Welcome to CE Stoicism

In The Rise and Fall of a Herd of Reindeer, Victor Scheffer explains how, in 1911, the US government placed 40 reindeer on the Pribilof Islands in Alaska to provide the native residents with a sustained source of fresh meat. The herd flourished on St. Paul Island and by 1938 it numbered 2,000 members. But then something strange happened. Over the next twelve years, the herd suffered catastrophic losses. By 1950, it comprised a miserly eight members. The herd initially flourished due to the unnatural environment they were placed in. There were no predators on St. Paul Island and lichen, a form of moss, provided the reindeer a plentiful supply of food for the winter months. As a result, the reindeer herd increased in size. The lichen could keep up with demand when the herd numbered a few hundred. But more reindeer meant more demand placed on the lichen.

This is where the herd began to have problems. Reindeer, just like all living things, interact to form ecosystems. Ecosystems provide the conditions for life to flourish, but they can only do so within limits defined by an area’s carrying capacity. In Population, Sustainability and Earth’s Carrying Capacity, Gretchen Daily and Paul Ehrlich define carrying capacity as the maximum “population size of a given species that an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future.” Carrying capacity is influenced by the size of an ecosystem, the characteristics of the area and the organisms that live within it. Larger or richer areas, like rainforests, have a higher carrying capacity than drier, sparser areas, like deserts. Similarly, an ecosystem will be able to support a larger population with low energy requirements, like lizards, than a species with higher energy requirements, such as birds, who have the same body-mass as the lizards.

The land area of St. Paul Island is 26,500 acres which means that as Scheffer argues, “at the peak of the population in 1938, there were only 13 acres of land for each deer… on this basis, the reindeer population was at least three times the carrying capacity of the range.” When the needs of a species exceed the capacity of an area, it creates a state of ecological overshoot. In the case of the reindeer herd, their needs exceeded the regenerative capacity of the lichen on St.Paul Island, as a result, the lichen disappeared as the population peaked in 1938. Without a food source for the winter months, the herd was devastated by starvation and disease over the next twelve years.

The great acceleration

The challenge we face is that we’ve induced ecological overshoot on a planetary scale. This has happened for a few reasons. Firstly, the human population has exploded. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, after thousands of years, the population hit a billion people for the first time. By 1920, there were two billion people; by 1960, three billion. Four billion came in 1974; five billion just thirteen years later. By 1999, six billion people roamed the Earth. By 2011, there were seven billion people. In 2022, the eight billion milestone was hit.

An increasing population wouldn’t be an issue in and of itself. But this explosion has coincided with a feverish increase in human activity, known as ‘The Great Acceleration’. In the second half of the twentieth century, the global economy grew sixfold. Between 1950 and 2010, the human population nearly tripled. In 1950 the world produced 1 million tonnes of plastics, today we produce around 300 million tonnes. In that time, energy consumption tripled. The number of McDonald’s restaurants, an icon of globalisation, increased from one restaurant in America in 1954, to over 36,000 restaurants in over 100 countries in 2021.

Every conceivable thing has increased exponentially, from air travel to automobiles to telecommunications; the Great Acceleration has created an avalanche of consumable goods and services that have led to higher living standards. And it’s all thanks to increases in production which have resulted from economic growth. The issue with growth is that to produce more, you need to make more. So as production has increased, so has the amount of energy and resources we need to achieve those increases. Since the Industrial Revolution, economic growth has led to miraculous increases in living standards for many, but higher living standards come with a horrifying cost.

Ecological overshoot

More people consuming more stuff leads to an increase in our collective ‘ecological footprint’. The ecological footprint measures how fast we consume resources and generate waste compared to how fast nature can absorb our waste and generate resources. Every year, the Global Footprint Network uses the ecological footprint to assess if, and when, our demands on the Earth exceed what Earth can replenish in that year. The graph shows that since 1971 the demands we make on the Earth to produce the goods and services we then use to support our lifestyles exceeds what Earth can supply. In short, we’ve been in a state of ecological overshoot for over fifty years. Overshoot has accelerated over time as our collective ecological footprint has increased. We now require 1.75 Earths to provide for our wants and needs as a species.

