William Catton - "Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse"

[hatrack]

EDIT

Now William R. Catton, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Sociology at my state's other PhD granting institution, Washington State University, brings on the sequel to his first book in this genre, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press, in which he sounded an alarm being heard more frequently. Like Speth, Catton, in that earlier book, pointed out the problems as he saw them, from the viewpoint of a sociologist, and then declared that if we heed these warnings we might yet escape the worst. In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called an population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.

Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return.

As to why we are in this state of affairs, Catton calls on several sociological theories surrounding the evolution of culture and especially the development of over-specialization or 'division of labor'. The latter was touted by Adam Smith as the reason we were so efficient in our manufactures. And Catton, like many authors who deplore modern capitalism and corporatism, recognizes that at a time this was indeed a beneficial capacity. Today, however, he says that we overdid it and that the tendency toward deep specialization has tended to dehumanize and isolate each of us from the benefit of interpersonal relations. He further argues that we have come to think of others as instruments, mere means to our own ends. This he says is the end result of taking the abstraction of money as representing wealth too far in our thinking.

EDIT

The failure to recognize this is the lack of wisdom, to which I will return in a bit. But to understand how humans got so carried away it is important to recognize, as Catton and others have done, that humans, like all animals, have a biological dictate to maximize their access to energy. For humans this took the shape of learning to control fire, making clothing, building shelters, and later finding additional external energy sources to supplement their bodily abilities. This included the invention of tools and agriculture. And it essentially culminated in the discovery of fossil fuels that allow modern humans incredible power over their environment. Catton renames a subset of Homo sapiens as a 'quasi-species', Homo colossus, those being the people in developed countries who consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to motivate and control machines that do orders of magnitude more work than a human can do with muscle power alone. To achieve this we are combusting carbon to produce CO2 and returning fossil carbon deposits to the atmosphere and oceans after sequestration for millions of years. And it is the rapidity with which this is happening which leads Catton, and others, to conclude that it is infeasible to put the brakes on for this train. That is, you can try to brake, but you won't stop in time to avoid a crash.

EDIT

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954#more

[whoneedstickets]

1. Between the Fundies with the end of days...and the Eco-pessimists...

..Is there anyone who isn't pedaling a doomsday scenario? I hear the sky is falling.

[phantom power]

2. I hear James Inhofe is still quite bullish.

[glitch]

3. Must read. Thanks for posting. K & R nt

[profgoose]

7. just another K/R... :)

thanks to hatrack for posting this over here. :) George did a really nice job on this.

[GliderGuider]

4. It's an excellent review of what looks to be an excellent book.

Like Nate Hagens, two of my formative books were "Overshoot" and "Ishmael". George Mobus' thinking on wisdom - what it is, why it's essential and why we lack it - as laid out on his blog, is also worthy.

The idea of carrying capacity is so perspicuous to me that I'm still startled whenever others are incapable of grasping it, or the consequences of exceeding it

[hatrack]

5. Which is why Inhofe, Will et. al. bleat and blow with such enraged fervor, facts be damned . . .

It's the Great Inarguable, stating (sort of a la Diane Keaton in The Godfather) that "all of this must end."

Just too much, too stark, too uncomfortable, too unprofitable for TPTB and for most human beings.

It's like being forced to squarely confront the reality of your own death.

[pscot]

6. Catton should be required reading for congress-critters

and high-school freshmen.