Just like that goofy Druid that tries to predict the future our author has taken a dive into the fanciful, silly church of slow collapse.
Normally, 'B' is great. Normally he sticks to fairly provable stuff -- stuff that has already happened or is so close that it is obvious that it will happen. This, was not in keeping with 'B's high standard.
I didn't interpret this essay as espousing a "slow collapse" scenario.
Rather, I viewed it as a post-collapse partial recovery, which, if humans have not completely extinguished themselves, seems likely.
The major premise seems to be that, post-collapse, low-technology materials will be readily available via salvage. "Fast crash" scenarios seem to always feature a "die off", which means more salvage materials for survivors. If the power grid goes down, one power substation and nearby aluminum window frames should do!
We have been on the same "doomer" sites for years now, and I have blasted you for little details about which we disagree too often. Since we are getting close to the end now, it seems that the little quibbles are just not that important. Anyhow, you make a good point.
Agreed. B, with this one you may have indulged a bit in overdooming. Our species has indeed overshot our resources; has indeed consumed the energy legacy that might have been left for future generations; the human future will be radically reduced in means; bronze and the reasoning behind it makes sense - but you are leaving out the eternal human capacity for forgetting, and restarting, and nature’s capacity for awesome regeneration.
In short, although our species doesn’t ‘deserve’ to survive, has fallen woefully short on virtually all moral metrics, and, eternally, may never learn - well earning our ‘disgust’ (rooted in our disappointment with ourselves) - yet Nature, like any true God, simply IS ….. far beyond OUR stories and conceptions.
The rain falls equally on the just and the unjust. The Tao remains unperturbed, no matter our temporal silliness. Nature brings the storms, and policies bring the catastrophes; yet ‘the journey of our history has not ceased. Earth turns us still towards the rising East.’ Life is bigger than us, including our stupidity.
Let us not be led astray in our reasonings by beginning the task with emotionally satisfying conclusions, and then secondarily assembling supporting evidence. Let the evidence lead the reasoning. You are good at that, B. Therein lies any useful sense-making that may transcend our ever-present, oh-so-human myopic self-congratulation.
Seems to me overall the elites shall preserve as much high tech as possible. Weapons as well. Elite enclaves exist. Shall continue to exist. I would argue that they anticipate collapse and try to game it, shape it, manage it. It is about the same as an organized tactical retreat. Apocalyptic climate collapse-outside of thermonuclear war and overwhelming climate engineering requires looking at the Sun and the Solar System. Man, puny man, comes and goes but the Earth abides. And men will adapt. Intelligence and imagination can find solutions unforseen.
"...even the gentlest societies will begin to disappear." -- Unfortunately, the gentlest societies are always the first to go. Those most willing to commit the worst atrocities are usually the "winners" in whatever competition / game is being played.
I think you're following the trajectory of our history of excess-energy.
In ecology, relationships in high-energy biomes are dominated by competition. But relationships in low-energy biomes seem to favour cooperation.
If, indeed, we are heading for a low-energy future, it could be that the "gentlest societies" will have an edge, co-operating to share precious energy resources, rather than fighting over prodigious energy resources.
Genghis Khan lived in low energy times; historians estimate that he and his armies killed is around 40 million people, roughly 10% of the world's population at the time. Scholars estimate that Genghis Khan may have killed three-fourths of the population of modern-day Iran during his war with the Khwarezmid Empire.
Gently, it doesn’t seem like you understand the ecological sense of the word ‘energy’ as it was being used here. The Holocene era has definitely been a high energy time, hence the expansion of all these conquering states compared to the more unstable and unpredictable Pleistocene, with only hunting and gathering.
In a time when one's riches were measured in goats, Genghis Khan was possibly the most energy-rich person on Earth!
How do you provision an army that stretches from the Pacific to the Baltic? You don't. Conquered locals won't cooperate, you can't commandeer much food outside of harvest season, and you cannot possibly carry enough food with you.
Khan travelled with thousands and thousands and thousands of goats. They happily grazed along the way, and they sustainably provided his troops with all manner of healthy dairy products and occasional meat. The role of "goatherd" was a high-level position, fairly safe from getting killed in battle.
This is not easy to tease out from history books, which will wax poetic about Khan's superior ambition, tactics, and strategy, but perhaps his greatest innovation that allowed him to conquer a continent was a portable, autonomous, self-maintaining and reproducing solar energy processor — the humble goat.
