January 11, 2012 was the 125th anniversary of the birth of author, scientist, ecologist, forester, and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold professed an ethics founded on the biotic community – a community encompasses and includes humans:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Leopold rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, who pursued a conservationism based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold was instead an advocate of wilderness, and of its conservation for its own sake. For Leopold, the relationship of humans to the land was an ethical one.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Leopold saw that humans are part of an ecological community. He saw that humans can thrive only if the entirety of the larger community of which we a part thrives.

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Leopold preached “an intelligent humility toward man’s place in nature”, and warned that we should not stray too far from the land.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Leopold was a prophet for our times. We should have listened.

A study by Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Fleming at the U.S. Army War College concludes the volatility we’ve seen in oil prices and the lack of increased production as a response to high prices is evidence that we’re hitting geological limits to global oil production.

The excerpt below is from the abstract of the study “Considering oil production variance as an indicator of peak production“:

The primary finding was unprecedented statistical variance in oil production rates as well as in oil prices beginning approximately 2005 to 2010. In the case of oil production rates, variance is at historically low levels. In the case of oil prices, variance is at historically high levels. The data indicate a new higher order of inelasticity between oil price and oil production.

These findings support peak oil forecasts in the range of 2005 to 2010 and together provide strong evidence that geological factors could presently be limiting world oil production.

The inelasticity between oil price and oil production Fleming talks about is evidenced by the wild swings in oil prices over the last six years, as seen in this graph posted by Stuart Staniford at Early Warning . . .

. . . while the lack of response from oil producers can be seen in this graph posted by Gail Tverberg at Our Finite World showing production from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since 1965.

MENA Monthly crude oil production, based on EIA data.

MENA’s oil consumption is rising, so even if MENA’s oil production could rise, that does not mean that oil exports would rise. For example, Saudi Aramco projects Saudi Arabia’s domestic consumption will reach an equivalent of 8.3 million barrels by 2028, more than double the 3.4 million barrels equivalent in 2009 – leaving precious little for export.

Ecological economist David Stern recently published a paper on the essential role of energy in economic growth, aptly titled ‘The Role of Energy in Economic Growth“. Stern observes that mainstream economic theory pays no attention to the role of energy; however, physics shows that energy is necessary for economic production and, therefore, economic growth. The “synthesis” model proposed by Stern explains the industrial revolution as a releasing of the constraints on economic growth due to the development of methods of using coal and the discovery of new fossil fuel resources.

Climate considerations aside, for business as usual – the continuation of economic growth – it’s bad enough that the world is bumping up against limits to oil production volume; however, the energy returned on energy investmen (EROI) is dropping, too – it’s costing more and more energy to produce the same amount of oil. A new study titled “A New Long Term Assessment of Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for U.S. Oil and Gas Discovery and Production” finds:

EROI for finding oil and gas decreased exponentially from 1200:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in 2007. The EROI for production of the oil and gas industry was about 20:1 from 1919 to 1972, declined to about 8:1 in 1982 when peak drilling occurred, recovered to about 17:1 from 1986–2002 and declined sharply to about 11:1 in the mid to late 2000s. The slowly declining secular trend has been partly masked by changing effort: the lower the intensity of drilling, the higher the EROI compared to the secular trend. Fuel consumption within the oil and gas industry grew continuously from 1919 through the early 1980s, declined in the mid-1990s, and has increased recently, not surprisingly linked to the increased cost of finding and extracting oil.

A new paper by economist James Hamilton titled Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources, and Economic Growth documents that a key feature of the historical growth in production has been exploitation of new geographic areas rather than application of better technology to existing sources, and suggests that the end of that era is nigh. Hamilton shows that economic dislocations have historically followed temporary oil supply disruptions.  He concludes:

If the peaking of global production results in further big increases in the price of oil . . . the economic consequences of reduced energy use would have to be significant.

* * *

If the future decades look like the last 5 years, we are in for a rough time.

Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource that was extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It is not clear how easy it will be to adapt to the end of that era of good fortune.

Tom Murphy writes that we now find ourselves in an energy trap.

