Many people come to Seattle Peak Oil Awareness with good intentions, lots of enthusiasm, and plenty of positive attitude. Many of them lean left, are dedicated “environmentalists”, and bring values, attitudes and perspectives that have become very familiar to us in the last 40 years. They value “community” very highly, they want to “be green”, clean up the environment, live in peace and harmony, and they respect the sanctity of each human life, but without forgetting the value of the nonhuman world either. Their concerns include depletion, climate, war, inequality, democracy, fairness, hunger, endangered species, pollution and nuclear waste. They come because they want to address these issues.

Some of them have wanted this group to address all of those issues. In other words, they want to try to “Save the World”.

This essay is an attempt to explain why we feel that such a project is foolish and impossible, and why other projects can realistically produce positive results that are even more rewarding, even if on a much smaller scale.

Reality Denial

Seattle Peak Oil Awareness members have studied the issues around environment and ecology a great deal. Almost everyone in the group longs for a peaceful, just world where resources are used wisely instead of wasted, shared instead of hoarded. At the same time, however, realism is and has always been the most cherished value in our group.

One of the biggest problems in our society is what we call “reality denial”. When we say that realism is our highest value, it means that we strive to reject reality denial wherever we can identify it. This tends to make our expectations and predictions more accurate as our social, political and economic analysis is based more on observation and data than on our hopes and dreams. Thus far, we’ve found this approach quite effective and generally useful.

The Exponential Function

Let me introduce a physics professor at University of Colorado, Albert Bartlett. Bartlett is famous for saying, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” By this phrase, Bartlett aims to point out that 7% growth per year means a doubling in size every 10 years. 7% per year sounds innocuous to us, but if we truly understand the math, it becomes clear that constant percentage growth of anything is basically unsustainable because this year’s 7% is 7% of the new total, not of last year’s. See the video Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast? for a better understanding of what this means and why it is so important.

Bartlett has truly grappled with the basics of sustainability, and has come up with some rather stark conclusions. These conclusions are almost totally self-evident to anyone who lives in our society and gives these matters more than a cursory thought. In his essay, The Massive Movement to Marginalize the Malthusiam Message, Bartlett lays out what ’sustainability’ means in our political life. These observations can be seen every day in board rooms and municipal meetings throughout our nation. They play out the way Bartlett describes them almost without exception:

The sustainers rely on the optimistic terms “sustainability” and “sustainable development.” Their use of these terms gives the untutored listener the comforting impression that the sustainer understands the problems and their solutions. In order to achieve the desired diversion, the works of the sustainers follow two paths:

First, the sustainers must be authoritative; simultaneously they must be vague and contradictory in their use of terms. Above all, the sustainer should avoid giving the term “sustainability” a meaningful definition that would cause ordinary people or political leaders any discomfort in their daily lives.

Second, the sustainers gain credibility by advocating good programs such as reducing resource use, reducing waste, using energy more efficiently, etc. These programs are environmentally beneficial, but they are often interpreted to mean that these and similar programs are all that we need in order to achieve a sustainable society. By omission, these programs divert attention away from the fundamental Malthusian problem of the arithmetic of population growth.

Following these recommended programs does save resources, but unfortunately, the resources that the sustainers save are not preserved for the use of future generations, but rather are used to support the continued growth of the population. Thus the net result of many of the actions of the sustainers is to accomodate and hence to encourage continued population growth.

The Growth Mandate

The substantial core of Bartlett’s writing focuses on the human population problem. We’re still adding people to the planet every single day and there are no solutions or even proposed solutions out there. Everyone wants to solve our problems, but nobody wants to solve this problem. Not only that, but we also demand constant economic growth. Some of us want to stop demanding it, but our modern money system actually requires growth or everything gets really messy and nobody wants to loan anyone else money anymore.

Given the pervasive nature of the growth mandates and what Bartlett described above, it should be no wonder that Seattle Peak Oil Awareness is skeptical of any prospects for “Saving the World”.

Die Off

One of the earliest and most prominent Peak Oil websites is called Die Off. It describes the population and energy calculations that lead to an inevitable result at some point in time. It proclaims, “The sudden — and surprising — end of the fossil fuel age will stun everyone — and kill billions.”

While Seattle Peak Oilers don’t have any specific predictions for this dieoff event, we do understand that humanity will certainly run into a math problem with resources and population at some time in the future. If you just watched “Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?“, then you can probably see the math problem pretty clearly as well.

The question that quickly comes up is what “Saving the World” would look like.

An Absurd Proposition

Suppose that billions really would have to die to allow the remainder to live on the planet’s future available energy. What if we could get it down to merely hundreds of millions dead? Would we have “Saved the World”? How low would it need to get for us to be successful? Zero?

These questions sound absurd because they are. The honest truth is that the remaining response time and the scale of these problems almost guarantee that we’ll be unable to make any meaningful changes beyond our own neighborhoods - presuming that long-standing power structures and social systems even leave us an opening for meaningful, large scale changes in the first place.

Focusing on Practical, Realistic Responses

Because we understand the futulity of trying to “Save the World”, attempting to do so would be the ultimate denial of reality. However, while we can’t change the world, we can change our own lives and improve our own local prospects. Armed with our understanding of what the future will really look like, we can focus our energy on the future of farming instead of the future of space travel.

It has been with these thoughts in mind that Seattle Peak Oil Awareness has embarked our our specific, small-scale projects that fit neatly into Richard Heinberg’s classification of “lifeboat building“.