorado. With 'known' reserves of approximately 600 billion barrels of oil equivalent and estimated potential of 1.8 trillion bbl, this resource is the American version of Canada's oil sands -- an unconventional source of petroleum that has a long history of being a bridesmaid, but never a bride. A popular saying in the Colorado industry captures this nicely: “Oil shale is the fuel of the future, and always will be.” But, as the tar sands have shown, changes in the economics of the industry coupled with technological developments can foster large scale production from previously inaccessible sources.

Second, the projection is based on expectations about both price and technology. Significantly, a recent survey of petroleum economists showed little consensus about future prices. The survey revealed two distinct camps -- those who think prices will remain high or increase and those who think they will fall substantially. Their take on prices is largely tied to their expectations about the impact of shale oil on the global market. One camp argues that the upside from shale oil supplies will be more than enough to meet demand growth. The other disputes that, saying the likely impact from shale is being exaggerated.

The role of technology is equally contentious. Some geologists point to the role of two technologies that have been central to the development of shale gas: hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Others emphasize the technologies present at Shell's Mahogany Ridge Project; a new, working, but small scale, oil shale demonstration technology that produced 1400 barrels of oil without mining. The traditional approach to oil shale -- which led to the bridesmaid label -- involved 'retorting,' a process that required mining the shale, hauling it to a processing facility that crushed the rock into small chunks, then extracted a petroleum substance called kerogen, then upgraded the kerogen through a process of hydrogenation (which requires lots of water) and refined it into gasoline or jet fuel. Here is a description of the Mahogany Ridge process from Shell's Terry O'Connor:

“Most of the petroleum products we consume today are derived from conventional oil fields that produce oil and gas that have been naturally matured in the subsurface by being subjected to heat and pressure over very long periods of time. In general terms, the In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) accelerates this natural process of oil and gas maturation by literally tens of millions of years. This is accomplished by slow sub-surface heating of petroleum source rock containing kerogen, the precursor to oil and gas. This acceleration of natural processes is achieved by drilling holes into the resource, inserting electric resistance heaters into those heater holes and heating the subsurface to around 650-700F, over a 3 to 4 year period.

“During this time, very dense oil and gas is expelled from the kerogen and undergoes a series of changes. These changes include the shearing of lighter components from the dense carbon compounds, concentration of available hydrogen into these lighter compounds, and changing of phase of those lighter, more hydrogen rich compounds from liquid to gas. In gaseous phase, these lighter fractions are now far more mobile and can move in the subsurface through existing or induced fractures to conventional producing wells from which they are brought to the surface. The process results in the production of about 65 to 70% of the original “carbon” in place in the subsurface.

“The ICP process is clearly energy-intensive, as its driving force is the injection of heat into the subsurface. However, for each unit of energy used to generate power to provide heat for the ICP process, when calculated on a life cycle basis, about 3.5 units of energy are produced and treated for sales to the consumer market. This energy efficiency compares favorably with many conventional heavy oil fields that for decades have used steam injection to help coax more oil out of the reservoir. The produced hydrocarbon mix is very different from traditional crude oils. It is much lighter and contains almost no heavy ends.

“However, because the ICP process occurs below ground, special care must be taken to keep the products of the process from escaping into groundwater flows. Shell has adapted a long recognized and established mining and construction ice wall technology to isolate the active ICP area and thus accomplish these objectives and to safe guard the environment. For years, freezing of groundwater to form a subsurface ice barrier has been used to isolate areas being tunneled and to reduce natural water flows into mines. Shell has successfully tested the freezing technology and determined that the development of a freeze wall prevents the loss of contaminants from the heated zone.”

It may seem, as O’Conner said, counter-intuitive to freeze the water around a shale deposit, and then heat up the contents within the deposit. It’s energy-intensive. And it’s a lot of work. What’s more, there’s no proof yet it can work on a commercial scale.

Yet both technologies, the freeze wall and the heating of shale, have been proven in the field to work. The freeze wall was used most recently in Boston’s Big Dig project. It was also used to prevent ground water from seeping into the salt caverns at the Strategic Petroleum reserve in Weeks Island, LA.

In short, the individual 'pieces' of a working approach have been demonstrated, but their viability as a systemic whole, particularly on a commercial scale, remain unproven.

