Accepting the Decline: Paradigm shift

Paradigms (from wikipedia) describe distinct concepts or though patterns in any scientific discipline or other epistemological (and yes, I did look that word up) context. Overshoot demands that we change, at the very least, our worldview paradigm to account for the changes that will sweep throughout our world. While peak oil means oil production will decline, the changes that that shift brings will not be a reversal of those born of oil productions rise, but it will share elements of a reverse. Climate change is effectively, the other main component of overshoot, a global experiment to find out what reverting our planets biosphere back into standard hothouse conditions looks like from the inside. As we accept the decline, we will have to change ourselves in response.

Economic assumptions will change drastically as both the net and absolute energy available to humanity declines. Since peak oil will hit transport first (60% of oil is used for transport) and most renewables supply electricity not fuel, we can start there. The gradual erosion of global trade will reduce the importance of imports/exports over a national, then regional, scale and act as a pseudo tariff which will both allow actual tariffs or trade barriers (due to the reduced influence of traders) to be implemented and rise over time until new sustainable (sailing ships) transport has been introduced. Localization, caused by this, of the economy will also revitalise the household economy, which functions differently to the market economy, such as being more resilient but also being less efficient, necessitating a new operative procedure. As energy becomes more expensive the equations that govern current industry practice change e.g. Hand labour for a smaller (high quality) output becomes more economical than mass production. These are only some of the changes that will occur.

Ideology and culture will also be forced to fragment and relocalise. As the infrastructure necessary to maintain the mass culture (a national culture with many regional cultures is certainly possible) degrades, it will dissolve into an environment filled with now resurgent local/regional cultures that will now have greater staying power. This will fragment nation-states into smaller, more homogenous units, effectively smaller national units, although many states could still survive where no strong nation exists today, other large identity groups will also fragment. Here I expect the Australia to remain; the man from snowy river type of nation building is possible in a post-overshoot world, but the states to become more autonomous and powerful than they are now. Ideologies will also change, even “think globally, act locally” will out of necessity change to “think locally, act locally” as the world gets big again. As communication systems decline we will know far less of what’s going on in the world and as energy availability declines we will less and less be able to affect other parts of the world (acid rain, global warming etc) while those parts can’t affect us as easily. While ideologies can function within a larger framework, like medieval Christianity, these frameworks can only form above a grassroots level after a decline and even then they take a long time to form, paganism was rampant in large parts of Europe (Vikings, Lithuania, Russia etc) well into the 12-14th centuries. Focusing on global problems at the expense of local ones is slowly, but at an accelerating pace, becoming non-viable.

These are only some of the realms that the paradigm shift will affect. The effects will be spread over a long-time but we can begin preparing now and start shifting our worldviews to match what our world is becoming.

Australia's Population - 22.7 million

 

State/Territory	Population	% in capital of state/territory
Australian Capital Territory	344,200	99.6%
New South Wales	6967200	63%
Victoria	5297600	71%
Queensland	4279400	46%
South Australia	1601800	73.5%
Western Australia	2163200	73.4%
Tasmania	498200	41%
Northern territory	219900	54%

As can be seen (in the map) the majority of Australia’s population is along the coast (83% is within 50km of the coast) and in the State capital cities, total urbanity is 83%. Is this surprising? Not really, Australia, since white settlement, has always been an urban country (initial urbanises was 50%) and the grand internal desert has, and will as long as it survives, keep people close to the coast, mostly the Eastern seaboard.

What is malleable is the incredibly high concentration of people in the big capital cities. I expect the first decomplexification of Australian society to be a move away from the big cities to the Country, one way would be by going into Small cities regional centres and small towns instead of farmland or villages. This actually offers several advantages over a population moving directly into rural areas.

A transition from the big city to the country is quite a leap and, while individuals and small groups can certainly succeed, the shock caused by large numbers of people migrating at once would likely cripple or damage our economy and society. However, if most people move into the regional cities and towns (spread out to minimise stress) then manufacturing can be revitalised, markets and infrastructure can be built to service the new population distribution while benefiting from a now larger labour pool. Some people would also move into the rural areas, but at a more manageable pace (and also those more suited and motivated to the tasks required). This approach also has the advantage of moving people to available resources in enough numbers to access those resources.

