At least once a week I wonder if I'm crazy. Because it seems to me that there are natural limits to consumption. That there's a point where we drown in concrete, tweak the climatic knobs a little too much, extract all the gallium and indium and can't make more solar panels.
And I don't know many people who worry about this stuff. When I bring it up the response is something along the lines of
— Nah, we're clever, we'll think of something. We always have.
Legend has it that the game of chess was invented by the brahmin Sissa, who worked for an Indian king. Delighted with the game, the king told Sissa to claim any reward he desired.
My needs are modest, he said. Simply place a single grain of wheat on the first square of the chess board. Two grains on the next. Four on the next, and so on throughout each of the board's 64 squares. And that will be my reward.
The king snorted and laughed and agreed with a wave of his hand.
Eventually it became clear that the quantity of grain on the board would surpass all the wheat ever produced. The number amounts to roughly 2000 times the wheat grown globally in 2020. In some tellings of the story, Sissa becomes the king's most trusted advisor. In others, he is executed.
Herein lies the power of exponential growth1.
In fourth grade I spent Tuesday afternoons at Kyle Broxterman's house. Kyle had a collection of longboards and lived at the top of a huge hill. We'd race down the hill luge-style, gradually picking up speed. Sometimes you could scrape your shoes on the ground to slow down. Other times we crashed into parked cars. Somehow we always emerged in one piece. But more than anything I remember the terror of the rare moment you exceeded escape velocity — too late to bail, the board sailed ever faster and you could not stop it. At this moment in history, I think about that feeling often.
Here’s where we sit on a number of different curves. What might they look like in twenty years? Exponential functions are not intuitive. Flying past the end of your friend's cul-de-sac into traffic is.
So the problem at the heart of it all is this: too many humans, consuming too much stuff, within a global economic system that demands they keep consuming more stuff or else the whole thing falls apart.
A finite planet eventually corrects exponential growth of any kind.
In 1972 a group of systems theorists at MIT developed a simulation that mapped out what humanity's path forward might look like, examining pollution, non-renewable resources, industrial output, food production, etc. The brilliance of the model lay in their focus on the dynamic interaction between variables and subsystems rather than the variables themselves.
Their results, which took shape in the classic Limits to Growth2, have been both maligned and ignored, but never refuted. In every scenario, population and industrial output eventually fall — they only differ in when, and the steepness of the curve.
The researchers countered the typical We’ll think of something retort, factoring in scenarios of remarkable human ingenuity, potential technological breakthroughs, and large deposits of natural resources we might stumble across3. In all cases the downward side of the graph is never avoided, only delayed. Sooner or later we surpass the ability of planetary sources to provide materials and energy or that of planetary sinks to absorb pollution and waste.
The shape of the curve matters — the longer you wait to dig your heels in and slow the longboard, the more chaotic the descent. At the bottom we'll find a harder, more crowded, more degraded natural world than the one that existed when the first black gold spewed out from the ground. But it’s been nearly 50 years since Limits to Growth was published and I have a hard time envisioning a period of managed degrowth ever happening. Suggesting such a thing is a great way to avoid getting elected.
Ronald Reagan once said there are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.
It's a damn shame I can't eat imagination, or burn wonder to stay warm.
It's a damn shame nobody listens to prophets either. Humans have always had a frustrating tendency to ignore the Cassandra, the voice crying out in the wilderness. It's difficult to wrench your mind outside the narrative of an age, contextually all-encompassing as it tends to be —and in this particular Faustian mythology we’ve swapped God for Progress, the seductive teleological view that we are history’s favored children marching towards an ever more prosperous future.
In Charles Baudelaire's story The Generous Gambler, the protagonist gambles away his soul to the devil. The devil goes on to explain that he feared for his power only once, upon hearing a preacher cry
— My dear brethren, do not ever forget, when you hear the progress of lights praised, that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!
There's a reason why certain questions are not on the table in this mythology. We scream at each other across the dinner table over the narrow range of issues the media has presented like Toastmasters prompts, and forget the questions on which all else hinges4.
— Are we living beyond our means? Must we lower our expectations and live with less, both individually and as a society?
— Do we have any responsibility at all to other species, to ecosystems? Does an armadillo have the right to exist?
— Why do we only worry about resource availability for this generation? Why do our climate models all stop at the year 2100? My grandchildren will be alive then, and will expect the world to be habitable.
It isn't all nefarious. While blaming the powerful is convenient, the looming descent is psychologically subtle, a wicked problem due to the way it creeps low through the scrub of the subconscious, unnoticed until it's too late. Humans harbor an inspiring ability to rally around a smoking gun — we've shown the ability to shift gears fast in response to specific problems. That pesky hole we tore into the ozone layer has been closing up since we outlawed CFCs, for example.
But the present weighs heavier on the human mind than the future5, and we find it hard to comprehend tipping points and systems that prop each other up until one cracks a bit too much.