Third, a number of other factors have to be taken into account. The energy content of oil shale varies tremendously from region to region. Colorado shale is, by far, the most concentrated and, hence, most attractive. But, the process is both energy and water intensive, and water is at a premium in Colorado. Moreover, 72% of known US oil shale reserves are on government land. This is a fact that cuts both ways. On the one hand, this provides an economic lure; development of the lands could provide a significant revenue stream. On the other, as the case of drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge shows, exploitation of sensitive government lands can be a political hot potato. The Colorado reserves lie on land surrounded by National Parks and other sensitive areas. So, simply put, in addition to the economic and technology matters, there are also significant political considerations.

Finally, as my earlier research on the history of oil estimates showed, the current political economy of the oil industry accounts for the way assumptions underlying such projections are interpreted. In other words, while the projections are justified in terms of geology and technology, it is the current political economy of the industry which affects whether such estimates incorporate 'optimistic' or 'pessimistic' assumptions about the implications of those factors.  Simply put, when there is lots of shut in short term capacity, the industry thinks that there is lots of energy available and opts for optimistic assumptions about future geology and technology. Alternatively, when demand outstrips supply, there is no shut in capacity, and the industry is doing everything it can to find new sources and get them on to the market, then pessimistic assumptions about future geology and technology become the order of the day. Thus, given the current glut of supply on the market, history suggests we would be wise to question the ultimate validity of these particular projections.

Harvey: Zero Growth and Novelty

Harvey says that past communist systems failed because they did not provide "the liberty to pursue novelty" and promote human development. My take: adapting to climate change, resource constraints and economic degrowth (whether planned or forced) will require constant innovation, and all our creative problem solving capacity, just to keep up with the constantly shifting environment.

Transition Towns: Possibilities, not Probabilities

The following blog post from Rob Hopkins is by far the best explanation of what Transition Towns is about. It contains numerous but implicit references to chaos theory: that we have to self-organize, start from the simplest level, from the ground up, that we don't know the mature state of the system or even where we're going, but that by following simple 'nearest neighbor' rules, we can create resilient communities and perhaps arrive at a mature system state that is resilient and more ecologically sound than the current one.

After reading this, my 'aha' moment was that I realized that there's no way we can solve the problem of global climate change—it's impossible. It's too big, it's too complex and too intractable. Since we can't solve the problem of global climate change (or 'peak oil') we have to focus on problems that we can solve. "Focus on possibilities, not probabilities." We have the capacity to build local, resilient communities that can survive whatever hits us, whether climate change, peak oil, economic collapse, or the decline of an empire. But just working on any collective social problem won't help us develop the right skills for the crisis. In order to develop the necessary skills to survive climate change, we have to work on problems and projects that "model" the larger crisis. So working on the cooperative local provision of food, shelter, energy and governance in a low carbon mode, creating systems that can react quickly and flexibly to localized change, helps us develop capacities for a future that is energy scarce and climate disrupted. We can solve those problems by working through movements like Transition Towns that ask the right questions and focus on the right issues, even if they don't have all the answers. "Resilience" doesn't solve the problem of climate change either—it just helps us to survive it so that we can adapt to whatever conditions will be thrust upon us for the indefinite future. In the face of these insurmountable dilemmas, we cannot avoid collapse, large or small. Catastrophic transformation is on it's way and we can't stop it. All we can do is survive it and hope that the new communities we create will evolve into a system that is adapted to the new world that awaits us.

From today’s Guardian Sustainable Business section: ‘Community action alleviates climate change gloom’

In his recent piece on climate change on the network, Jo Confino wrote of the dark place he found himself in after a few weeks immersed in the latest news on sustainability – his climate change ”dark night of the soul” if you like.  For the past six years I have been part of an experiment known as Transition, which encourages people to do just what Confino suggests: to sit with the pain of this awareness, while also pointing to a path beyond it.

It’s a bottom-up approach to the creation of community resilience; the ability to withstand shocks at the local level. It focuses on “engaged optimism”, a solutions-focused and positive response, rather than the “false cheer” Confino warns against.

There is an important distinction to be made between the kind of positive thinking that Barbara Ehrenreich lambasts in Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, and the Transition approach. Ehrenreich writes of “mandatory optimism and cheerfulness”, whereas Transition is very different. It acknowledges the scale of the challenges we face and that they can be deeply upsetting, but also invites you to be part of a collective response, with no predetermined answers, to help make history figuring it out. A collective experiment, if you like.

It works like this: an initiating group forms; raises awareness about climate change, peak oil and so on (always in the context of what can we, now, here, do about it); then subsequent groups form around key areas – food, energy, transport – which enable the people who are passionate about those areas to get involved. It works to create a collective vision of how it would like its future to be in the context of the challenges outlined above. This then leads to practical projects driven by what people feel enthused to do. You might think of it as a “do-ocracy”, a process driven by the people who are doing stuff.

