[A-List] A Depopulation Explosion?

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (June 12 2007)


The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were
left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green
everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the
country looked alike. The meadows were green, and so was the rising
wheat which had been sown, but neither had nor would receive any further
care ...

With this brilliant image, Richard Jefferies began the harrowing
prologue to his 1885 novel After London, or Wild England {1}, one of the
first works in the modern genre of apocalypse fiction. In Jefferies'
backstory, some unremembered catastrophe erased nearly the entire
population of Britain, leaving a few survivors to rebuild a medieval
society amid the ruins. Jefferies is almost forgotten today but his
novel was influential in its time; echoes of After London can be found
straight through the next century of science fiction, showing up in
writers as different as H G Wells and Edgar Pangborn, and Jefferies'
vision of a depopulated world in which the remains of civilization
crumbled beneath spreading greenery hit a chord in the modern imagination.

It's a vision that has seen quite a bit of play in recent discussions
about the future of industrial society, especially among those who like
to frame those in terms of one apocalyptic narrative or another. In some
circles these days, global depopulation in the near future is treated as
a given, and the only point of debate seems to be what mechanism will
tip six billion superfluous lives into history's dumpster. A certain
amount of millennarian machismo seems to creep into these debates, as
though believing in a catastrophe more dire and more imminent than
anyone else's is a sign of toughness. All this has a good deal to say
about the way social narratives are shaped, but arguably much less about
the shape of the future ahead of us.

Thus, for example, I was contacted not long ago by a reader of The
Archdruid Report who announced he'd come up with a scenario that
involved the immiment extermination of 95% of the world's population in
a matter of weeks. Did I want to read more? Well, no, in fact, I didn't.
I'm old enough to remember when Comet Kohoutek was supposed to cause
global devastation and Anwar Sadat was widely identified as the
Antichrist, and one thing I've learned is that it's very easy to come up
with a worst case scenario and back it up with a bunch of cherrypicked
factoids. Another thing I've learned is that this sort of exercise is
probably the least effective way there is of guessing the shape of the
future. When such predictions leap into the pool of time, the reliable
result is a thundering bellyflop.

Still, it's important not to jump to the conclusion that this means
current global population levels are sustainable. What William Catton,
in his classic work Overshoot {2}, called "ghost acreage" - the vast
boost to the means of subsistence that comes from the unsustainable use
of fossil fuels in growing, storing, and distributing food - has allowed
the world's human population in the last few centuries to balloon to
between three and four times what the earth can support over the long
term. As the industrial age winds down, the surpluses of food and other
resources and the infrastructure of public health that made this
expansion possible will wind down as well, with predictable impacts on
the size of the human population.

So far, this supports the catastrophist model, but there's a catch. The
winding down of the industrial age isn't a fast process. The peak of
worldwide conventional oil production may well have already happened -
the best figures I've seen show that production rates reached in the
fall of 2005 have not been equalled since - and the overall peak,
including nonconventional sources such as tar sands and natural gas
liquids, probably isn't far away. What too few people seem to have
noticed, though, is that the Hubbert curve is shaped like a bell, not
like a sawtooth.

That bell-shaped profile means, among other things, that about as much
oil will be pumped out of the ground on the downside half of the curve
as was pumped on the upside. It also means that production rates along
the downside will be roughly commensurable with production rates at
points on the upside the same distance from the peak. If peak production
comes in 2010, in other words, the amount of oil produced in 2030 will
likely not be far from what was produced in 1990; production in 2060
will be somewhere near production in 1960, and production in 2100 will
be around production in 1920. Even after the peak comes and goes, in
other words, there will still be a great deal of oil in circulation for
many years to come. The same will likely be true of most other energy
resources, and of energy as a whole.

This same lesson could have been learned from the growth of
nonconventional oil sources like the Alberta tar sands, and the
reopening of hundreds of formerly uneconomical stripper wells in
pumped-out oil provinces like Pennsylvania. As oil production falters,
market forces and political pressures alike guarantee that every
possible replacement will be brought online. Right now, attempts to
increase production are struggling to keep up with slumping yields at
existing fields, and it's a struggle that will only get harder as more
fields reach the downside of their own Hubbert curves. Still, even
though new fields and alternative sources can't make up for the
exhaustion of supergiant fields like Ghawar and Cantarell, they can
stretch out the process much further than the raw figures on production
declines from existing fields might suggest.

