tpaine posted:

yeagh this!!!!

girdles_gone_wild posted:

fuck the north.

the north owns! it owns!

Tinkzorg posted:

hey shennong can you lay out for me basically these things:

1) in WHAT WAYS our current agricultural system is dependant on energy subsidies in the form of fossil fuels

2) what sort of timeframe we're talking about for a collapse due to more expensive oil + other dangers inherent to the low robustness of a monoculture system of the type we're using

3) what sort of structural changes to society you think are likely/necessary reactions based on 1) and 2).

any reading material recommendations would be cool too

i can try

1) pretty much all aspects of the modern industrial ag model draw heavily on fossil fuel energy. this becomes immediately obvious once you go a step or two remove away from tractors in the fields and look at production chains, so like the aluminum in the hoops for the hoop house was extracted, smelted, formed etc using fossil fuels, the chemicals used to synthesise the pesticide are derived from petroleum, and so on. everything from environmental modification (greenhouses, moving topsoil around, etc) to irrigation (digging ditches, pumping water, moving water around), to cultivation and harvesting to getting produce to market relies to a greater or lesser extent on fossil fuels.

probably the most significant contribution imo is labour, agriculture is generally labour intensive and the fact that we've got a tiny fraction of the population working the entire vastness of the breadbaskets in eg north america speaks to that. big monoculture fields mean you can use tractors and combine harvesters instead of crews of dozens or hundreds of people sowing, planting, harvesting, threshing etc. pesticides and aircraft mean you don't need a person laboriously going through every row and cultivating.

i can give you more specific examples of the manner and extent to which particular operations depend on fossil fuels if you want but if you just think that if it involves a combustion engine, refined metal, or a synthetic chemical anywhere along the route there are FF inputs it should be pretty obvious

2) i don't subscribe to "collapse" theories altho i joke about them a lot. increased fossil fuel prices are already impacting production in lots of places, it's part of (although there are obviously lots of other things going on) upward pressure on food commodity prices. a few years ago i spent a lot of time sifting through the peak oil literature and if i remember correctly i don't think it's really clear that absolute scarcity is going to be a thing for at least a couple decades, so i think that's more of a medium-long term concern and is maybe more relevant to the general configuration of the economy and a geographical morphology of agricultural markets (which will probably become more localised in response to price pressures and maybe take on some resemblance to structures described in classical central place theory) than it is to the wheels falling off industrial agriculture in some catastrophic way. that said, disruptions in supply and crazy volatility in the markets will probably cause transient dislocations, famines, etc

as far as timelines for the other uniquely brittle pillars of the industrial ag system go, i think we'll probably start to see disease from CAFOs be a major problem pretty soon (already have some reports of human->swine->human transmission of ab-resistant MRSA etc). climate change is the big one for me, namely effects on water as the drought maps in the OP outline. even the dryland farming techniques we have are highly vulnerable to disruptions in rainfall patterns, and we don't really have the appropriate kinds of intensive, small scale terrain-modification practices that have been used by peasants in Africa and other places to deal with water conservation that could be readily implemented in places like North America and Europe. everything i'm reading in the climate journals says this is a foregone conclusion at this point, we're going to see drought conditions predominate across much of the farmland we rely on within 30-40 years at the outside.

as the holy quran says

The analogy of this worldly life is like this: we send down water from the sky to produce with it all kinds of plants from the earth, and to provide food for the people and the animals. Then, just as the earth is perfectly adorned, and its people think that they are in control thereof, our judgment comes by night or by day, leaving it completely barren, as if nothing existed the previous day.

3) i have no idea lol. i intended this thread to ultimately be about delineating the bounds of the biophyiscal landscape those responses are likely going to be taking place in more than predicting what the responses will be or ought to be, although i havent really had time to elaborate too much on that, so i'll answer in that way i guess

generally speaking in 30-40 years i think we're going to be dealing with a world where energy is far more dear, and therefore effects like Scott's terrain friction and boundaries of state space start to matter more than they have in the fossil fuel age, and where climate change makes status quo subsistence routines non-viable