It is open source, bottom-up and self-organised. It represents a shift from focusing on probabilities to focusing on possibilities. Confino’s despondency following his immersion in the data on climate change is about probabilities, the probability that such-and-such will happen by a certain time. But what if the thinking shifted to what was possible? Given that we are where we are, what might we be able to create in this situation?

It is that refocusing that led to the creation of Bath & West Community Energy, a co-operative, community-owned energy company which just raised £750,000 in its first share launch. It led to the Bristol Pound, launched last month with the full support of the city council and already accepted in many hundreds of businesses, and Transition Lancaster’sFruity Corners, fruit trees planted across the city. . There are many other examples of such initiatives.

While none of these on their own are an adequate response to climate change, combined they represent communities taking visionary leadership when their leaders are failing to do so.

Might we redefine resilience as the degree to which we can breathe possibility into our local communities, changing the stories they tell about themselves, so that when they encounter shock, they are able to refocus on the possibilities that emerge? The realisation that we live in a world of limits can be a great stimulus for new thinking and creativity.

I too have sat in the pit Confino writes about, the gloomy place where it feels like you are the only person who can see the wall our juggernaut of civilisation is heading for at great speed. Indeed, I pop back there on a fairly regular basis. But feeling part of a process, with others, of starting to build the kind of world we want to see, helps hugely. It contributes to my own personal resilience, as well as to the resilience of the community around me.

It is perhaps a path out of the pit driven by action.

Rob Hopkins is co-founder of Transition Network and author of The Transition Companion. He blogs at TransitionCulture.org and tweets as@robintransition.  You can find the original of this piece here.  

Networks in Community Energy Projects

Research on community energy projects in the UK cites Transition Towns as a key player in a network of organizations that support sustainability. The researchers used a 'sociogram' to diagram the linkages and nodes among these organizations:

"The other aspect of networking explored was the links these projects had with intermediary organisations and networks.  This built up a fascinating picture of the web of organisations, from local networks to national networks, national-scale organisations, public sector and third sector organisations and private organisations.  The authors mapped these relationships in what they call a ‘sociogram’ which shows the complexity of these relationships, and who influences who (see below, click to enlarge).

It concludes that “Transition Network was the most commonly named organisation” by respondents, and this is reflected in the sociogram.  Given that it is followed in the list by organisations such as the Energy Savings Trust whose resources and size far outstrip Transition Network’s, this is a fascinating taste of the impact of Transition, and of how it works, being as much an idea, a unifying context and identity, a motivating concept and active network, as it is a provider of tangible support in relation to community energy.  For an organisation that has been around for only a short time, and whose staff consist of less than 10 people, this is really something to celebrate I feel."

From a systems theory approach, I would call Transition Towns' collection of unifying contexts and ideas an attractor around which groups can self-organize. Multiple groups linked by these common ideas form a network to continue sharing, learning and building the network to a new emergent level of social organization, perhaps a regional ecology.

Foodless Days in 2012

Lester Brown has published two books, available free online, that detail the ongoing crisis in world food supplies. His latest book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Security, describes the current state of people in the world near starvation:

"In early 2012, Adam Nossiter wrote in the New York Times about the effect of high food prices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country where hunger is common. Interviewing individual families in Kinshasa, he noted that three years ago everyone ate at least one meal a day. But today even families with both parents working often cannot afford to eat every day. It is now a given in many households that some days will be foodless, days when they will not eat at all. Selecting the days when they will not eat is a weekly routine.

The international charity Save the Children commissioned detailed surveys in five countries—India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Peru, and Bangladesh—to see how people were dealing with rising food prices. Among other things, they learned that 24 percent of families in India now have foodless days. For Nigeria, the comparable figure is 27 percent. For Peru it is 14 percent. Family size plays an important role in hunger. Almost one third of large families in all countries surveyed have foodless days." 

As always, war, foreign and capitalist exploitation, political regimes, gendercide, racism and other social and political factors adversely and unjustly impact the distribution of food. But this time it's different. In addition to all these factors, there simply isn't enough grain to feed everyone. Catastrophic climate change in the form of floods droughts and heat waves, soil erosion, water shortages, and the demand for grain-based ethanol are having severe impacts on the total global supply of grain. World grain supplies are at their lowest in since the mid-20th century.