Does this mean peak oil is nothing to worry about? Not at all. The fact
that the "ghost acreage" that supports our huge global population is
going away gradually, rather than all at once, does not change the fact
that it's going away. Historically speaking, both a slow decline and a
fast collapse produce population loss; the difference is that in a slow
decline, depopulation tends to be a much more complex process, subject
to major regional and temporal variations.

It actually doesn't take that much to change an expanding population
into a contracting one. Modest changes in birth and death rates will do
the trick, and such changes are predictable consequences of the twilight
of the industrial age. We've already had a preview in the former Soviet
Union, where the implosion of Communism launched a classic cycle of
catabolic collapse in the 1990s followed by partial recovery in this
decade. Statistics I've seen put live births in Russia around eight per
thousand annually, and deaths around fourteen per thousand; that alone
is predicted to reduce the Russian population to half its present size
by midcentury.

The factors that push population contraction in hard times are familiar
enough to demographers. Malnutrition is a major factor; so are epidemic
disease and child mortality driven by failing public health; so are
social factors such as alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and suicide,
driven by the psychological impacts of life in a failing society.
There's at least one additional factor to keep in mind, though, and the
best way to explain it is to introduce a guest who will be appearing in
this blog tolerably often in the future.

'Abd-er-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami - ibn Khaldun for
short - was a jurist, politician, and Sufi mystic who lived from 1332 to
1406. He was also one of the first known historians to make a serious
attempt to get under the hood of history and figure out what makes it
go. His major work, the Muqaddimah (Introduction to History) {3}, was a
massive treatise - three thick volumes in English translation - setting
out the patterns he saw at work behind historical events, and his
conclusions hold up remarkably well in the light of history since his time.

He spent much of his life in northwestern Africa, where the contrast
between the ruins of Roman settlement and the deserts of his own time
was hard to miss, and one of the many questions he set out to answer was
why that happened. It's popular nowadays to blame it on deforestation
and the like, but ibn Khaldun saw a different cause at work -
infrastructure failure caused by political dysfunction. In the examples
he surveyed, agricultural societies were conquered by new ruling classes
of nomad origin, who saw their subjects as cash cows but failed to
realize that cows have to be fed. Revenues needed to maintain vital
infrastructure were thus diverted into unproductive uses, sending
societies into a downward spiral of economic collapse and depopulation
from which they rarely recovered.

In the the twilight of the industrial age, ibn Khaldun's insight is
likely to be worth close attention. There aren't a lot of nomads at the
edges of today's civilizations, but too many members of the political
class in the modern world have no more sense of the importance of
infrastructure to survival than the nomad rulers ibn Khaldun critiques,
and the malign neglect so often visited on infrastructure in the US and
elsewhere may be a foretaste of worse to come. Since a significant
amount of North American infrastructure is locally managed and
maintained, this represents a factor that could be powerfully shaped by
community action on the local level.

Like every other aspect of our contemporary predicament, finally, these
forces will also be shaped by geographic factors. Communities that are
economically viable in a global economy awash in cheap fossil fuel
energy, in many cases, are not places that will be economically viable
in the deindustrial future. This cuts both ways. Sprawling Sun Belt
cities with little water and no potential for agriculture will slowly
shrivel and die as the energy that keeps them going sputters and goes
out, and tourist communities across the continent will pop like bubbles
and become ghost towns once travel becomes a luxury, while Rust Belt
towns struggling for bare survival today will likely find a new lease on
life when adequate rain, workable soil, and access to waterborne
transport become the keys to prosperity, as they were in the 18th century.

One question not yet settled, though, is how many of the communities in
areas that might prosper in the deindustrial age will be inhabited by
descendants of the people who now live in those parts of North America,
and how many will be populated by way of the second theme to be
discussed in this series of essays - the theme of migration. We'll turn
to this theme in next week's post.

Notes

{1} http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781419105036-0

{2} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780252009884-8

{3} http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Muqaddimah&x=0&y=0


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