i think basically taken together that means simultaneous doubling-down on status quo structures by existing institutions and elites (ie diversion of fuel into existing agricultural structures, replacement of fossil fuels with urban debt-serf labour, probably-futile attempts to build out centralised renewable energy, etc) amidst counter-hegemonic projects by communities to relocalise political and economic structures to bring them within the narrowing thermoeconomic constraints of the age to come, all set against a background of profound dislocation, migration, and various forms of violence. i think ultimately the relocalisation/state-status-quo interplay may manifest itself similarly to Scott's state/nonstate dynamic, particularly with regard to ag/thermoeconomics and maybe in other ways as well, which is why i think his work is so improtant

what specific responses will or should look like, i don't know, i'm trying to figure that out in one highly specific context (my own) and have got a set of physical and intellectual tools i think i'll need and some ideas about organisational structures that are capable of dynamically adapting to some of these challenges but thats about it

as far as reading material goes, i'd really recommend the scott book this thread is about, otherwise if you can be more specific i can point you to places you might find answers to particular questions

Edited by shennong (June 11, 2012 22:08:08)

tpaine posted:

Poop pool...aids pool...Naegleria fowleri pool...what is the difference in a modern context

modernity? in MY post-normative safe space!? t-paine you have made a powerful enemy today.

Tinkzorg posted:

also shennong i want to learn enough about all of this so that i can at least be literate and draw my own conclusions with regards to what sort of political prescriptions we need. i dont have a green thumb but its obvious to me that this is important.

any sort of reading tips about like everything from agricultural history to the theoretical and practical basis for horticulture and so on would be really appreciated.

im reading "radical agriculture" edited by murray book chin.

stegosaurus posted:

im reading "radical agriculture" edited by murray book chin.

im reading 'mein kampf' by john christy and it covers a lot of this too

Tinkzorg posted:

also shennong i want to learn enough about all of this so that i can at least be literate and draw my own conclusions with regards to what sort of political prescriptions we need. i dont have a green thumb but its obvious to me that this is important.

any sort of reading tips about like everything from agricultural history to the theoretical and practical basis for horticulture and so on would be really appreciated.

do you have journal access? i'd recommend at least glancing at some fo the stuff i've mentioned earlier in this thread, eg Howard's "An Agricultural Testament" and King's "Farmers of Forty Centuries" which are kind of permaculture Ur-texts and are still relevant. if you want to be scientifically literate re: agriculture i'd probably start with something like Bleasdale's "Plant Physiology in Relation to Horticulture" (pretty short) or Russell's "Soil Conditions and Plant Growth" (really long and in depth). you can get old editions of either of those for a couple of bucks online usually

agricultural history i really don't have any good book recommendations, maybe someone else can recommend sth there. i usually prefer to look at archaeological papers for particular areas/societies just because when that stuff gets rolled into a grand narrative it's often with a particular teleological-development or primitivist slant that annoys me

shennong posted:

Tinkzorg posted:

hey shennong can you lay out for me basically these things:

1) in WHAT WAYS our current agricultural system is dependant on energy subsidies in the form of fossil fuels

2) what sort of timeframe we're talking about for a collapse due to more expensive oil + other dangers inherent to the low robustness of a monoculture system of the type we're using

3) what sort of structural changes to society you think are likely/necessary reactions based on 1) and 2).

any reading material recommendations would be cool too

i can try

1) pretty much all aspects of the modern industrial ag model draw heavily on fossil fuel energy. this becomes immediately obvious once you go a step or two remove away from tractors in the fields and look at production chains, so like the aluminum in the hoops for the hoop house was extracted, smelted, formed etc using fossil fuels, the chemicals used to synthesise the pesticide are derived from petroleum, and so on. everything from environmental modification (greenhouses, moving topsoil around, etc) to irrigation (digging ditches, pumping water, moving water around), to cultivation and harvesting to getting produce to market relies to a greater or lesser extent on fossil fuels.

probably the most significant contribution imo is labour, agriculture is generally labour intensive and the fact that we've got a tiny fraction of the population working the entire vastness of the breadbaskets in eg north america speaks to that. big monoculture fields mean you can use tractors and combine harvesters instead of crews of dozens or hundreds of people sowing, planting, harvesting, threshing etc. pesticides and aircraft mean you don't need a person laboriously going through every row and cultivating.

i can give you more specific examples of the manner and extent to which particular operations depend on fossil fuels if you want but if you just think that if it involves a combustion engine, refined metal, or a synthetic chemical anywhere along the route there are FF inputs it should be pretty obvious

