"Managed collapse"?

[GliderGuider]

An article in the Toronto Star 'Managing' environmental collapse ponders the unthinkable:

In the face of the increasing speed of climate change we should be embarking simultaneously on two divergent tracks to preserve our collective way.

The first is the important but well-worn path of reducing our environmental footprint through energy conservation, increased government regulation, innovation, and international standards – all without killing our economy.

The other track is metaphorically darker and far less well travelled.

This is the road to, and through, what a growing body of public commentators, academics and government policy-makers are calling "managed collapse."

Popularized by Jane Jacobs, Jared Diamond and Thomas Homer-Dixon, adherents of managed collapse argue that the complexity of modern, urban societies is our collective Achilles heel.

Pull one too many threads out of the tapestry of interlocking systems, institutions and social networks that support our established way of life and it will quickly start to unravel.

Specifically, the twin effects of energy scarcity and rapid climate change – factors in history that most often trigger societal collapse – threaten to overwhelm our fragile and co-dependent systems (global food distribution, international financial institutions, disease eradication, etc.).

For believers in managed collapse, smart societies not only cut greenhouse gases they actively reduce the complexity of their social systems and institutions in anticipation of a more globally disconnected and lower-energy future.

The author has put his finger precisely on the risk posed by the interacting elements of the World Problematique. I am in complete agreement that we are facing an imminent involuntary simplification of industrial society. I don't think we will be able to manage it as the article suggests, but we need to start talking about it. It will be possible to manage the immediate, local effects in some cases, and that will be essential to maximize humanity's chances for transition to the next phase of our existence.

[phantom power]

1. As Kunstler likes to say, it is time to "make other arrangements."

[bananas]

5. Kunstler predicted y2k would collapse society

"It seems to me that the Y2K problem is so broad, systemic, and unprecedented that imagining its repercussions calls for something beside conventional thinking."

http://kunstler.com/mags_y2k.html

My Y2K - A Personal Statement

1. From Duh to Huh?

Writing this in April of ‘99, I believe that we are in for a serious event. Systems will fail, crash, seize up, cease to function. Not all systems, maybe only a fraction, but enough, and enough interdependent systems to affect many other systems. Y2K is real. Y2K is going to rock our world.

<snip>

[GliderGuider]

6. Kunstler wasn't alone in his Y2K concerns.

People took the threat seriously enough to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to avert it. This time people are taking the threat seriously enough to, oh, install a couple of CFLs... Likewise this time it's not just Jim Kunstler beating the Drum of Doom. The risks to civilization posed by the gathering convergence of the Problematique greatly exceed the threat posed by Y2K.

To lighten the mood, here's a little Y2K joke for everyone:

A new product was marketed in late 1999, called KY2K Jelly: "When you want four digits to fit where only two fit before."

[hunter]

7. A lot of people worked their butts off on Y2K.

And there were a couple of very serious crashes anyways.

As a mitigation measure, "Don't Panic" worked fairly well. The money kept flowing, and people kept working. But the economy is mostly an abstract thing, based on what we believe. Money is not a natural force.

We won't be so lucky with climate change, where the Bush Administrations version of "Don't Panic" was on full display after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and ignore the screams.

[phantom power]

8. The Y2K bug is an interesting subject. I also was worried about it, as a former COBOL programmer.

I think there were two factors that people (like me) who were worried about didn't take into account:

1) A heck of a lot of money was spent actually fixing these bugs leading up to 2000 (as GG already pointed out).
2) Part of the original "doom" theory was that to "truly" fix it, you need to add two characters to already-maxed-out fixed records: from "00" to "2000". So, there was an assumption that it was all but unfixable. However, in most cases, all that was really required to fake it was to add logic like this:

if (yy < 30) yyyy = 2000 + yy
else yyyy = 1900 + yy

So, no intractable database reconfigurations were required. They just added a bit of logic that works because nobody has records in computers prior to 1930 (or whatever thresholds were chosen).

So, if (god help us) we're still using those same COBOL legacy apps in 2030, weve got a Y2K+30 bug coming.

Another Y2K joke: Everybody immediately abbreviated "The Year-2000 bug" as "Y2K" -- the exact same thinking that got us into that mess in the first place.