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability—first in petroleum—our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but . . . energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term—effectively steepening the decline—for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

A rough time, indeed. Effectively coming to grips with this new reality won’t be from the top down; it’s futile to look for or expect political solutions. Rather, doing so will require the kind of “magic” that begins with the individual, and works outward from there. It’s not the destination that matters, but rather the journey. And anybody can take that first step.

Writer and homesteader Ellen LaConte has a new book titled Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it.

The book first diagnoses our condition . . .

Economic and polar meltdowns, inept, corrupt and bankrupt governments, long-term double-digit unemployment, climate instability, failing social services, collapsing ecosystems, a widening wealth-poverty gap, unprecedented species extinctions, mass migrations, peak fossil fuels, religious, ethnic and resource wars, spreading hunger, poverty, chaos and disease. . .

Why is so much going wrong everywhere at once? The global economy has gone viral. It is ravaging Earth’s immune system, triggering a Critical Mass of mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social, cultural and political crises that are compromising the ability of Earth’s human and natural communities to provide for, protect and heal themselves.

The prognosis? If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, Life will last but Life as we know it—and a lot of us—won’t.

. . . and then offers a course of treatment:

What should we do instead? We should remember that Life rules, we don’t. The global economy operates as if it were larger than Life. It isn’t. As if it had multiple Earth’s to supply its appetites. It doesn’t. . .

Among the rules written into Life’s Economic Survival Protocol are local self-reliance, intercommunity and regional functional cooperation, non-carbon energy sourcing, resource conservation, sharing and recycling, and organically democratic methods of self-organization and governance. . .

We can learn Life’s rules and adopt lifeways that are at once authentically conservative, deeply green and profoundly liberating.

Robert Jensen interviews LaConte at Energy Bulletin. She reminds us something we seem to have forgotten – that humans are but bit players in a much bigger system.

The largest context – the largest high-functioning complex system within which we live our lives – is not the nation, nation-state system or global economic system but Life itself, the whole-earth, emergent and self-maintaining system of natural communities and ecosystems. That system, the ecosphere, teaches us the physical laws, the relationships and behaviors discovered in physics, biology and ecology and exemplified by the so-called “mystical” spiritual teachers, that we have to obey if we want to remain viable as a species.

The global economy has become pathological and is undermining the ability of human and natural communities to provide for, protect, defend and heal themselves – and here’s where LaConte invokes the analogy of AIDS/HIV:

I think we are presently at the HIV stage of the disease; it hasn’t quite yet become full-blown planetary AIDS. But I insist in the book that doing more of what we’ve been doing to exceed Earth’s physical means as well as our own fiscal ones — in other words, trying to heal and grow the very kind and scope of economy that caused this disease — is akin to injecting a patient who already has HIV with more HIV. That’s precisely what we’re doing.

Lynn Margolis argued in Symbiotic Planet that much of evolution on Earth is better explained by symbiosis – “the living together in physical contact of organisms of different species” – than by competition. LaConte similarly sees life on Earth as a cross-species, communitarian phenomenon. We’re not the “masters of the universe” we’ve come to believe we are, but rather a small part of a larger system. The most important and hardest lesson we will need to learn as a species is self-limitation. We have to stop behaving as if we were larger than or apart from Life and become constructive participants in it. If we fail to do so – if we don’t choose to transform ourselves and our lifeways – Life will force us to. Life rules, we don’t, and Life will not hesitate to rule harshly and even rule us out.

How can we possibly give up on economic growth? LaConte suggests focusing on what we need, as human beings.

Like everyone else, I need food, clean air and water, clothing, some sort of shelter, preferably warm in winter, occasional medicine or medical care, spiritual and physical exercise, colleagues, friends, family, if possible books, lots of quiet, a garden to work in, woods and wild not too far off. To love and be loved. To carry no debt. To believe there is some sort of livable, desirable future for the next seven generations. . . . To be happy, I need good work to do, work that I feel is, in my late mentor Helen Nearing’s terms, “contributory.”

We could all agree to get to work to fulfill that vision.

The Little Book of Life’s Rules for Surviving Critical Mass, a pocket version of key economic survival principles and practices culled from Life Rules, is soon to be serialized in posts at LaConte’s website.