Interesting. I often find myself comparing the pros and cons of dairy vs meat animals from a hypothetical homesteading or settled permaculture pov. It hadn’t to occurred to me that dairy animals are superior from a nomadic standpoint, as you can do more with less. Or get more from less, as it were!
Pastoralism is often disregarded by anthropologists and historians who create the impression that we were all hunter-gatherers, then one day, put down our spears and started planting seeds.
The transition to agriculture seems to have taken thousands of years, and was uneven and spotty, with some areas transitioning back and forth, depending on food availability. And also, in-between, there was as much as 2,000 years (in some areas) of pastoralism, or nomadic herding, primarily of dairy ruminants.
It seems to me that dairy animals are a Permaculture win, as long as you can find multiple uses for them. Our goats gave us about eight cubic metres of manure a year, which we used to turn our hard clay into awesome loam in just a few years. They had long, happy lives.
I know some Permaculturists get multiple uses from meat animals, too, but I'd rather not kill them, which is perhaps just a conceit and luxury of our current energy-rich times.
But from a nomadic perspective, it seems to me that they're an even bigger win. Slaughtering, butchering, and meat preservation is a lot of work, compared to milking.
All good point here. Also interesting to look back at the hunter-gatherers who were domesticating plants (eg Ohalo II) vs the ones who became pure pastoralists and how they branched out (before ultimately coming back together in the form of cities, I suppose).
I do think not killing them is a modern convenience, but don’t take that in any way as judgmental. I have no practical experience yet, so it’s just an intellectual position. But yes, it seems to me like entering into a deeper and more mutualistic relationship with an organism also includes taking on the role of balancing and strengthening their population. It seems unethical or unpleasant to us moderns, but I think that is fear of our own death/mortality and general lack of acceptance of our place in the greater cycle of death and birth that makes up Life.
Also, I wonder what to do with all the dairy when in a hot/humid climate. I think the pastoralists get around this by just eating as they want, right? And if they do store food, it’s directly in the culturing medium (ie stomach) and probably not actually “stored”. Whereas making long lasting cheeses seems to be a colder climate thing, with none that I read about in say India. I have read about some that seem like they could maybe work, like a dried Nepalese cheese that turns into a rock hard smoked ball. But otherwise, it seems like a resource to be consumed right away.
I say this because, part of my concern is how intensive vs extensive my system is going to be. It seems like dairy animals require constant low-intensity work, vs meat animals with occasional high intensity processing that can be done at your leisure when not in a modern commercial farming context.
But again, stocking rate is definitely a factor even in a settled context. Probably the best answer is a multi purpose breed with many roles, which I think is probably closer to the original role of these animals anyway?
Also, keep in mind that, in the vocabulary of William Catton ("Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change") there are two ways to boost your energy use in a non-sustainable manner.
How we're currently creating an "energy high" is what Catton called "drawdown", or consuming a resource faster than it can be replenished.
Khan maintained his "energy high" by what Catton called "take over", or claiming and consuming nearby energy sources, beyond what he could consume in place, much as Europe did to North America from 1607 to 1865 or so.
As a enthusiast of Ancient Greek, I like to point out the fact that even the earliest Greek texts such as Homer and Hesiod associate the collapse of their civilizational predecessors with the disappearance of bronze. Indeed, it was in Hesiod's "Works and Days" from around 700 BCE that we find the first mention of the Bronze Age.
"Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash-trees; and it was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong. They loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence... Their armour was of bronze, and their houses of bronze, and of bronze were their implements: there was no black iron."
Thanks to this article, I can see why even the Greeks knew there was no "black iron" in the olden days of bronze. It was simply too inefficient from an evergy perspective, much like no one tried fracking before conventional oil began to tun out...
Interestingly, the Greeks referred to their own age as the Iron Age—in which lives were harder and men were weaker and more cowardly than their ancestors. Also, in their view, mankind was doomed to continue its decline.
"Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils. And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth..."
Understanding that the Ancient Greeks were still nostalgic for the times immediately before the Bronze Age Collapse is essential, in my view, to grasping the essence of Western Culture, for better or worse...
This essay is a very useful exercise for planning for the future - especially because it doesn’t incorporate the “Never underestimate the spirit, resourcefulness, and resilience of humans” optimistic argument.