Finally, I would note that climatologists were worried, back in the 60s, about pollution causing global cooling. I'm sure you're aware of how often we have to deal with that old saw from global-warming skeptics. Sometimes you get stuff wrong, but then later get it right on other issues. I think Kunstler's assessment of our unsustainable economic system, and our unsustainable organization of living space, are essentially correct. I can't see where he's wrong. Peak oil certainly seems to be picking up steam, eh? Likewise, climate change. My reading of the evidence I see in this forum leads me to think that we lost the opportunity to prevent it, and now our least-crappy option is to try and "manage" our response to what's coming.

[Porcupine]

9. In the 1960's Pollution WAS causing Global Cooling

Through two actions. Unscrubbed coal smokestacks were the primary means of gettting rid of coal burning fumes. That meant that sulfer dioxides were being pushed into the atmosphere in volumes larger than are active today.

Recent proposals to mitigate climate change have included introducing more sulfer compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect incoming thermal energy.

Today most coal plants in Europe and the US have particulate scrubbers that pull significant amounts of of sulfer from the waste stream.


The second method of global cooling present in the 1960's and today was jet contrails. High altitude cloudse reflect sunlight away from the earth.

Now we are sure that the added input of CO2 and methane overrides any cooling effects caused by pollution. It's the balance of effects that counts not the effect of any one pollutant.

[rodeodance]

2. at first glace the phase is not inviting but upon reading it--yes. makes a

lot of sense.

[GliderGuider]

3. Which phase ("phrase"?) are you referring to?

[TreasonousBastard]

4. They call it "managed collapse," others...

just say prepare for the future. Whatever key words you want to use, the idea's been around for a long time. Problem is, you just can't get enough people around the idea to create a critical mass for change.

I've been reading a lot of stuff about how we have to start moving the population away from the coasts, find new food growing technologies and such because no matter what we do we probably can't reverse global warming.

Fat chance of that, though. We have enough trouble dealing with filling present potholes and the human race has no history of at any time taking the long view of things. When crops fail and there is mass starvation, the seas rise and Bangla Desh and Florida are under water and we all have a bird flu, then we'll start work on how to solve things.

That's the way it's always been.

[Dover]

10. It's called SUSTAINABILITY

Something we might have learned from native populations but failed to see ourselves as part of nature and natural systems.

Nature is ultimately VERY complex and manages to sustain itself within natural laws.

[GliderGuider]

11. Yes, but for how many people and at what level of consumption?

Achieving sustainability for a billion people is rather uncomfortable if you are part of the other 5.5 billion. Even if you make it through the bottleneck, sustainability that requires you to walk everywhere for the rest of your shortened life is likewise uncomfortable.

I have no worries about Mom Nature sustaining herself. I worry about the kids in my neighbourhood, none of whom knows which end of a goat to stick the knife into...

[many a good man]

12. Y2K is a good metaphor

Companies spent BILLIONS to prevent and it worked. Modernizing all the systems created a much more robust computing infrastructure, created lots of new jobs, and a soaring economy.

[GliderGuider]

13. Here's an excerpt of an excellent interview on the subject of managing collapse

The interview is with Thomas Homer-Dixon who has recently written a very good book on this topic, called "The Upside of Down". It made an impression on me primarily because it introduced me to the idea of resilience and adaptive cycles. It points to a way of thinking about system decline that is more complex than the simple linear "Grow, peak, crash" models proposed by Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond.

The theory says that as complex systems grow, they become more interconnected and at the same time lose resilience. At some point they have grown enough to have lost the resilience needed to survive shocks. When shocks happen, the interconnectedness of the system causes the resulting breakdowns to cascade through the system. This causes a decline in the system, during which it sheds complexity and simultaneously regains resilience. This allows the system to begin to regenerate, though possibly in a different form than it originally had, depending on the resources available to fuel the regeneration.

The idea proposed by Homer-Dixon is that if we can initiate a dialogue about the structure of our system (i.e. civilization) in advance of the decline, we may be able to improve its resilience enough to improve its chances of regeneration after the inevitable decline.

Is the Deadly Crash of Our Civilization Inevitable?

TMN: People have heard about the litany of crises in your book, but what's unique I think is the stance you're willing to take about what's going to happen. Jared Diamond says that there are two main factors that define whether societies succeed or collapse. Societies that survive practice long-term thinking and are willing and flexible enough to change their values when they no longer serve them.

What do you feel will save us from ourselves? What is The Upside of Down?