Obama is touting his deal with the Republicans as “stimulus” – as a spur to economic growth. Leaving aside the fact that the deal is a very good deal for corporations and the rich but rotten for ordinary Americans, the gamble is this: paying off the huge debt we already have, plus the additional $1 trillion in debt that’s being taken on, will be made possible if we can just get the economy moving again, back on the growth track.

Dan Weintraub argues at The Automatic Earth that the folks in charge really know better. They’re embracing “extend and pretend” fiscal policies in the present because they are deathly afraid of the alternative. They’re kicking the fiscal can down the road for a while longer so as head off the discontent and civil strife that always accompanies increases in austerity along with its attendant human suffering. The ruling elite understands all too well that present fiscal and monetary policies will fail to fix the underlying and most fundamental and socially destructive of all economic ills – those of an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and the absolute disaster caused by an ever-shrinking, formerly self-sustaining American middle class. According to Weintraub, Krugman advocates for, and Bernanke is pursuing, policies whose aim is to keep civil strife from destroying, in the near term, the very fabric of American society. Weintraub errs, I think, only in failing to include Obama in his circle of conspirators.

As Tom Whipple observes, what we’re experiencing isn’t a routine downturn in the business cycle which can be cured by Keynesian stimuli favored by the Democrats or tax cuts favored by the Republicans. Rather, it’s the ending of a period of 200 years of abundant energy that allowed us to build an extremely complex civilization based on dozens of interrelated systems without which we can no longer live. The most important and the most overlooked system is the global biosphere. The consequences of its devastation for humans and all life on Earth are only now, too late, beginning to become evident.  At the same time our very complex civilization has begun to exhaust the sources of energy and numerous other raw materials that built and maintained it.

In our politics, we are struggling to return to a civilization which is no longer possible – and the inevitable failure of that effort is likely to be explosive. Whipple seconds Weintraub’s warnings of impending social chaos:

If anyone thinks the employment situation is difficult, wait a few years until the very high priced motor fuels makes discretionary car travel unaffordable. Millions upon millions of jobs in the retail, travel, hospitality, recreational, and dozens of other industries will be lost.The current efforts by various levels of government to stimulate job creation or save people from home foreclosures will prove to be ridiculously inadequate. A completely new paradigm of what we do to sustain life is going to have to emerge or things will become far worse than most of us have ever known. Modern civilization simply cannot stand a situation in which a substantial share of its people is destitute. The potential for social disorder is too great.

“A completely new paradigm” – doesn’t that sound lovely? Carolyn Baker is more blunt: what we are experiencing is the collapse of industrial civilization. And while we we can wax eloquent about rebirth, we absolutely refuse to acknowledge the death that makes it possible.  We don’t dare talk about the pain and suffering that collapse will entail. Any transition to a new paradigm of resilience and self-sufficiency won’t be accomplished without great suffering and painful loss. The path leads where it will, whether we like it or not. As Baker reminds us, transition requires an internal journey as well – a journey of the human spirit, the hero’s journey. And each of us is being called.

Boreal forests and peatlands store more carbon than any other ecosystem, far more than tropical forests which have received more attention.

Boreal forests, found in Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and parts of the United States, cover 11 percent of the earth and store 22 percent of all carbon on the land surface in soil, permafrost, peatlands and wetlands. But this carbon is “the carbon the world forgot,” says this report from the Canadian Boreal Initiative. In cold climate boreal forests, much of the carbon in vegetation never fully decomposes and is gradually pushed into thick layers of peat and permafrost and stored for thousands of years. But this stored carbon is released as greenhouse gases when the forests are logged or soils are disturbed by logging, mining, and other industrial activities, including tar sands extraction and processing.

While boreal forests are under attack, the Greenland ice sheet is loosing mass at an accelerating rate. So reports a new study published in the journal Science. The mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland’s fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometer of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year. The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause a global sea level rise of seven metres. Since 2000, the ice sheet has lost about 1500 Gt in total, representing on average a global sea level rise of about half a millimetre per year, or 5 mm since 2000.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reports that a warming climate has resulted in twice as many daily record high temperatures than record lows over the last decade across the continental United States.