Data from Lester Brown's earlier book, World on the Edge, is presented in a pdf slideshow that encapsulates these issues.

The Cybernetic Cycle

Let's take another look at Abel's energy diagram. Moving from left to right, the diagram shows flows of energy, or eMergy, as it is transformed into more complex embodied forms. However it doesn't show emergent levels. It depicts transformations as if it were one continuous flow from solar energy to "legal codes." But there are stages of emergence that structure these flows, transformations that happened over tens of thousands of years. Solar power produces plants, which leads to human agriculture as an emergent stage. Agriculture creates the possibility of complex civilizations, including learning and cultural complexity at various stages of development. Complex civilizations create the possibility of fossil fuels and technology, which makes possible an advanced technological society. Finally, the knowledge sector grows until it becomes the dominant system of the planet. Unfortunately, what is missing from the diagram is "economic" and "scientific" data, which are the information sectors that control most of the human activity on the planet, and reshape the entire terrain of minerals and living things.

Moving from right to left on the diagram are the backward pointing arrows, which depict what I call the Cybernetic Cycle. At the point of agriculture, developed by human intelligence, energy is transformed into a civilization that can produce and store information. From that point on, at each successive stage, more information and energy is generated and stored in more complex forms, in cultural products and institutional routines. But knowledge and information is also deployed "backwards", demanding, extracting and controlling more energy from the root sources (solar, plants and fossil fuels) in order to drive the transformation "forward" to new stages of emergence and new levels of complexity. At the end point, human information in the form of economic and scientific data is controlling the entire chain of energy and materials, continuously demanding and extracting more energy, and continuously driving the production of culture and institutions that store more information and energy.

Collapse and Change

In this video, filmed at a Transition Towns 2011 conference, "Mike from Forrest Row" explains that collapse is a necessary and unavoidable stage that systems go through, and is the immediate cause of systemic change. It is possible and necessary to prepare materially and psychologically for collapse and the for the profound changes that will result.

Finding the Future

Browsing the web this morning I came across a pair of articles that speak significantly to one another and illustrate a general problem with forecasts of the future.

In Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Emanuel Derman reflects on life as a "financial engineer" who worked in investment banking and built financial models designed to quantify a "vast and ill-understood sea of ephemeral human passions." Two points from the article are worthy of note. First, the concept of financial engineering is hugely flawed. Engineering models, for example of the structural tensions on a bridge, involve a set of deterministic factors for which one can calculate precise answers. The notion that one can directly port such deterministic mathematical models to finance is, as noted by many subsequent to the crash, a bit of hubris. As Weber noted oh so long ago, the causes of social action differ from those found in the natural world. This underpins the second key point in the article:  the models work well when the sea stays calm, but not when a storm hits

In Trending Upward, Michael Horowitz and Philip Tetlock explore ways the intelligence community can better see into the future. Based on an analysis of the National Intelligence Community Global Trends Reports, they note a similar pattern. The reports almost inevitably fall into the trap of treating the conventional wisdom of the present as the blueprint for the future 15 to 20 years down the road. Thus, many of the things the reports get right were already unfolding when the report was written and the reports have struggled to make accurate non-obvious predictions of big-picture trends.  The article goes on to suggest a number of specific ways that analysts might improve their predictions. Interestingly, the suggestions largely involve various ways to quantify the process. Unlike financial engineering, which builds quantitative models of the economy itself, Horowitz and Tetlock eschew attempts to model the political future directly. Instead, they suggest various means to quantify the process of making and aggregating expert judgments about the future.

Digital Snow Days

Another brilliant article by Mary Logan on the sudden temporary loss of complexity.

http://prosperouswaydown.com/digital-snow-days/

As we progress further into descent, we will see more electricity brownouts, blackouts, and other events where there is a sudden failure of complexity, resulting in a shutdown of productivity. This failure of complexity has created a new urban word; "digital snow day." And since our digital snow day in Anchorage coincided withtermination dust on the mountains, the name is especially fitting. When we lose complexity suddenly, much of modern life stops, as our subsystems are highly connected. What sort of systems will be impacted when we have complexity brownouts, and what will some of those snow days look like? Does digitization make the failures worse, with a drop to a lower trophic level than would have occurred without digitization?

What's really interesting is how H. T. Odum characterized industrial energy as an extension of the food chain, as "highly embodied energy", as a higher trophic level of transformed energy that both drives and controls production. These concepts are critical to understanding the link between energy and information, a complex set of questions that I have been pursuing for the last four years.