THD: I agree with Jared on both those factors. At the end of my book I spend a fair amount of time talking about the importance of value change. We need to move away from what I call strictly utilitarian values which focus on simple likes and dislikes that emphasize consumption of material goods, towards moral values, and even what I would call existential values. These relate to what we consider to be the good life, what brings meaning into our lives, what kind of world do we really want for our children and our children's children. These are fundamentally values conversations.

My difference with Diamond is that I don't think we're going to really begin those conversations in a proper way until we face some crises or breakdowns. In other words, my impression of his argument is that collapse is something we have to avoid, in all cases and in all forms. On the other hand, I believe there is a spectrum of forms of collapse. At one end is the ideal, optimistic future where we solve all our problems and we live happily every after. At the other end is catastrophic collapse. We have tended not to fill in all the spaces in between, but that's actually where things might be very interesting. There may be some forms of disruption and crisis that will actually stimulate us to be really creative. Most importantly, they may allow us to get the deep vested interests that are blocking change out of the way.

TMN: And that will be part of what allows us to finally have that values conversation?

THD: Exactly.

TMN: It seems that we're more willing to admit that when we talk about individuals. The 12-step notion, for instance, that people don't change till their backs are against the wall, till they hit bottom. We're usually not willing to say that about society because it's too frightening.

THD: I introduce it very much in personal terms, exactly the kinds of things that you mentioned. Many of us have had times in our lives where crises have challenged us in the most fundamental ways. We've had in some sense a breakdown of the basic systems that we rely upon to manage our lives. And we've had to rebuild, we've had to think very carefully about what we're doing, re-examine our values, break patterns. And often we've ended up much better off afterwards.

When you look at research that's come out over the last 15 to 20 years, the most complex adaptive systems in the world all go through patterns of growth and increasing complexity till eventually they become rigid and break down. Then they reorganize themselves, regenerate and regrow. All highly adaptive systems have breakdown in them at some point or other.

The key thing though -- and this is where I think that Jared Diamond's argument just doesn't give us the purchase that we need -- is that we have to keep the breakdown from being catastrophic. There has to be enough resilience in the system, enough information, enough adaptive capacity that things can be regenerated. With catastrophic breakdown, recovery is often impossible.

To anyone who is interested, I heartily recommend the related work of Dr. Buzz Holling and The Resilience Alliance.

[phantom power]

14. Living systems adapt to the boundary of order and chaos.

The modularity of a system is tuned over time. Reduced modularity brings greater efficiency at the price of increased brittleness. Maximum adaptability tends to show up at the border between efficient/brittle and inefficient/modular.

For example, evolution has tuned most genomes to have some level of interconnectedness between genes (and their proteome phenotypes), but not too much. Organisms that become too highly optimized tend to become extinct over the long-haul.

It appears that Thomas Homer-Dixon is making the same observations about civilizations and their economies. Our current system has become somewhat over-connected and over-optimized. Brittle. It is resisting the changes we need to move forward. A crisis will be needed to break down some of those connections so new adaptations can proceed.

[GliderGuider]

15. Bingo

You've described the situation exactly. The opposite of brittleness is resilience. So integration/efficiency/brittleness is the inverse of modularity/inefficiency/resilience. On the way up the front of the adaptive loop a system tends to gain in the first set of qualities. On the trip down the back of the loop it loses those and gains in the second set. The key question during the turnaround phase at the bottom of the loop is what resources remain available. If the resource base has been changed by the earlier growth, the subsequent regrowth will take a different form. I think we all know that the world's resource base has been, um, modified by the growth of civilization.

THD's book is well worth a read.

[phantom power]

16. You might find some books by Stuart Kauffman interesting.

"Observations" and his earlier "At home in the universe" are about his research into this chaos/order boundary, and how complex systems tune themselves.

Every so often I find myself plugging Kauffman in this forum, just because his work has so many implications for ecologies, economies, evolution, etc. The intersections with the subjects we talk about in E/E are numerous.

In some fantasy future, I like to think that humans might even take his results into account as we make choices about how we grow our economies. In theory, it should be possible to make choices about how modular an economy is, or a city design, or a political system, etc. Of course, that requires a degree of self-control and scientific literacy at the level of governments that's not widely practiced here in our country where we actually elect congressmen who deny the reality of evolution. Forget applying it to managing a civilization.