No one can predict the future but planning based upon the probability of various scenarios is a widely accepted practice. The credibility of a given scenario is established by using factual data and logical reasoning.
I’m not qualified to attach a probability number to the basic scenario laid out in this essay, but I think it’s certainly a double digit figure. B has provided sufficient factual data in his essays to demonstrate the critical role of diesel fuel and it’s inevitable decline. His references to the sixth mass extinction, topsoil erosion, ore deposit decline, pollution, etc, are easily verified. And, the “overshoot” predicament of 8 billion humans is reasonably established.
Putting together the current facts of resource depletion along with the credible science of overshoot theory, only needs a bit of logical reasoning to establish a legitimate probability for the scenario in B’s essay. And, he readily admits that this is not the only possible scenario for the future of humans.
I, for one, am persuaded that the scenario in this essay has a substantial probability of coming true. However, the real point is to give this kind of discussion a broader audience. Perhaps it will help some people make wiser life decisions - regardless of this scenario’s exact probability.
Great writing as always. About the passage “all large animals are largely extinct…” smaller animals are more vulnerable to chemicals since a smaller amount will make larger damage.
"As long as tin and copper mines were able to produce enough ores to satisfy demand, iron could not compete."
I was wondering if you were going to address this.
I "learned" in school that the bronze age ended when humans mastered "superior" iron, painting the bronze-iron transition as an inevitable result of human progress.
It was only much later that I discovered that the whole "iron age" thing was simply the result of the depletion of raw materials for producing bronze, which in many ways, is a superior metal. (Even today, go to any hardware store and compare the price of bronze screws to identical steel screws.)
So this entire essay puzzled me a bit. The Bronze Age did not collapse because humans "progressed" to a "better" material; it collapsed because of resource depletion. Iron was a distant second choice to bronze.
Just like that goofy Druid that tries to predict the future our author has taken a dive into the fanciful, silly church of slow collapse.
Normally, 'B' is great. Normally he sticks to fairly provable stuff -- stuff that has already happened or is so close that it is obvious that it will happen. This, was not in keeping with 'B's high standard.
I didn't interpret this essay as espousing a "slow collapse" scenario.
Rather, I viewed it as a post-collapse partial recovery, which, if humans have not completely extinguished themselves, seems likely.
The major premise seems to be that, post-collapse, low-technology materials will be readily available via salvage. "Fast crash" scenarios seem to always feature a "die off", which means more salvage materials for survivors. If the power grid goes down, one power substation and nearby aluminum window frames should do!
Sounds OK, Jan.
We have been on the same "doomer" sites for years now, and I have blasted you for little details about which we disagree too often. Since we are getting close to the end now, it seems that the little quibbles are just not that important. Anyhow, you make a good point.
Doesn't seem a particularly good idea to "blast" anyone these days, does it?
You might someday need some of the people you blast. :-)
Agreed. B, with this one you may have indulged a bit in overdooming. Our species has indeed overshot our resources; has indeed consumed the energy legacy that might have been left for future generations; the human future will be radically reduced in means; bronze and the reasoning behind it makes sense - but you are leaving out the eternal human capacity for forgetting, and restarting, and nature’s capacity for awesome regeneration.
In short, although our species doesn’t ‘deserve’ to survive, has fallen woefully short on virtually all moral metrics, and, eternally, may never learn - well earning our ‘disgust’ (rooted in our disappointment with ourselves) - yet Nature, like any true God, simply IS ….. far beyond OUR stories and conceptions.
The rain falls equally on the just and the unjust. The Tao remains unperturbed, no matter our temporal silliness. Nature brings the storms, and policies bring the catastrophes; yet ‘the journey of our history has not ceased. Earth turns us still towards the rising East.’ Life is bigger than us, including our stupidity.
Let us not be led astray in our reasonings by beginning the task with emotionally satisfying conclusions, and then secondarily assembling supporting evidence. Let the evidence lead the reasoning. You are good at that, B. Therein lies any useful sense-making that may transcend our ever-present, oh-so-human myopic self-congratulation.
Not sure why you jumped from the end of large scale metallurgy to human extinction.
Seems to me overall the elites shall preserve as much high tech as possible. Weapons as well. Elite enclaves exist. Shall continue to exist. I would argue that they anticipate collapse and try to game it, shape it, manage it. It is about the same as an organized tactical retreat. Apocalyptic climate collapse-outside of thermonuclear war and overwhelming climate engineering requires looking at the Sun and the Solar System. Man, puny man, comes and goes but the Earth abides. And men will adapt. Intelligence and imagination can find solutions unforseen.