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Much of the nation’s warming is occurring at night, when temperatures are dipping less often to record lows. This finding is consistent with years of climate model research showing that higher overnight lows should be expected with climate change. The scientists’ modeling projects that in all likely scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions, record daily highs should increasingly outpace record lows over time. If nations continue to increase their emissions of greenhouse gases in a “business as usual” scenario, the U.S. ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.

I am frequently asked why this blog seems to publish almost nothing but discouraging, depressing news. My answer: because that’s the reality we have to come to grips with. We have no alternative but to embrace that reality and deal with it as best and as gracefully as we can.

Joanna Macy in an article at Yes Magazine encourages us to embrace our feelings of despair,  anguish and outrage at the fact that we are destroying our world:

Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit—or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival. . . .

Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from getting lost in grief.

Macy’s use of the word intention encompasses the ancient meaning of the word faith: the duty of fulfilling one’s trust, from the Latin fides and its root fider. This sense of faith as “loyalty based on promise or duty” is preserved today in “keep one’s faith”; in the Marine Corps slogan “semper fidelis (semper fi); and in common usage of faithful and faithless, which contain no notion of any divinity (faith in the religious sense of “mental acceptance of something as true” stems only from about the 14th century).

What is required from us is faith: the resolve to embrace whatever fate awaits us and do the best we can, no matter what the outcome may be.

Speaking the truth is essential to our task. As Macy concludes:

Speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive, charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive now, to take part in this planetary adventure.

Auden Schendler writes at Orion that coming to grips with our energy and climate situation requires not just political will and corporate action. It will require unyielding commitment and dedication on the part of humanity to literally remaking society. And remaking society requires that we renew our relationship with the divine.

Schendler quotes Barry Lopez:

“One of the oldest dreams of mankind is to find a dignity that might include all living things. And one of the greatest of human longings must be to bring such dignity to one’s own dreams, for each to find his or her own life exemplary in some way.”

Schendler I think rightly sees this longing for a right relationship with creation, with ultimate reality, as a fundamental aspect of human experience.

The vision of a sustainable society, with its implications for equity, social justice, happiness, meaning, tolerance, and hope, embodies the aspirations of most religious traditions: a way of living at peace with each other, the world, and our consciences; a graceful existence; a framework for a noble life. Most religions originally evolved to meet a basic human need for community, understanding, and mission. Religion, in its original intent, and the sustainability movement seem to be sourced from the same ancient human wellspring.

Schendler says religion needn’t be divisive. Even atheists share the idea of the sacred.

When you talk about God as ultimate reality or the sacred, and if you see religion as a way of relating to the world in a dignified way—a broker for grace—then the religion discussion becomes much less charged. Nobody’s trying to get you to believe something ridiculous. Instead, we’re simply talking about a philosophy of living.

Remaking society requires that we bring the idea of the sacred back into every aspect of our lives, and especially our working lives.

[The role of the business community], in part, is providing safe, gratifying work to members of the community, creating fulfilling jobs about which people can be proud. Perhaps business can be graceful. . .

Making the costs of air pollution, climate change, and fisheries destruction part of the business equation—and recognizing the true value of the natural resources we use as feedstocks—would in fact be a divine act: it would mean the business community finally seeing not just the bottom line but the entire world as sacred. It would mean seeing the dignity of the world, the harm in damaging it, and the vision of a sustainable future.

Addressing our energy and climate situation requires that we let go of our attachments and illusions and see the world as sacred, and come to understand that our practice – our everyday lives, lived with attention – is to cultivate an understanding of and relationship with the divine.

Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights reminds us that we shouldn’t be too attached to our industrial age.

Industrial civilization arose as a result of our species taking advantage of an opportunity for energy gain. But like all species, humans and their societies are not immune to expansions and contractions. As Heraclitus said 2,500 years ago, there is nothing permanent except change.

Kobb argues we need not judge the fossil fuel age as either good or bad. It just was. But can we really be so sanguine about what we’ve unleashed?

At the Paleocene/Eocene boundary 55.8 million years ago, global temperatures rose by about 6 °C over 20,000 years, with a corresponding rise in sea level as the whole of the oceans warmed. The rate of carbon addition to the atmosphere almost equaled the rate at which carbon is being released into the atmosphere today through anthropogenic activity.

