Ours are not the Children of the Nobles

by Joel Hirst (December 2018)

The Fight between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559

Ruin.

Scarcity is not something we want to talk about much. Angus Deaton and Thomas Pickey tell us of our “Great Escape”. Aren’t we living better than we ever have? Isn’t wealth increasing exponentially even as the population of the planet doubles and doubles and doubles yet again? Haven’t all the doomsayers always been wrong? Scarcity, that must be one of those ridiculous ‘classical liberal’ ideas that died with Malthus and Smith.

[i]. “As the author Jason Hickel points out, a decoupling of rising GDP from global resource use has not happened and will not happen. While 50bn tons of resources used per year is roughly the limit the Earth’s systems can tolerate, the world is already consuming 70bn tons. At current rates of economic growth, this will rise to 180bn tons by 2050. Maximum resource efficiency, coupled with massive carbon taxes, would reduce this at best to 95bn tons: still way beyond environmental limits. Green growth, as members of the institute appear to accept, is physically impossible.” The sixth great extinction; the destruction of our oceans—the lungs of the world. “Almost all of our world’s oceans have been negatively affected by the impacts of humanity, a new study has revealed. Just 13% of the world’s oceans remain without damage and home to naturally occurring high levels of marine life[ii].” Deforestation at an all-time high, “In tropical regions around the world, tree cover is disappearing that quickly: Every minute of every day over the last two years, a tract the size of 40 football fields was clear-cut or burned to increase production of soy, cattle, palm oil, and wood products.[iii]” Every year consuming from our earth more than it can replenish, thereby taking from our children, and eventually our grandchildren. Easter Island on a global scale.

Author Kevin MacKay calls this all “terminal disfunction”[iv]. “Control by oligarchs, he (MacKay) argues, thwarts rational decision-making, because the short-term interests of the elite are radically different to the long-term interests of society. This explains why past civilizations have collapsed ‘despite possessing the cultural and technological know-how needed to resolve their crises’. Economic elites, which benefit from social dysfunction, block the necessary solutions.”

The difference to all this and the world of Alfred the Great is of course scale. The population of the civilization which had built the roads and heated floors (the Romans) was probably four million people upon the English isle. That number had fallen to roughly 1.8 million during Alfred’s time (at the time of the famed Doomsday Book—in 1083—there were probably two million English). The fall of Rome was an extinction level event. Today there are 55 million English in a world much more interconnected, globalization (which is different from globalism) making the problems harder to solve because they are more interconnected. “Disastrous tipping points loom in several of civilization’s systems—from the collapse of ocean ecology to the threat of nuclear war. In addition, because the crisis cannot be contained in one part of the globe, the dysfunctions can’t be dealt with in isolation.”

And the world we love so much? Our lives, our children, our travels and literature and plays? The politics about which we obsess over micro-brewed beer and range-fed steak? More probably our children’s children will live like those of Uhtred, working dawn till dusk seven days a week in Alfred of Wessex’s “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” world. For ours are not the children of the nobles.

[i] “The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us”, Monbiot George. The Guardian, November 14, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/earth-death-spiral-radical-action-climate-breakdown

[ii] “Wilderness Map Reveals Only 13% of World’s Oceans Is Untouched by Humans”, Miley, Jessica. “Interesting Engineering” July 27, 2018 https://interestingengineering.com/wilderness-map-reveals-only-13-of-worlds-oceans-is-untouched-by-humans

[iii] “Tropical Forest Loss Slowed in 2017—To the Second Worst Total Ever”, Leahy, Stephen. National Geographic, June 27, 2018 https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/tropical-deforestation-forest-loss-2017/

[iv] “The Ecological Crisis is a Political Crisis”, MacKay, Kevin, Resilience, September 25, 2018 https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-09-25/the-ecological-crisis-is-a-political-crisis/

[v] “The Coming Anarchy”, Kaplan, Robert, The Atlantic, February 1994 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/

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I, Charles, From the Camps. He was a Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas and an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has a Masters from Brandeis University. He tweets @joelhirst and his public facebook is @JoelDHirst

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