And in a global society those who see the signs first are the ones with the smallest ability to respond or call attention to it.
Because, at least for awhile, those lucky enough to live in wealthy enclaves in the cities of the west do not have to look at the waste piling up outside the gates, can choose to believe that whispers of supply chain shortages speak of a temporary phenomenon. It's easier to claim that all is well when you can still buy a latte, travel by plane and enjoy lunch at the lodge after a day on the ski slopes. Feedback signals are distorted and delayed when the externalities of an affluent life reach those living it last.
Picture a factory farm that wafts a horrifying stench through the valley below. As John Rember puts it, To the extent you can buy reality off — that you can use money to buy a house ten miles upwind... you can say that reality is for people who lack money.6
Recent analyses of the Limits to Growth model have shown we continue to track very closely to the business as usual scenario. In this scenario things plunge somewhere between 2015 and 20407.
Ultimately it's clear that one day we will enjoy less material wealth. But we might become rich in other ways, climb out from our plastic sarcophagus to find aspects of our humanity that have been ground up in the machine of progress.
My life is not better because I've seen Paris or can eat tomatoes in January. But it is better because I know the names of trees and which berries are edible, because I can trade duck eggs for goat milk and elderberry wine for dried nettles, because I can dig clay and sand from the earth and build things with it.
Who knows how all this will go? On the bright side, the breakdown of a culture usually doesn't happen all at once — stretches of partial recovery punctuate periods of crisis that knock a few more bricks from the tower of civilizational complexity8. It took 300 years for the Roman Empire to crumble9. Taking the long view, one might regard the 2008 recession and COVID pandemic as crises on the way down, with a not quite complete recovery in between.
Once you accept all this and move past the fear, steeling your mind against future hardship, you might find inspiration in those years in between. You might seize chances to adapt, keeping one foot in the old world and one in the new. Learn what a great horned owl sounds like and how to process acorns, explore the potential for decentralized local currencies. New paradigms arise from the ideas lying around when the old ones fall away10.
I don't think I'm crazy.
I often envision the ouroboros, that ancient mystic image of the curled serpent eating his tail. Persistent throughout an uncanny number of cultures, it can represent the beginning and end of time, the philosopher's stone in alchemy, the nesting doll like rings of the universe as it leaps in scale from atoms to galaxies...
For Francisco Varela it represented autopoiesis, that mysterious ability of living systems like cells to create their own components. Order arising from chaos and raw potential.
In it I can’t help but see the adaptive cycle, a model of ecosystem dynamics. A forest logged or burned is ripe for colonization by opportunistic pioneer species, who prepare the soil and create niches. The land gradually shifts from this period of reorganization to that of growth or exploitation as shrubs and larger animals move in, piggy-backing on existing relationships. Eventually trees grow tall and the canopy layer fills in, the available light and water decreases, and the system grows rigid, vulnerable for fire or flood to shatter the system back into building blocks.
Civilizations work in much the same way. We've grown fat on the spoils of empire, and like the serpent we will consume ourselves. But the circle will begin again, and amidst the release perhaps we can save those things worth saving, and regain the parts of our humanity we've already lost.
See this lecture by the University of Colorado physics professor Al Bartlett for some clever and easy to understand examples of how exponential growth works.
Donella Meadows, one of the authors of Limits to Growth, also wrote Thinking in Systems, which is a great introduction for understanding the dynamics of how all this works.
Within the allure of technological breakthroughs hides the Jevons' Paradox. Old Willy Jevons looked at coal use in the 1800s after the advent of James Watt's new steam engine and found that as technology gets more efficient, it becomes cheaper and more accessible to the average joe. At that point usage explodes and it colonizes the economy like an invasive species. Examples of this in modern society are legion — we burn more coal now than we did in the Coal Age, and more firewood than when it was the main source of energy and heating. Solar panels haven’t led to a decrease in fossil fuel use, and so on.
For more on this, read Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky.
Discounting the future is a known psychological tendency of humans to treat present worries and opportunities as far more important than those in the future.
A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, John Rember.
The most recent analysis was completed in 2020 by Gaya Branderhorst: Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 Model With Empirical Data.
See John Michael Greer's work on how civilizations decline (it rarely involves an all at once apocalypse), including The Ecotechnic Future, The Long Descent, and his theory of how civilizations undergo catabolic collapse.
Simon Sarris has written an intriguing (and, I think, valid) critique of Stoicism, and how as a philosophy it is strictly defensive, and feels incomplete as a result. He writes about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, how to him it feels brooding and gloomy, and describes the context of when he was writing it — at the end of Pax Romana, as the Roman Empire was just falling from its peak, and trouble was gathering on the edges.
This concept actually comes from the conservative economist Milton Friedman.
"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
Naomi Klein explores this in more detail in her excellent book The Shock Doctrine.