Faith and Ancestry:

Ancestry	Percentage of overall
English	36.1%
Australia	35.4%
Irish	10.4%
Scottish	8.9%
German	4.5%
Chinese	4.3%
Indian	2%
Greek	1.9%
Dutch	1.7%
Lebanese	.92%

The major ancestry of Australia is English but growing proportions are Australian born and bred. While the European proportion is falling to an Asian rise this is not a quick or even substantive change (Chinese only account for 4.3% ancestry), especially compared to the British settlement and the destruction of the Aborigines (now only 2.3% of the population).The fear and concern is probably more of what I call the “Box Hill” effect than facts. Boxhill is a suburb/town centre near where I live and is a highly Asian (Korean, Chinese, Japanese but not Indian) area with lots of stores focused on Asian foodstuffs. This concentration of immigrants (highly diverse, especially the food), which is at times more of an illusion, gives the impression that there are lot’s of Asians when statistically it is not a big deal.

The major variable that could substantially change Australia’s demographics is another mass migration, potentially from Indonesia but to full explore that possibility will take another post.

                       

Faith	Percentage of Pop
Roman Catholic	25.8%
Anglican	18.7%
Total Christian	63.9%
Others	19.4%

Faith is an important aspect of Identity, but, functionally, what is Australia’s faith? You might say Christian, at 63.9%, but that statistic hides the fact that only 7.5% of the population attends church, or only 11.7% of people who answer Christian on the census form.

Australia is a deeply secular society and the strongest religion, Christianity is a spent force that has very little influence on Australian culture or politics and is only used symbolically. Only two of our Prime ministers since 1950 have actually been observant Christians (John Howard and Kevin Rudd) and the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is an atheist. The attitude, from my experiences, is that religion does not matter much and it actually harms a politician’s election campaign more than it helps. For clarity, I’m agnostic, my family is agnostic (only one grandmother was religious and only for a time), I’ve only met 1 person to whom religion was important, 2 others who go to church (one hates it and only goes because her mom forces her, the other’s family immigrated here from Malaysia) and most people I meet are functionally agnostic.

Our faith will probably change as Overshoot’s downside begins as there is no strong core of religion (spirituality is existent) to oppose the changes. But the religions that succeed here will not be Christianity or Islam, since they’re both too alien and organised (in the religious sense) to penetrate mainstream Australian society. My bets are on paganism or some form of earth worship, since an unorganized religion will be better able to penetrate Australian society and not carry the stigma of previous religions. Nevertheless, it is a very good possibility that Christianity will stay; it just will not have any great significance.   

Technology as community

As a highly developed tool-using animal, almost all aspects of our lives id linked to technology. Unfortunately, most of our current tech base is linked to fossil fuel usage, fossil fuels that are running finite, necessitating a massive change, which will require an understanding of what our tech base actually looks like and how it functions. To illustrate I’ll use some basic ecology concepts, with technology being the community (living component of an ecosystem) alongside the human population that makes it function.

Just for clarity, Technology is defined here as both the physical artefacts and behaviours necessary to both create and use the artefacts. E.g., a shovel is an artefact a labourer uses it and a blacksmith forging it are all forms of technology.  

Food chains: The most basic ecological relationship is that of predator and prey, it works in a community as the flow of energy + matter from one organism to another. 

Food webs: A step up from food chains. Food webs are created by linking food chains together and allow far more relationships to be seen. While detritivores and decomposers can be shown in food chains, in food webs their influence can be seen fully. Since technology is more circular in nature, (e.g. a farmer needs tools from a blacksmith who needs food from the farmer, this forms a short loop) this should probably be the starting point. 

Humans; a parallel community: However, technology is a human adaptation and cannot be independent from humanity. Therefore, how do we place humans in this conceptual model? Simple, we have humans as a parallel community that functions both alongside and with the technology community. As the major tool-wielding animal these two communities require each other to survive, almost everything we do requires tools, artefacts and/or machines.

Trophic levels: a pyramid structure, trophic levels show the amount of energy/matter in each level. Each trophic level feeds upon the ones below and only gains a portion (typically 10%) of the energy of the level below it. for technology we can simplify each level into its basic self sufficient levels e.g. the bottom levels contain the basic extractive techs (logging, agriculture, mining) and the manufacturing techs to make the tools/machines necessary for the extraction and manufacturing techs, the second level has the next layer of manufacturing plus basic culture techs (paper or papyrus, ink, paint etc).   

