How fragile we are: Why the complexity of modern civilization threatens us all Posted on December 15th, 2009
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The fragility of our modern human civilization did not become clear to me until I began living full-time in South America. As a resident of Vilcabamba, Ecuador, I’ve grown accustomed to the idea of knowing where the things I consume come from.
The water I drink, for example, comes from a hole in the ground that taps into a water table replenished by the clouds hanging over the Podocarpus National Forest to the East. I can make a logical connection between the clouds, the rainfall, and the water in my glass. And if the well pump fails, I know I can always carry a bucket to the river a few hundred meters away and scoop up virtually unlimited quantities of water that recently fell out of the sky.
During a recent trip to Tucson, however, I found myself hesitating when I turned on the kitchen faucet. I paused, marveling at the magic of this water which apparently appears from nowhere. And it’s always there, reliable and uninterrupted. That’s when I noticed myself asking the commonsense question: “Where does the water come from around here?”
I had no idea.
The realization astonished me. I lived in Tucson for over five years and yet the thought suddenly occurred to me that if the water stopped magically flowing out of these pipes, I had absolutely no idea where to physically find waterbeyond the bottled water in the grocery stores, and that wouldn’t last very long.
Sure, I know where the rivers are in Tucson, but these desert rivers are bone dry river beds for all but a few days of the year. And yes, I know how to get water out of cactus, but it’s hard work, and the water isn’t pure water. Try to live off cactus juice for a few days and you’ll end up with severe diarrhea (which is dehydrating).
This thought never hit me when I lived in America, but now it struck me hard: Life in many U.S. cities is extremely fragile. Much of the abundance and convenience of city life is pure illusion, conjured up by a system of underground pipes that deliver water to your home and another set of pipes that magically dispose of your flushed liquid waste. A set of wires brings electricity that makes your home livable (at the great expenditure of energy for heat or cooling), and cheap gasoline makes it possible for fresh produce to magically appear in the grocery stores that feed us all with food from who-knows-where.
Take away any one of these — electricity, water, sewers, fuel, food — and virtually every U.S. city becomes an urban death trap for all its citizens.
It’s not just Tucson, either: The entire American Southwest is extremely fragile when it comes to supporting life. The same story holds true with Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego and many other cities and towns of all sizes. The population currently living in the Southwest USA is far greater than what those geographic regions could support on their own: It is the mass-importation of water, electricity, food and fuel that makes life possible there.
And all those mass imports are extremely fragile.
The flipside of this problem exists across Northern USA and Canada, where extremely cold winters make these regions unlivable without the steady importation of heating fuel. Most Americans and Canadians would freeze to death in less than a week if left without some ability to heat their homes during a severe winter freeze. Very few people (in the cities especially) still have free-standing, non-electric wood-burning stoves or effective fireplaces that can keep them warm and alive during such an outage. Most of the younger generation has never even chopped wood! (And wouldn’t know where to start if they had to…)
Read the rest by clicking here.
Take Notice of the Sustainability Factor and the Disposable Economy of the World, Part III Posted on December 3rd, 2009
by Aaron Turpen, NaturalNews.com
The human population currently thrives on a basic food source: grains. Our current food paradigm requires that we have wheat for our breads, barley for our animals, rice for our tables, and soy for our animals and food additives. Corn is another important food source, especially in the Americas. All five of these food sources make up the bulk of the world`s diet at present.
To grow these crops using our modern, industrial methods requires a lot of resources. It requires oil for the machinery and transportation, artificial fertilizers (nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous), and water.
All of these crops, cereal grains especially, require potassium (commonly called “potash”) to thrive, especially when farmed industrially. Potash is literally mined out of the ground (it is a mineral). Between 2006 and 2008, the price of potash went up by 500%. It’s still rising. We`re running out of “easy” potash.
Water is another resource growing more scarce. The planet is 2/3 water, but only 2% of that is fresh water. Most of that fresh water is polar ice, glaciers, and in the atmosphere. What`s left is fresh water that we can utilize. It cycles at a given rate. Currently, we use 30% more than there is in America and 50% more than there is in China, and it gets little better as we circle the globe. Most of the excess comes from aquifers, which are quickly drying up.
Oil has peaked, which leaves nitrogen. Nitrogen we aren`t running out of, but we’re heavily over-using it. Again, because of industrial farming. Nitrogen is so cheaply acquired that farmers can dump it by the train load on their fields without concern. The excess runs off into groundwater and eventually into rivers and the ocean.
At the mouth of the Mississippi River, where it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico, there is a huge “dead zone.” It stretches from Louisiana to Houston, Texas and out into the Gulf nearly five miles from its source. That dead zone is due to all of that nitrogen raging into and down the Mississippi and into the Gulf.
The nitrogen causes an explosion of algal growth, soaking it up. That algae breathes the oxygen in the water, sucking it up at such a rate that anything else that requires oxygen (basically everything living) either dies or has to leave. These dead zones are at the mouth of nearly every river in the world.
Many people are under the impression that we can just magically switch from our current, industrial methods of farming to organic and more sustainable methods whenever we need to. This is not the case. Even disregarding USDA Organic requirements, it takes several years (close to a decade) for a farm to move from synthetic fertilization to organic methods. The soil requires time to recover.
So, we face a big decision as humans. Do we continue as we are and eventually starve to death when the resources start to run out? Or do we change our ways and hope that in the next generation (or less), we can reverse the trend and become sustainable?
It`s not a question for governments; it`s a question for people. We all have to change, individually and in communities. That change can`t come by government coercion. It comes through personal life choices that you must make, your family must make, your neighbors, friends, and community must make.