Vulnerabilities from added levels of complexity

Odum, 1995, p. 24

Trophic levels are descriptions of organisms’ position in the energy hierarchy through their positions in the food chain. But what people do not realize is that trophic levels extend from natural ecosystems on into human economies, as higher and higher amounts of energy and other resources are transformed to build added complexity (see an example of this hierarchy in a figure at the end of the post). If we consider human economies as complex extensions of the food chain, then electricity and transmitted cultural information yield higher trophic levels that have undergone a series of energy-using transformations that exert top-down control in regulating productivity. Information is one of the most highly embodied forms of energy, and high transformity digital information can be shared over a large territory with global impact. Odum was especially concerned about the long-term storage of information in a digital age. How many of these digitized formats have paper backups that are relatively secure for the long-term in an increasingly chaotic world?

[the following selections are from my scattered 'Notes on Energy and Information']

I could not understand the concept of emergy, or embodied energy, until I understood General Systems Theory, which explains how matter/energy at each level is contained wholly in the next higher levels, up to the most all-inclusive levels. Energy/matter is embodied and concentrated within each higher level, enabling QUALITATIVE COMPLEXITY, i.e. new morphogenic forms and capacities to emerge at higher levels; GST explains how energy and information are concentrated and concatenated upward through the chain of complexity and evolution. At each higher level, more information is also embodied, which more precisely controls energy and slows entropy, and makes possible more complex functions and interactions with the environment. The concatenation of information and energy makes it possible to produce more specialized and carefully-controlled work (efficiency); the outcome of these processes alters the environment and creates new environmental conditions, which are then re-imported in a feedback system as more information. 

Energy + Information = Power. Information organizes energy to do work; at the cognitive level (the social level) cognition organizes other cognitions, as information, to control and use energy for work. Energy directed toward a purpose is power.

How is energy converted to information in social systems? Through COMMUNICATION.

Human information is potential energy. It is organized in to complex and integrated forms through communication and then stored as memory, whether in brains, books, computer systems, or institutional routines. As a stored, complex and integrated form, is has the potential to organize material energy (e.g. electrochemical, fossil fuels, electricity, muscles) for work, for a specific function. When human information is combined in a functional system with material energy, it is transformed into actual or kinetic energy (electrochemical, mechanical, chemical, physical, etc) and does work, performs a function, produces a civilization.

Cybernetic systems are systems of energy and power. Language not only generates systems, it also controls them internally. Externally, cybernetic systems do the work of controlling what’s in their environments. This requires energy and exerts power—power to influence and control other systems, or influence their outcomes.

Connectedness is the way that energy/information is organized and categorized, catalogued, and connected to prior knowledge and information. Energy drives the dissemination of information, but information organizes energy and puts it to useful work. Information overload is too much energy/information that has not been connected and organized In a useful way. 'Knowledge as power' is energy/information that has been connected and organized in such a way as to control the flow and organization of other energy/information.

Entropy is disorganized, disconnected information that does not direct energy toward a purpose, a function. Entropy is too much noise, not enough signal; entropy is dead, lost, archaic information.

Luhmann's error, if you will, is that he analyzed communication as the starting point of creating social systems. We need to go back much further, as H. T. Odum did, and begin at the level of solar and organic energy, and using General Systems Theory, understand how energy and information are successively embedded holonically in each level of complexity, up to the most complex level on earth, the human social system, and human communication, which is the end point of this planetary system. That's why Odum was right--human information systems are the most highly embodied form of energy.

The human brain, and the human ability to communicate, is the result of millennia of evolutionary development—energy/matter combined in ever more complex forms by information/feedback from the environment. Joanna Macy explains how feedback/information is encoded in patterns, and how organisms use codes/patterns, whether genetic or behavioural, to connect with things in the environment that fit those codes and thus meet their life-support needs. The human brain, and the human ability to communicate, has the capacity to generate an almost infinite number of complex codes, but only with other humans. Individuals, by themselves, do not have the capacity to generate this infinite variety of codes. Luhmann was right to focus on communication and code generation as the key to the development of complex societies. Once humans got to a stage of evolution where they were able to communicate regularly, and learn from each other, our collective intelligence generated an almost infinite variety of codes that could be used to generate every possible thing we need from the environment—in short, to create human civilization.

[note: I was going to post the above notes on Monday, Labor Day, but I got distracted with a bunch of other stuff as usual. Anyway, Happy Belated Labor Day.]