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) climate change event was accompanied by the extinction of numerous deep-sea benthic foraminifera and a major turnover in mammalian life on land which is coincident with the emergence of many of today’s major mammalian orders. A similar event today will surely have similarly radical consequences for life on Earth.

It’s one thing to withhold moral judgment for actions which are beyond one’s understanding or control. Plants and animals have had major and even transformative impacts on their environments throughout evolutionary history.  We don’t blame them for Earth’s changes. But are humans free from moral obligation and judgment when they are or should be aware of the effect of their actions, when those actions lead to the extinction of thousands of species including perhaps their own, and when they have the ability to change their behavior?

Perhaps from the Olympian heights of a future civilization – should one, human or not, emerge – it will be possible to look back on humans’ disruption of their Earthly environment with equanimity. In retrospect, it will seem obvious that humans could not do otherwise. But that humanity could rise to the challenge and avoid climate catastrophe would seem equally obvious, should that come to pass.

It will be possible for humans to successfully change the course of history and avert climate catastrophe only if we can let go of our attachment to our fossil-fuel dependent civilization.

Kobb concludes that we have to let go of our attachment to the industrial age before we’ll be able to move beyond it.

“If we could come to accept that our current industrial age is just a phase, ephemeral like all ages, neither a triumph which must be defended in its entirety at all costs, nor a mistake which must be allowed to collapse, nor a system that can be redeemed with just a few adjustments, we could learn to let go of it as it recedes without rejecting aspects of it that might prove to be instructive or useful. We could then move on to our next task, creating a new phase of human existence on planet Earth within limits we can no longer ignore.”

Letting go of attachment – to wealth, possessions, power, the self – is nothing less than the spiritual quest carried within the human breast since humans first drew breath.

Even Joseph Romm is starting to get all preachy. He invokes the Book of Daniel to remind us that our religious teachings are replete with lessons of the consequences of attaching our devotion to material things.

In short, the time to act is yesterday. Facing catastrophes of Biblical scale, I make only a small apology to Omar Khayam:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”

Albert Bartlett points out that the recommendations for solving the problems caused by population growth – including peak oil and global warming – almost never include the recommendation that we advocate stopping population growth. Political correctness dictates that we never mention overpopulation in the U.S. and the world.

“We can demonstrate that the Earth is overpopulated by noting the following:

“A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH: If any fraction of the observed global warming can be attributed to the actions of humans, then this, by itself, constitutes clear and compelling evidence that the human population, living as we do, has exceeded the Carrying Capacity of the Earth, a situation that is clearly not sustainable.

“As a consequence it is AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH that all proposals or efforts at the local, national or global levels to solve the problems of global warming are serious intellectual frauds if they fail to advocate that we address the fundamental cause of global warming namely overpopulation.”

One reason this is so stems from the liberal faith in equality and progress. Those who advocate for limiting population are usually rich and white, while those to be limited are poor and dark-skinned. And aren’t the poor and dark-skinned entitled to live as well as the rich and light-skinned?

Rowan Williams observes that the liberal and progressive movements arose in reaction to conservatives, who recognized the reality of limits. Liberals objected to the political reality that limits applied only to the poor and powerless, not the rich and powerful.

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This excerpt from an article by David Korten in Yes! Magazine (reprinted at Alternet) sums it up pretty well. We in the U.S. have accumulated a lot of bad karma.

“Cheap oil provided an energy subsidy that defined the wars, economies, settlements, values, and lifestyles of the 20th century. The result was a century of wasteful extravagance and inefficiency that encouraged us to squander virtually all Earth’s resources — including water, land, forests, fisheries, soils, minerals, and natural waste recycling capacity. We are now waking up to the morning-after consequences of a brief but raucous party. These include depleted natural systems, unsustainable economies, an obsolete physical infrastructure, and a six-fold increase in the human population dependent on the diminished resources of a finite planet.”

Richard Heinberg asks:

“Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures.

“What do you get?

“Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it.”

Even as it seems that things are beginning to spin out of our control, we don’t know that it’s too late. We may be able to avoid catastrophic global warming. We may be able to make a controlled transition to renewable energy sources.

Heinberg points out that the way we decide to live our lives isn’t dependent on what an unknowable future holds:

“. . . there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant.

“Taking in traumatic information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.”