2) i don't subscribe to "collapse" theories altho i joke about them a lot. increased fossil fuel prices are already impacting production in lots of places, it's part of (although there are obviously lots of other things going on) upward pressure on food commodity prices. a few years ago i spent a lot of time sifting through the peak oil literature and if i remember correctly i don't think it's really clear that absolute scarcity is going to be a thing for at least a couple decades, so i think that's more of a medium-long term concern and is maybe more relevant to the general configuration of the economy and a geographical morphology of agricultural markets (which will probably become more localised in response to price pressures and maybe take on some resemblance to structures described in classical central place theory) than it is to the wheels falling off industrial agriculture in some catastrophic way. that said, disruptions in supply and crazy volatility in the markets will probably cause transient dislocations, famines, etc

as far as timelines for the other uniquely brittle pillars of the industrial ag system go, i think we'll probably start to see disease from CAFOs be a major problem pretty soon (already have some reports of human->swine->human transmission of ab-resistant MRSA etc). climate change is the big one for me, namely effects on water as the drought maps in the OP outline. even the dryland farming techniques we have are highly vulnerable to disruptions in rainfall patterns, and we don't really have the appropriate kinds of intensive, small scale terrain-modification practices that have been used by peasants in Africa and other places to deal with water conservation that could be readily implemented in places like North America and Europe. everything i'm reading in the climate journals says this is a foregone conclusion at this point, we're going to see drought conditions predominate across much of the farmland we rely on within 30-40 years at the outside.

as the holy quran says

The analogy of this worldly life is like this: we send down water from the sky to produce with it all kinds of plants from the earth, and to provide food for the people and the animals. Then, just as the earth is perfectly adorned, and its people think that they are in control thereof, our judgment comes by night or by day, leaving it completely barren, as if nothing existed the previous day.

3) i have no idea lol. i intended this thread to ultimately be about delineating the bounds of the biophyiscal landscape those responses are likely going to be taking place in more than predicting what the responses will be or ought to be, although i havent really had time to elaborate too much on that, so i'll answer in that way i guess

generally speaking in 30-40 years i think we're going to be dealing with a world where energy is far more dear, and therefore effects like Scott's terrain friction and boundaries of state space start to matter more than they have in the fossil fuel age, and where climate change makes status quo subsistence routines non-viable

i think basically taken together that means simultaneous doubling-down on status quo structures by existing institutions and elites (ie diversion of fuel into existing agricultural structures, replacement of fossil fuels with urban debt-serf labour, probably-futile attempts to build out centralised renewable energy, etc) amidst counter-hegemonic projects by communities to relocalise political and economic structures to bring them within the narrowing thermoeconomic constraints of the age to come, all set against a background of profound dislocation, migration, and various forms of violence. i think ultimately the relocalisation/state-status-quo interplay may manifest itself similarly to Scott's state/nonstate dynamic, particularly with regard to ag/thermoeconomics and maybe in other ways as well, which is why i think his work is so improtant

what specific responses will or should look like, i don't know, i'm trying to figure that out in one highly specific context (my own) and have got a set of physical and intellectual tools i think i'll need and some ideas about organisational structures that are capable of dynamically adapting to some of these challenges but thats about it

as far as reading material goes, i'd really recommend the scott book this thread is about, otherwise if you can be more specific i can point you to places you might find answers to particular questions

what i recall from memory (which means it's probably inaccurate), something like 60% of USA's energy consumption a direct result of heavy reliance on fossil fuels in agriculture; how much of that is due to pesticides and fertilizers being comprised of hydrocarbons?

i'm curious, hypothetically, how much of our energy consumption could /theoretically/ be met by an entirely renewable energy system? not that i have illusions, i'm deeply cynical of capitalism adverting climatological crisis, because it's an external cost to capital (i.e. never taken into consideration) and by the time climate change will have a drastic impact on humanity, it will already be too late.

as a corollary, it's pretty assured that geoengineering is an inevitability at some point. do you know what would be the most likely way it will occur? last i remember reading about it, some scientists were throwing around the idea of shooting a bunch of sulfur and metal into the air then dumping iron into the ocean. i guess, at least we'll have permanent grey skies, and bubbling oceans full of dead floating fish in our dystopian future so it can aesthetically match the fictional ones depicted by movies in every

AmericanNazbro posted:

i'm curious, hypothetically, how much of our energy consumption could /theoretically/ be met by an entirely renewable energy system? not that i have illusions, i'm deeply cynical of capitalism adverting climatological crisis, because it's an external cost to capital (i.e. never taken into consideration) and by the time climate change will have a drastic impact on humanity, it will already be too late.