The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. What we are pleased to call “primitive societies” – that is, societies that are well enough adapted to their environments that they get by comfortably without huge masses of cumbersome and expensive infrastructure – usually do so in a fairly small way, and very often evolve traditional ways of getting rid of excess goods at regular intervals so that the cost of maintaining it doesn’t become a burden. As societies expand and start to depend on complex infrastructure to support the daily activities of their inhabitants, though, it becomes harder and less popular to do this, and so the maintenance needs of the infrastructure and the rest of the society’s stuff gradually build up until they reach a level that can’t be covered by the resources on hand.

It’s what happens next that’s crucial to the theory. The only reliable way to solve a crisis that’s caused by rising maintenance costs is to cut those costs, and the most effective way of cutting maintenance needs is to tip some fraction of the stuff that would otherwise have to be maintained into the nearest available dumpster. That’s rarely popular, and many complex societies resist it as long as they possibly can, but once it happens the usual result is at least a temporary resolution of the crisis. Now of course the normal human response to the end of a crisis is the resumption of business as usual, which in the case of a complex society generally amounts to amassing more stuff. Thus the normal rhythm of history in complex societies cycles back and forth between building up, or anabolism, and breaking down, or catabolism. Societies that have been around a while – China comes to mind – have cycled up and down through this process dozens of times, with periods of prosperity and major infrastructure projects alternating with periods of impoverishment and infrastructure breakdown.

A more dramatic version of the same process happens when a society is meeting its maintenance costs with nonrenewable resources. If the resource is abundant enough – for example, the income from a global empire, or half a billion years of ancient sunlight stored underground in the form of fossil fuels – and the rate at which it’s extracted can be increased over time, at least for a while, a society can heap up unimaginable amounts of stuff without worrying about the maintenance costs. The problem, of course, is that neither imperial expansion nor fossil fuel drawdown can keep on going indefinitely on a finite planet. Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at that point the costs of keeping wealth flowing in from your empire or your oil fields begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally unstoppable decline; the gap between your maintenance needs and available resources spins out of control, until your society no longer has enough resources on hand even to provide for its own survival, and it goes under.

That’s catabolic collapse. It’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds, because each burst of catabolism on the way down does lower maintenance costs significantly, and can also free up resources for other uses. The usual result is the stairstep sequence of decline that’s traced by the history of so many declining civilizations—half a century of crisis and disintegration, say, followed by several decades of relative stability and partial recovery, and then a return to crisis; rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.

Most of the second half of the book covers the great acceleration of our fossil fuel driven technology age and the impacts it has had on many aspects of our history: geography, economy, technology growth, planetary biology, etc… This is where the book really shines. His key observations, which I believe are spot on, include:

Humanity was somewhat stalled at ~Roman-age to middle-ages level of technology and population for many centuries until the discovery of fossil fuel and the technologies to utilize it. This created a rapid positive feedback cycle of growing energy use enabled by rapid technology growth which enables more use of energy, and so on.

With globalization, humans have essentially created a “superorganism” under the control of no one but driven by our basal instincts: Not good! We are out of control and cannot help ourselves: We’ll grow and grow and grow until we run into “something”…

And that “something” is the fact that planet Earth is finite. And the issue is that we’ve already significantly grown past Earth’s steady state carrying capacity. We may not notice too much now because Earth has (or had) vast resources that we were emptying: i.e. We are draining Earth’s bank accounts and they aren’t quite empty yet. However, when we finally do draw down all those aquifers, chop down all those rainforests, deplete that topsoil, overharvest all those fish, dam all the rivers, and disrupt our climate and oceans, we’ll have such a large population running at such a high level of consumption that it’ll be impossible to slow down enough to make a difference: A crash may be coming!

Finally, he touches on the incredibly important element which is this: Regardless of what side of the political spectrum someone is on, most leaders and citizens are ignoring the scope of issue: The Right simply ignores that there is an issue. The Left pretends there are simple technology fixes that can “just be rolled out now” if we just have political agreement (i.e. put up windmills and solar panels, drive an electric car, and “Presto, problem solved!”). Both the Left and Right also are good at pointing the figure elsewhere: For the Right it’s often the rise of China and developing world, for the Left it’s often big companies and the developed world. But they both agree on one thing, it’s never ourselves. The biggest flaw is they all agree we can just keep growing and growing and growing (GDP, Population, Consumption, etc…). ...

...

Ecological Overshoot