Muse's 2nd Law

Muse is a popular rock band from the UK. They're putting out a new concept album called "The Second Law", referring to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Entropy. As a sociologist, it's interesting to me how an idea as abstract and scientific as the Second Law of Thermodynamics can make it's way into popular culture; and how it becomes politicized. Muse is an awesome band; I've enjoyed their previous releases and I'm going to buy this one when it comes out in September. This video is "The 2nd Law: Unsustainable".

John Bellamy Foster on Weber and the Environment

Thirteen years ago John Bellamy Foster published "Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology" (American Journal of Sociology 105 (2): 366–401), a work that mined Marx's work for long forgotten themes, drew attention to and explicated the concept of metabolic rift, and fundamentally reoriented Marxist thought about the natural world.

In the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Foster and co-author Hannah Holleman have produced an article about Weber, "Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for a Postexemptionalist Sociology" (AJS Volume 117 Number 6, May 2012: 1625–1673) which, I expect, will have a similar impact for future Weberian analyses of the environment. 

The article itself is long, detailed and examines Weber's approach in relation to a diverse variety of themes, including:

• Weber’s interpretive/causal sociology and the environment
• Weber's historical sociology and the environment in terms of two eras

1. The traditional-organic era in human history: the environment and nonindustrial society (including discussions of hydraulic bureaucracy and of deforestation and the shift from the epoch of wood to the age of iron) 
2. The rational-inorganic era in human history: the age of coal, iron, and industrial capitalism (including a discussion of the concept of "raubbau" (land-robbing agriculture) and its connection to the heedless consumption of natural resources)

• The sociology of energy
• The disenchantment of the world and its relation to human conquest of nature
• And, finally, Weber and the classical foundations for postexemptionalist sociology in relation to the following questions: 

1. How do we account for the fact that leading environmental sociologists have characterized Weber’s environmental contributions as “relatively invisible”?
2. And what do Weber’s insights into the environment and society teach us with regard to the needed transformation of environmental sociology and sociology as a whole—in our postexemptionalist age, symbolized by global warming, when we realize all too fully the dangers of the human degradation of the environment?

Here is the abstract:

In the last two decades classical sociology, notably Marx, has been mined for environmental insights in the attempt to surmount the “human exemptionalism” of post–Second World War sociology. Weber, however, has remained an enigma in this respect. This article addresses Weber’s approach to the environment, including its significance for his interpretive-causal framework and his understanding of capitalism. For Weber, sociological meanings were often anchored in biophysical realities, including climate change, resource consumption, and energy scarcity, while environmental influences were refracted in complex ways within cultural reproduction. His work thus constitutes a crucial key to constructing a meaningful postexemptionalist sociology.

All in all, a provocative read well worth the effort.

Qualitative Complexity: new source for complexity theory

QUALITATIVE COMPLEXITY

Ecology, cognitive processes and the re-emergence of structures in post-humanist social theory

John Smith and Chris Jenks

Offering a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory, Qualitative Complexity is the first comprehensive sociological analysis of complexity theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, ‘fuzzy logic’, systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, John Smith and Chris Jenks present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organising structures.

John Smith has taught at Goldsmiths College, University of London; Lancaster University; and Greenwich University. He is a sociologist and a painter trained at the Royal College of Art. He is interested in sociological theory, philosophy and visual culture, and has published in all of these areas.

Chris Jenks is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Sociology at Brunel University. He has published extensively in the areas of sociological theory, childhood, cultural theory and visual and urban culture.

The two authors met at Goldsmiths College and have subsequently published together in Cultural Reproduction (edited by Jenks; Routledge 1993);Visual Culture (edited by Jenks; Routledge 1995); Images of Community: Durkheim, Social Systems and the Sociology of Art (jointly authored by Smith and Jenks; Ashgate 2000); and an article on Complexity Theory in Theory, Culture and Society (October 2005).


[quote] Autopoiesis in its original form stressed that the living organism produced and organised the relationships between its components. Crucially, it also organised its relationship to its environment. Despite ‘structural coupling’ or evolved adaptation, ‘the organism decides what counts as environment’ and so also maintains its ‘operational closure’⁷. It is, of course, central to the application of complexity theory to sociology (Luhmann 1984, 1995), but it should be noted that Varela objected to the application of autopoiesis to social systems, even the operationally closed models developed by Luhmann. The versions explored here are much more open. Indeed, it is a characteristic of complex systems that boundaries are extremely difficult to draw. For example, in sociology how do we draw the boundary between individual and member? We shall return at length to Maturana Varela and Luhmann below. For the moment, it is important to stress that autopoiesis is completely unlike the ideas of self-autonomy assumed by post-modern or post-structural notions of freedom, negation and deconstruction.