afaik "theoretically" all of it if someone carpeted a chunk of the sahara in solar collectors or whatever. you'll see maps like this sometimes



the amount of fossil fuels you'd have to expend to perform that build-out and maintain all those mirrors and shit is never accounted for in this kind of stuff of course. solar also has intermittency issues etc

wind and wave energy is pretty severely limited by hte amount of energy in the atmosphere

biofuels can't really be produced on a large enough scale to replace any significant quantity of non-renewables

probably all of those will see limited use over the medium to long term but from a state perspective the only game in town if you want to maintain the status quo w/ renewables is solar and no one's doing it so you're correct that it's probably never going to happen

AmericanNazbro posted:

as a corollary, it's pretty assured that geoengineering is an inevitability at some point. do you know what would be the most likely way it will occur? last i remember reading about it, some scientists were throwing around the idea of shooting a bunch of sulfur and metal into the air then dumping iron into the ocean. i guess, at least we'll have permanent grey skies, and bubbling oceans full of dead floating fish in our dystopian future so it can aesthetically match the fictional ones depicted by movies in every

the last i read about this stuff it's more or less as you say, they're still talking about doing the high-altitude sulfur dioxide stuff and there's still a little bit of chatter about fertilising oceans. i think the ocean stuff has had a couple of small scale trials but there's a moratorium on it now and the trials didn't look too promising so that's probably out. you can do the sulfur dioxide thing with a bunch of high altitude weather balloons so its totally within the unilateral reach of just about any state at this point, so i believe you're correct that it's a given. my understanding is that hte knock-on effects of this stuff are poorly understood at best, but im not an atmo chemist. guidoanselmi might know more about that, i think NASA might be involved with some of those studies

yeah like the first and biggest warning sign for me was just the start where he talked about "ok im gonna depress y'all but then ill be moving to more POSITIVE THINGS". thats the format thats so inescapable for basically everyone in the western world: things may look like shit, but dont worry, there's a solution that will make the problems go away, no big, therefore we HAVE to end a lecture feeling cheered up and positive about starting our own "food forests" or whatever. this is a serious problem that youre gonna have to take seriously, but not TOO seriously, we wouldnt want anyone to make some sort of frowny face, after all!!
...

the situation we're in is so dire, so totally without any light at the end of the tunnel that the "positive" things he talks about is just this bullshit about painting road intersections and "catching social energy and storing it".

...

i'd say people like these are still marginally useful but the fact that they just arent able to stare deeply enough into the Abyss Of The Real just means that you get some correct things mixed with a lot of desperate positive thinking.

...

i firmly believe that everyone knows on some sort of subconscious level that of course we cant find more oil forever. this entire industrial society promises to be an incredibly transient and short-lived part of human history.

There's a very, very common phenomenon in the literature on these topics (resource depletion, environmental degradation, etc.); there's always a happy chapter, usually near the end. It acts as the sudden relief, the author's personal feelings on the matter, that comes after a deluge of overwhelmingly depressing facts and predictions.

The purpose of this chapter is very simple. It provides the reader with hope, the promise that it is not too late at all to change, that the future can be saved. (of course, the implied future here always seems eerily similar to the status quo).

Hope, however, is the problem. With the "happy chapter", personal responsibility becomes an externality (someone else will fix the problem), as people turn to the false belief that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change for the better while maintaining the status quo. This chapter (like the "solutions" offered at the end of video) ultimately serves to distract. The author says that while civilization cannot be saved (or perhaps moved beyond), the ancedotes (traffic circles re-building communities, etc.) he leaves at the end do nothing to engage or question our way of life. It is these false hopes that bind us to unlivable situations (and not act against them), and blind us to real possibilities.

Staring into the Abyss is unbearable for a reason: would you want to wake up from the perfect dream? Once you discover that nearly every aspect in Western society is a ephemeral luxury, facing to this truth is difficult... especially when one discovers the impossibility of trying to live outside the current industrial system, or attempts to move beyond it.

As the years drag on and more people acknowledge the horror, they will either lose their hope or surrender to the dream. If they lose their hope for the future, they'll be the better for it, for with the end of hope only then will one see the beginning of action.

Edited by Hubbert (June 26, 2012 19:43:56)