It starts, however, with you. Are you sustainable yet?
Take Notice of the Sustainability Factor and the Disposable Economy of the World, Part I Posted on November 27th, 2009
by Aaron Turpen, NaturalNews.com
We are facing a world-wide disaster on a scale much larger than any Al Gore could ever have imagined. This disaster is not the climate; it’s not a meteor, and it’s not a pandemic. The disaster is ourselves.
Every aspect of human endeavor requires resources. We need food to eat and live, water to drink, materials for building homes, and so forth. School children are told that Americans are only about 5% of the world’s population, but we consume almost a third of the world’s resources.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg. The Chinese use more than we do and India is working hard to catch up. Europe is almost on par with the U.S. and the rest of the world wants desperately to have the rich Western lifestyle of prosperity.
The problem isn’t the prosperity; it’s the consumption. Think of just oil, which by nearly every measure is the anchor resource from which all others flow in our modern economy. At current growth rates, China will consume 98 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. Current world production is about 85 74 million per day. Even conservative estimates show that we won’t be able to meet that demand and everyone else’s too.
On the other end of the spectrum, we’re getting close to drowning in our own garbage. Mountains of it occupy dumping sites around the globe. New York City ships 12,000 tons of garbage to places as far away as Virginia. Athens, Greece ran out of space for their 6,000 ton daily refuse pileups and had to beg the EU to help them.
There are floating refuse dumps in both the Pacific and the Atlantic. The more well-known Pacific Ocean garbage collection is the size of Texas. The smaller, but no less disturbing pileup, in the Atlantic is at the point where currents meet in the Bermuda Triangle.
Our population continues to grow at a fast pace and is up to 7 billion people. Modern, industrial farming methods allow us to produce enough food to actually feed all of them, but the process of industrial farming is perilously close to collapse. It’s unsustainable on several fronts.
Every single thing we do requires resources. Your food, your clothing, your cell phone, your pets, even the very air you breathe require resources to exist. The problem is we practice no husbandry over those resources. We merely consume.
Our cycle of consumerism cannot last much longer. If we continue at our current pace, we will soon have stripped away the resources that are easy to get. The harder resources are to acquire, the more they cost. The more they cost, the more difficult they are to utilize.
If we don’t have cheap oil, cheap potassium, cheap nitrogen, and cheap water, we cannot grow food through industrial farming. If we cannot grow food through industrial farming, most of the world will starve. Those are the basic facts. Food is only one facet of the problem, but it is by far the largest in terms of humanity’s existence.
We must make ourselves sustainable. We can’t do this through government; it must be done individually and in communities. Governments can only force; they cannot change. Much of our sustainability woes are due to governments anyway, so relying on them to change it is asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
The Sustainability Factor – Booklet Now Available Posted on November 1st, 2009
Earlier in October, I told you I was working on a booklet/white paper about sustainability. Although it took a few days longer than I’d expected, I’ve completed that booklet and now present it to you for reading. The booklet is in e-book format (PDF) and formatted to be read on-screen with each page being about a screen-full on a 15″ monitor at 800dpi.
The booklet is titled The Sustainability Factor: What Sustainability Means and Why You Need to Know.
The booklet is pretty short and presents just enough evidence to get you thinking along new lines in terms of environmental endeavor. Most of the environmental focus is on man-made global warming (aka climate change) and I think there’s a serious mistake in that. Climate change may or may not be a big deal, but even if it is, there are far worse things looming than that and if we take care of those things, global warming would be largely dealt with simultaneously.
The current work towards eliminating CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is going down the wrong track and if that’s really a problem, fixing it (the way that’s being proposed) will do nothing to fix these other problems that will hit us long before projected global warming disasters do.
Long story short, folks, in the next twenty years, we’re going to have world-wide crop failures and be looking at starvation and drought for all humanity. No earthquakes, floods, rising oceans, lost ice caps, 2 degree temperature increases, or whatever else are going to be the main concern.
The concern will be how we’re going to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, find something to drink, etc. Global temperatures be damned. Global warming will only make this worse, but won’t be the core of the problem. The core of the problem is peak productions and sudden falloffs in resource availability. Not just Peak Oil, friends.
Peak Everything.
Of course, this little missive isn’t going to convince you. That’s why you should download this short (20-page) PDF and read the booklet. The Sustainability Factor gives a start on the research you can do and I’ll bet that, after you’ve done so, you’ll stop paying attention to Al Gore, “cap and trade,” and Copenhagen and realize what we face and what needs to change right now, starting today.
The booklet is free of charge. If it opens your eyes and you’d like me to continue researching and writing information on this subject, please consider donating. I did this research and wrote this booklet on my own time, voluntarily. I’m offering it to you free of charge, to spread and disseminate to your friends, family, co-workers, elected representatives, whomever you’d like. You can even link to it from this site and save uploading it to your own server or website (cover graphic included).
Here’s the links to download this book and the cover (shown above):
http://www.aaronsenvironmental.com/books/sustainability-factor.pdf
http://www.aaronsenvironmental.com/books/sustainability-factor-cover.jpg
As always, I’m open to your criticisms, kudos, etc.
Serious Sustainability – Food Posted on October 31st, 2009
This video highlights one of the major problems that humanity will face in the near future. I agree with the Professor’s analysis of everything except his solutions (at the end). The heavy hand of government is, for the most part, what got us into the mess we’re in. Otherwise, this is very good information and points out the grave situation we face.
You’ll find my solution to this problem, and many other, related problems, in my soon-to-release booklet The Sustainability Factor.
