Natural Limits

It's time to think about natural limits. This can be a bit frightening to those of us brought up to believe that the sky's the limit, there will always be more of everything, our children will always have it better than we did, the Dow Jones will always go up, well, you put in your favorite pipe dream here....

Overshoot is a fact of life on a finite planet. In the web of life, some life forms follow a slow and cautious path, having evolved ways of not overrunning their subsistence. Other life forms go for growth, growth, growth, inevitably followed by crash. Even a slight knowledge of the growth cycles of forms of life on this planet corroborates this fact. Lemming populations follow a bubble of growth, outrunning food supplies, then a crash. Their predators follow a similar pattern.

The motto of the cancer cell is growth at all costs, even at the cost of the life form it inhabits. This bears a startling similarity to the raison d'etre of the corporation: growth at all costs. Corporations are a very simple form of life. And the less supervision they have, the more they will adhere to their simple goals of more growth and profit for themselves, and externalizing the costs of their decisions.

There are some qualities that we have which are infinite. A teacher once told me that "the treasure which we have, which is Attention, is infinite". Yes. We can always pay better attention to ourselves, our bodies, our families, our earth, our behavior. And, most spiritual traditions believe in an infinite spirit, a universal soul or God. Most people believe that there is an infinite place of delight for us after death.

But there is no way that there is an infinite amount of physical "stuff" for every person on Earth; there is not an infinite amount of energy available to the ever-growing population of Earth. There is not an infinite amount of food, or an infinite number of acres of land on which to grow it. If we can't bring ourselves to live within our means on this planet, there are four predators which will do it for us: Famine, Pestilence, Plague and War.

Let's look at some practical, near-at-hand examples of limits.

1. Residential real estate cannot continue to rise in value far faster than the average take-home pay of the people who buy the homes. The real-estate bubble started about 2000. Take-home pay (adjusted for inflation) has been flat for decades. The real estate meltdown will stop when the relationship of home prices and take-home pay reaches historic norms again. You can't trick this process, or have the government bail it out by maintaining irrationally high real-estate values. If take-home pay sinks, as it looks likely, the real estate will need to sink to match.

2. The stock market cannot rise in a stable way any faster than the basic value-creating abilities of our society. This includes what we make, what we grow, what we dig out of the ground. Anything more than that is speculation and leverage. Leverage by its very nature cannot continue forever; it is a Ponzi scheme. Unfortunately, the news is even worse on this front. At the end of World War II, the U.S. had the largest manufacturing sector of any nation on the planet. Now, our claim to fame is that we have the largest retail sector, and the largest imbalance of trade. Well, you just can't make money selling "BUYING". Not in the long run, anyway.

What needs to happen? First, we need to start making things again. We need to restore the manufacturing industry in this country. We're smart enough to do this. Second, we need to stop buying cheap stuff from other countries, much of it worthless, some of it toxic. Third, we need to put some controls on the rampant leverage some organizations and traders are using to cheat the system and pull the nation's long-term value into their own short-term pockets.

3. We need less retail space. This is painful, I know, especially when it is a small business started by someone using their life savings. It is absolutely impossible for the people in the U.S. to continue the buying spree they have been on for the last decade. Can't be done. No more residential ATM. So, most unfortunately, small and large retail businesses have ramped up as if not just the spending, but the growth in spending, was going to last forever.

What we can do to help: support small businesses, local businesses. Keep the money in our community. Support local families with the dollars that you do spend. It is not our job to support people in China, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the Barbados, etc., by taking out debt that we cannot afford.

4. There is a natural limit to the energy available on the planet; almost all of it is nuclear energy--from our sun. The Earth has a sun budget coming in every day in the form of direct heating, ocean waves, wind, and hydroelectric. (How do you suppose that water got up into the sky in the first place?) The other basic source is Earth's natural radioactivity, which came from the dust of dead stars. We can tap that with geothermal energy installations. And Earth-based nuclear power plants, though there are lots of unsolved problems involved in that. (Peak uranium, anyone?)

We've been living way beyond our means on fossil fuels. They're called fossil fuels because it takes geologic time to make any more. The readily-obtainable fossil fuels are half gone, the easier half too I might add. Getting oil out of shale and tar sands is tremendously expensive in fuel and water, and it's uncertain that the world can afford it long term. Like somebody who has been poor for a long time and suddenly gets a big windfall, we've been drunk on the wonderful nearly-free energy we found. So much of it was wasted, and is still being wasted now.

The fossil fuels had a role to play in the planet's thermostat too. When the fossil fuels were laid down, the Earth was very hot, and the carbon dioxide level was very high. This carbon was sequestered under the ground, even under the oceans, where it couldn't do any harm. Like children, we found the wonderful treasure trove of carbon, dug and pumped it up, and are busy burning it, putting that dangerous carbon dioxide back into the air. Not much surprise that the Earth is heading toward a hot future.

5. There is a natural limit to the ability of Earth's natural systems to detoxify all the waste we're putting into it. When the population of the Earth was 50 million, with low technology, there was no problem. There was always clean air and water over the next mountain. No more. We have filled the planet, and now are filling the air and oceans with our waste. This is pretty serious, since we would like to have a human-friendly Earth in thirty years, in one hundred years, in a thousand years. Sure, all of us living now will be gone. But I don't want to think that my actions are leaving a toxic waste dump for my great-great-grandchildren.

This post has gotten into some serious long-term issues. Panic is not called for, and won't help us. In future posts, I want to consider a simple question: what would it take to have food on the table 100 years from now? 100 years is not that much time. The children of children living now could be alive then. Your grandchildren, perhaps, or their children. What actions can we take now to save something for them? to build something for them? to restore something for them? It is a matter of simple integrity in our lives to leave the world better than we found it, not worse. Starting from the goal of food within 100 miles, which is still a valuable goal, let's begin to look at "food for 100 years".

We will probably find that the two have a lot in common.