"...even the gentlest societies will begin to disappear." -- Unfortunately, the gentlest societies are always the first to go. Those most willing to commit the worst atrocities are usually the "winners" in whatever competition / game is being played.
I'm not sure I agree.
I think you're following the trajectory of our history of excess-energy.
In ecology, relationships in high-energy biomes are dominated by competition. But relationships in low-energy biomes seem to favour cooperation.
If, indeed, we are heading for a low-energy future, it could be that the "gentlest societies" will have an edge, co-operating to share precious energy resources, rather than fighting over prodigious energy resources.
Genghis Khan lived in low energy times; historians estimate that he and his armies killed is around 40 million people, roughly 10% of the world's population at the time. Scholars estimate that Genghis Khan may have killed three-fourths of the population of modern-day Iran during his war with the Khwarezmid Empire.
Gently, it doesn’t seem like you understand the ecological sense of the word ‘energy’ as it was being used here. The Holocene era has definitely been a high energy time, hence the expansion of all these conquering states compared to the more unstable and unpredictable Pleistocene, with only hunting and gathering.
Got it, makes sense. thanks!
Sorry, I didn’t see that they’d already replied haha. Don’t mean to beat you over the head
In a time when one's riches were measured in goats, Genghis Khan was possibly the most energy-rich person on Earth!
How do you provision an army that stretches from the Pacific to the Baltic? You don't. Conquered locals won't cooperate, you can't commandeer much food outside of harvest season, and you cannot possibly carry enough food with you.
Khan travelled with thousands and thousands and thousands of goats. They happily grazed along the way, and they sustainably provided his troops with all manner of healthy dairy products and occasional meat. The role of "goatherd" was a high-level position, fairly safe from getting killed in battle.
This is not easy to tease out from history books, which will wax poetic about Khan's superior ambition, tactics, and strategy, but perhaps his greatest innovation that allowed him to conquer a continent was a portable, autonomous, self-maintaining and reproducing solar energy processor — the humble goat.
Interesting. I often find myself comparing the pros and cons of dairy vs meat animals from a hypothetical homesteading or settled permaculture pov. It hadn’t to occurred to me that dairy animals are superior from a nomadic standpoint, as you can do more with less. Or get more from less, as it were!
Pastoralism is often disregarded by anthropologists and historians who create the impression that we were all hunter-gatherers, then one day, put down our spears and started planting seeds.
The transition to agriculture seems to have taken thousands of years, and was uneven and spotty, with some areas transitioning back and forth, depending on food availability. And also, in-between, there was as much as 2,000 years (in some areas) of pastoralism, or nomadic herding, primarily of dairy ruminants.
It seems to me that dairy animals are a Permaculture win, as long as you can find multiple uses for them. Our goats gave us about eight cubic metres of manure a year, which we used to turn our hard clay into awesome loam in just a few years. They had long, happy lives.
I know some Permaculturists get multiple uses from meat animals, too, but I'd rather not kill them, which is perhaps just a conceit and luxury of our current energy-rich times.
But from a nomadic perspective, it seems to me that they're an even bigger win. Slaughtering, butchering, and meat preservation is a lot of work, compared to milking.
All good point here. Also interesting to look back at the hunter-gatherers who were domesticating plants (eg Ohalo II) vs the ones who became pure pastoralists and how they branched out (before ultimately coming back together in the form of cities, I suppose).
I do think not killing them is a modern convenience, but don’t take that in any way as judgmental. I have no practical experience yet, so it’s just an intellectual position. But yes, it seems to me like entering into a deeper and more mutualistic relationship with an organism also includes taking on the role of balancing and strengthening their population. It seems unethical or unpleasant to us moderns, but I think that is fear of our own death/mortality and general lack of acceptance of our place in the greater cycle of death and birth that makes up Life.
Also, I wonder what to do with all the dairy when in a hot/humid climate. I think the pastoralists get around this by just eating as they want, right? And if they do store food, it’s directly in the culturing medium (ie stomach) and probably not actually “stored”. Whereas making long lasting cheeses seems to be a colder climate thing, with none that I read about in say India. I have read about some that seem like they could maybe work, like a dried Nepalese cheese that turns into a rock hard smoked ball. But otherwise, it seems like a resource to be consumed right away.