Purpose, a difference: there is one major difference between a naturally occurring community and the artificial one of technology. Individual technologies have a purpose behind them, designed by a sapient mind with a specific goal in mind. Nature on the other hand has no purpose behind it and is shaped by the emergence of patterns or structures dictated by the fundamental rules of the universe. This gives technology several different characteristics, far more looping with a circular nature at the bottom (as opposed to a circle overall and linear at the bottom) and a prevalence of amplifiers that are higher in the trophic level but enhance the lower levels (typically high level manufacturing, sensor or control tech.)

The Emergence of technology: The modern technology base didn’t emerge fully formed but, like an ecosystem, was built up over time. To give an example of one way this happens (there are multiple ways); the total war team (creators of the total war games) follow a revolution then evolution cycle. They ‘revolutionise’ (create something new e.g. sea battles) then they evolve the concept. Why have I used this example? Because the changes overshoot brings will likely follow this progression, (John Michael Greer’s not mine)

·        Abundance Industrialism: The current state of Australia, runs entirely on non –renewables and is the current stock that future technology will be derived from. Counts as our baseline

·        Scarcity Industrialism: When the downsides of overshoot happen this will be the state Australia finds itself in. It is the mirror of abundance industrialism and will be powered by the remaining fossil fuels and renewables. Tech here be a direct offspring of abundance industrialism.

·        Salvage Society: No/extremely limited use of non-renewables and most materials will be salvaged instead of freshly harvested, providing the only direct link to abundance industrialism. Tech will be either legacy or what scarcity industrial society can put together.

·        Ecotechnic: here eco means only renewables are used and technic refers to the fact that the majority of energy use s non-food. This stage will have no direct link to either industrialism and represents the first stable stage. All technology can be created by other ecotechs indefinitely.

Each stage will cause its own demise by exhausting the resources necessary for its own survival until the ecotechnic stage is reached. Nevertheless, the previous stages tech base will also build the next stages tech base forming a continuity between the Beginning of Abundance industrialism to the end of the Ecotechnic stage.    

The Three Basic Renewables

Hydro: Easier to use and more reliable than wind, hydropower is the use of naturally occurring running water, big dams alter the environment to increase this factor, to spin something, either a water-wheel or a turbine to generate mechanical/electrical energy or in the roman case to supply water to aqueducts. It has the advantage of being reliable but most of the planets capacity for hydro, especially big dams, is already in use and climate change could severely disrupt the use of hydropower.

Comes in three scales.

• Big dams being what most people think of, these disrupt local environments and offer little room for expansion. The main versions of this in Australia are the snowy mountain scheme and hydropower in Tasmania
• Macro being the powering of towns or villages by hydropower
• Micro for single houses/buildings

The last two offer a good source of power for individuals or communities if the locality supports it and would be especially beneficial as the national grid declines. Currently the majority is used for electricity production but as the power grid fails declines and the energy available for industry declines a return to direct mechanical energy should occur.

Wind: Similar to hydropower in that naturally occurring air currents (wind) is used to spin something. Together with hydropower the foundations of the industrial revolution was built and they could easily sustain a low (relative to ours) consumption industrial complex (the evidence is that we have already done so once). While small scale is possible and it would certainly help (especially during salvage industrialism, see Arch druid report), wind power is best done n at least a community basis (think windmills). While current use is mainly electricity, like hydropower direct mechanical energy use should return, luckily advances in this mode have been made since the industrial revolution.

Both of these technologies will be utilised for electricity production, most likely for communication (radios, telegraph etc), lights and sensor (soil, air monitors) tech.

Sun: The energy source that the above ultimately descend from, the hydrosphere and atmosphere are powered by sunlight. Sunlight is also the main ingredient of agriculture and biofuels but they are separate topics so here I’ll look at direct solar use (think solar panels, solar hot water or solar furnaces). As experience has shown, which admittedly compared to wind or hydro is miniscule for solar but low-tech magazine has an article on heating/cooling cities with it. its main use is the production of thermal energy, something that wind and hydro can only provide indirectly and would otherwise have to be provided by biomass. It can produce electricity , however the current method of using solar panels is unlikely to survive, alternatives such as dye based solar panels or solar thermoelectric are possible. Solar furnaces, first used as scientific tools (it doesn’t interfere with the reactions), offer a way to replace fossil fuels in the important techs that require high heat (think metallurgy) while others other forms can provide low to medium heat quite well. This means a return to charcoal (which causes deforestation), in full scale, might not be necessary. In daily life it could easily combine with biomass to form the chief means of thermal energy for operations such as cooking, space heating etc while human muscle power provides the majority of the mechanical energy needs.