Though self-organisation obviously signifies autonomy, a self-organising system … must work to construct and reconstruct its autonomy and this requires energy …[T]he system must draw energy from the outside; to be autonomous…it must be [also] dependent.

(Morin 2002:45, following von Foerster 1984)

The inexorable fate of any system that does not draw energy from its environment is entropic equilibrium: it will cease to be dynamic or, in the case of the living, it will die.[unquote]

This reflects exactly my critique that Luhmann's theory lacks a thermodynamic theory that explains energy and entropy. And it has to do, apparently, with the openness of systems allowing systems to obtain energy from the environment.

There is another structural implication:

… when a variable affecting a dissipative structure changes enough, the structure either reorganises itself or collapses. This crisis point is called a ‘bifurcation’. When collapse is avoided, the reorganisation process takes pieces of the earlier structure and changes their functions and relative importance so as to allow the system to continue, although now in a new form. An example is the stress caused by rising populations, which ultimately compels a society to become more hierarchical or collapse into fragments.

(Grimes 2000:33)

Summer break / links

I'm off to Argentina for the next few weeks, so there won't be much action here.

Individuals wanting substance, can head on over to Collide-a-scape where there is an interesting discussion going on About the New Energy Revolution.

Individuals interested in visuals should check out Palíndromo Mészáros photos documenting the effects of a massive toxic aluminum spill in Hungary. The photo below isn't photoshopped or a before/after photo. The red line represents the height of the toxic sludge. The photographer cleverly selected the camera height in order to create the effect. Details and other amazing images at American Photo.

US Energy Outlook and other energy matters

The US Energy Information Agency has released the 2012 US Energy Outlook which contains a variety of projections about US energy use to 2035. The basic structure of the analysis involves comparison of the 'reference case' (the continuation of current policies) with various alternative scenarios based on alternative sets of assumptions (e.g., allowing existing regulations with sunset provisions to expire, new regulatory regimes, technological developments, different price scenarios, etc.). The base scenario for 2035 is pretty rosy --- predicting growth in energy consumption will average 0.3%  per year, despite a 25% growth in population and an almost doubling of GDP over the same period.

I was intending to write up my thoughts, but time intervened and Tom Fuller  has saved me the effort by taking up the challenge in a series of posts over at 3000 Quads (with the promise of more to come): The DoE's Daring Assumptions, U.S. Energy Consumption in 2035: Analyzing the DOE’s Projections, and How The DOE Thinks We’ll Save Energy Through 2035. Here is the main take away of Tom's analysis -- a point I share entirely. Following a listing of the various policy iniatives and global events the report outlines (e.g., improved emissions and fuel consumption standards for automobiles and trucks, a decline in US manufacturing after 2020 as a result of increased global competition, reduced residential energy use resulting from improved technology, etc), Tom concludes:

... if you postulated any one of these to me I would say it’s well within the realm of possibility. However, if anyone were to tell me that all of these were sure enough bets to make policy decisions on, I would start to shake my head in dismay. That’s more than a Green Trifecta. It would be like winning the lottery on successive days.

One thing that is not explicit in the report but seems to really drive a lot of their thinking–a core assumption seems to be that energy will get more expensive–expensive enough to justify the wholesale changes they are predicting.

But, for a fascinating assessment of why that may not be the case, see The Future of Natural Gas

Austerity and Collapse: A Snapshot of Portugal

I recommend that you read Luis de Sousa's post "A Postcard from Portugal" on the effects of austerity measures on the economy and society in Portugal. De Sousa snapshot reveals the multiple effects of economic austerity and collapse: a shocking 20% increase in the mortality rate, rising unemployment and poverty, the shrinkage of outlying towns as people move toward the cities, and the tension of impending political upheaval. Luis de Sousa is also an expert on Peak Oil and links that crisis with the ongoing political and economic crisis in Europe.

The thrust and perry over Planetary Boundaries

The concept of Planetary Boundaries was front and center at the Rio+20 conference. In the run up to the conference, the Breakthrough Institute released a report highlighting "scientific flaws" with the concept and, as a result, UN negotiators "stripped out all references to planetary boundaries from the Rio+20 text."