I say this because, part of my concern is how intensive vs extensive my system is going to be. It seems like dairy animals require constant low-intensity work, vs meat animals with occasional high intensity processing that can be done at your leisure when not in a modern commercial farming context.
But again, stocking rate is definitely a factor even in a settled context. Probably the best answer is a multi purpose breed with many roles, which I think is probably closer to the original role of these animals anyway?
Also, keep in mind that, in the vocabulary of William Catton ("Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change") there are two ways to boost your energy use in a non-sustainable manner.
How we're currently creating an "energy high" is what Catton called "drawdown", or consuming a resource faster than it can be replenished.
Khan maintained his "energy high" by what Catton called "take over", or claiming and consuming nearby energy sources, beyond what he could consume in place, much as Europe did to North America from 1607 to 1865 or so.
Your work is always a great read! Thanks for sharing.
As a enthusiast of Ancient Greek, I like to point out the fact that even the earliest Greek texts such as Homer and Hesiod associate the collapse of their civilizational predecessors with the disappearance of bronze. Indeed, it was in Hesiod's "Works and Days" from around 700 BCE that we find the first mention of the Bronze Age.
"Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash-trees; and it was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong. They loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence... Their armour was of bronze, and their houses of bronze, and of bronze were their implements: there was no black iron."
Thanks to this article, I can see why even the Greeks knew there was no "black iron" in the olden days of bronze. It was simply too inefficient from an evergy perspective, much like no one tried fracking before conventional oil began to tun out...
Interestingly, the Greeks referred to their own age as the Iron Age—in which lives were harder and men were weaker and more cowardly than their ancestors. Also, in their view, mankind was doomed to continue its decline.
"Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils. And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth..."
Understanding that the Ancient Greeks were still nostalgic for the times immediately before the Bronze Age Collapse is essential, in my view, to grasping the essence of Western Culture, for better or worse...
This essay is a very useful exercise for planning for the future - especially because it doesn’t incorporate the “Never underestimate the spirit, resourcefulness, and resilience of humans” optimistic argument.
No one can predict the future but planning based upon the probability of various scenarios is a widely accepted practice. The credibility of a given scenario is established by using factual data and logical reasoning.
I’m not qualified to attach a probability number to the basic scenario laid out in this essay, but I think it’s certainly a double digit figure. B has provided sufficient factual data in his essays to demonstrate the critical role of diesel fuel and it’s inevitable decline. His references to the sixth mass extinction, topsoil erosion, ore deposit decline, pollution, etc, are easily verified. And, the “overshoot” predicament of 8 billion humans is reasonably established.
Putting together the current facts of resource depletion along with the credible science of overshoot theory, only needs a bit of logical reasoning to establish a legitimate probability for the scenario in B’s essay. And, he readily admits that this is not the only possible scenario for the future of humans.
I, for one, am persuaded that the scenario in this essay has a substantial probability of coming true. However, the real point is to give this kind of discussion a broader audience. Perhaps it will help some people make wiser life decisions - regardless of this scenario’s exact probability.
If nothing else, it's inspiring me to start building a Cu-Al bronze foundry. :-)
China’s Cocaine Rally Needs Another Line
Hong Kong's Hang Seng index plunges 9.5% as investors dump shares
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/chinas-cocaine-rally-needs-another
There will be no slow descent... eventually ... the stimulus will poison the beast...
Great writing as always. About the passage “all large animals are largely extinct…” smaller animals are more vulnerable to chemicals since a smaller amount will make larger damage.
let's not rule out hoomins inventiveness and creativity...
A current prime example being the US proxy war in Ukraine against
Russia... Russia has become truly inventive, and proves the saying
"War is the mother of destructive inventions" !
"As long as tin and copper mines were able to produce enough ores to satisfy demand, iron could not compete."
I was wondering if you were going to address this.
I "learned" in school that the bronze age ended when humans mastered "superior" iron, painting the bronze-iron transition as an inevitable result of human progress.
It was only much later that I discovered that the whole "iron age" thing was simply the result of the depletion of raw materials for producing bronze, which in many ways, is a superior metal. (Even today, go to any hardware store and compare the price of bronze screws to identical steel screws.)
So this entire essay puzzled me a bit. The Bronze Age did not collapse because humans "progressed" to a "better" material; it collapsed because of resource depletion. Iron was a distant second choice to bronze.