These three energy sources could easily support a low-energy industrial complex and agricultural sector. But a large amount of power will come from human muscles and any tech that can amplify this (bicycles are one) would also provide a significant energy resource.      

Community or one component of an ecosystem

When talking about the survival of societies an important concept is community since local communities are the basic socially self-sufficient unit of a society, families are a further division and they are the building blocks of communities. But the concept itself and as used in common speech is quite vague and imprecise, often used confusingly or without an exact meaning. So here I’ll do a basic examination of the word from a its scientific meaning and relate it to human societies.

One of the classes I took for VCE is environmental science and there was a specific term for what a community was. It was the living components of an ecosystem, or biotic, with the environment forming the non-living, abiotic, component. From this point we can get several conclusions; first that the community of an urban environment also includes the vermin, pets and various plants or microbes that live there as well as humans, second that it is only one part of a greater whole and must work with the non-living components of the ecosystem its embedded in, thirdly that a human community in its most basic definition just accounts for who lives in a set area wether or not they interact much. When we talk about community we normally only mean relationships between humans and often restrict them to personal/social relationships but this ignores the vast amount of life living there, domesticated plants and animals are only some of them, that humans have formed intricate bonds with over the time we have been on the earth and the vast variation of inter-human relationships that exist. The communities we live in are far more than the people who live in them.        

Submarines

An important area of warfare i missed out was submarines, its not seperate from naval warfare but it does have a different area and is a gamechanger in both naval warfare and empire building. To understand submarines role the two main goals of naval warfare must be known; the first is the allowance of your shipping to pass across the seas, theses can be transports, merchants or even troops and supplies, the second goal is the denial of the use of the seas to enemy shipping. Before submarines the acheivment of sea dominance meant both of these goals was accomplished, this was the basis behind the British empires massive navy (had to be able to fight the next two biggest fleets at the same time). Submarines changed this, think both world wars and the wolfpacks, because while you could acheive sea dominance and deny the enemy use of the seas the enemy could still threaten and deny effective use of the seas to shipping, while they can't easily destroy warships it dosen't matter if your supplies can't get through. while there are effective countermeasures to submarines they require certain tactics, such as escorts or convoys, to be effective and are greatly enhanced by knowing where the subs are or are going to. This makes them a great defensive weapon, especially for a weaker power, and if submarine colliers or enhanced ranges are built in they become potent offensive weapons. Australia could do worse than get a defensive (low range in exchange for cheapness, for numbers, and weapons) sub fleet to ward off other powers. Submarines are mainly diesel or nuclear powered now, so biodiesel will be neccesary for current designs to be used which certainly acheivable to some extent and if the fuel usage is reduced across the whole fleet (say by using wind) would be easier, or alternate power sources. But an important lesson is the first military submarine, it was hand powered by a single man and was supposed to attach explosive charges to british warships during the war of independence. It completly failed to destroy any warships but it was a good first try. As we can see low tech submarines are possible but warships themselves are hard to kill (the new russian torpedoes may change that) and the best historic success has been in the denial of safe shipping to the enemy.

Just what is technology?

The abstract concept of technology covers quite a lot of ground, Agriculture-industrial or organic, industrial arts- blacksmithing, factories and modern high tech, energy collection to energy use and every form of transport except walking. A useful phrase is ‘technology only uses energy and matter, it cannot create them’. While this is entirely accurate, another phrase has to be added, “Technology is also the primary means by which humans make energy and matter usable’. For oil to be usable, it first must be dug up, even if by shovels powered by workers feed by small-scale farming, and then refined. All but the most primitive hunting techniques, like utilizing our natural endurance to run down animals, require tools and while gathering can be done without them it is greatly improved by baskets. So technology can be divided into collectors (agriculture, mining etc) and utilizers. But there is also another dividing line, that between human driven (tools, bikes, etc) and non-human driven (sailing ships, computers etc). Both of these form a spectrum since no action can be done without energy and matter but large parts of our tech base is simply making energy or matter usable, metal refining is both a collector (refined metals) but also a utilizer (ores, heat energy). Moreover, to a certain extent, human driven technology can be swapped for non-human technology and vice-versa e.g. pumping can be done by both windmills and human effort.

So when we speak about it, just what is technology?