This appears to have been an overreaction. A reading of the Breakthrough Report and the response by Johan Rockström (Planetary boundaries: Addressing some key misconceptions) leads to the conclusion that a) some earth scientists interested in getting traction with the policy community appear to have deployed the idea in ways that went beyond what can be justified on the basis of current science and b) the critics appear to be more interested in cutting the head off the concept than in furthering sound debate.

Thus, for example, the critics state categorically that six of the nine planetary boundaries operate at the local or regional scale and don't have global biophysical thresholds. There are two basic problems with the claim. First, it fails to recognize our level of ignorance about many of the topics. New information is constantly appearing. As one specific example, a recent summary of our understanding of biodiversity makes the case for a planetary boundary in that area much stronger. Second, the distinction between planetary level processes and the aggregate of local/regional processes is not as clear cut as the critics would suggest.

A second example relates to the 'environmentalist's paradox'. Here is the summary of the Breakthrough critique:

The planetary boundaries hypothesis rests on the assumption that environmental variables are closely linked to human welfare, and that, consequently, loss of ecosystem services or natural capital implies declining human welfare. This assumption, however, has thus far not stood up well to observed trends with regard to both human welfare and ecological degradation. Over the last few decades, human welfare has improved significantly on a global level, even as a majority of ecosystem services have declined.

While this critique does give greater play to the role of time (note the reference to "thus far"), it fundamentally treats the observation as an inconsistency that contradicts the planetary boundaries account rather than as an empirical observation which can be explained in a variety of ways -- only one of which would contradict the planetary boundaries concept.

China's C02 emissions

It is widely recognized that China has become the world's largest producer of carbon-dioxide emissions. A recent article in Nature Climate Change suggests that the current official figures may under-represent those emissions by as much as 1.4 billion tonnes per year. The difference comes from comparing an aggregation of 'official' provincial figures with the 'official' national figures. More on the issue here.

Politics and Economics or Political Economy?

How, precisely, does one conceptualize the operation of a system as complex as the United States? Or, more specifically, is the US best conceptualized as Luhmann suggests -- that is as a set of largely distinct systems (social, political, economic, legal, etc.) which each operate with all of the others as part of their environment -- or as Marx suggests -- that is as an integrated political economic system?

The fascinating figure below shows that for the past 60 years there has been a very strong link between the extent of income inequality (as the difference between the rich and the poor increases, so does the gini coefficient) and the extent of political polarization within the US House of Representatives.

Obviously, no single piece of evidence can unequivocally answer such a broad question. But, the figure below certainly suggests a very tight coupling between the Gini index (economy) and polarization within the House (politics); a scenario more straightforwardly consistent with Marx than with Luhmann

Those interested in the details of the research that produced the above graph will want to check out Polarized America.

US Income Inequality: Real, Perceived, Desired

Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, by producing the graph below, have provided an interesting addition to the growing discussion of income inequality in the US.

The two columns on the left come from representative national samples of the American public.

The one on the far left shows the wealth distribution their respondents said would be ideal. In other words, in an idealized version of America, the public thought that the wealthiest 20% of the population (the purple bar) should control about 32% of the total wealth, the second and third quintiles (the blue and green bars) should control slightly more than than their proportionate 'share' (about 22% for each), while the poorest 40% of the population (the yellow and red bars) should control substantially less of the total wealth. In short, the American public embraces the concept of inequality of wealth, but not extreme wealth inequality.

The middle column captures American perceptions of how wealth is currently distributed. Clearly, Americans perceive the country as being more unequal than their 'ideal' distribution. They perceive the wealthiest 20% as having substantially more than ideal, the second 20% as having close to their ideal share and the bottom 60% having substantially less than ideal.

The column on the right shows the actual distribution of wealth in the United States, which is substantially more unequal than the perception. In sum, "respondents to his surveys universally think that wealth is more evenly distributed in the United States than it actually is—and what’s more, respondents say they would prefer for the wealth to be still more evenly spread around."

For more:  What We Know About Wealth

H. T. Odum: There is no Steady State

Now we're getting somewhere. . .

A century of studies in ecology, and in many other fields from molecules to stars, shows that systems don’t level off for long. They pulse. Apparently the pattern that maximizes power on each scale in the long run is a pulsed consumption of mature structures that resets succession to repeat again. There are many mechanisms, such as epidemic insects eating a forest, regular fires in grasslands, locusts in the desert, volcanic eruptions in geologic succession, oscillating chemical reactions, and exploding stars in the cosmos. Systems that develop pulsing mechanisms prevail. The figure above includes the downturn for reset that follows ecological climax. In the long run there is no steady state (Odum, 2007, p. 54).