This Week’s Finds (Week 314)

This week I’d like to start an interview with Thomas Fischbacher, who teaches at the School of Engineering Sciences at the University of Southampton. He’s a man with many interests, but we’ll mainly talk about sustainable agriculture, leading up to an idea called "permaculture".

JB: Your published work is mainly in theoretical physics, and some of it is quite mathematical. You have a bunch of papers on theories of gravity related to string theory, and another bunch on magnetic materials, maybe with some applications to technology. But you’re also interested in sustainable agricultural and building practices! That seems like quite a leap… but I may be trying to make a similar leap myself, so I find it fascinating. How did you get interested in these other topics, which seem so very different in flavor?

TF: I think it’s quite natural that one’s interests are wider than what one actually publishes about—quite likely, the popularity of your blog which is about all sorts of interesting things witnesses this.

However, if something that seems interesting catches my attention, I often experience a strong drive to come to an advanced level of understanding—at least mastering the key mechanisms. As far as I can think back, my studies have been predominantly self-directed, often following very unusual and sometimes obscure paths, so I sometimes happen to know a few quite odd things. And actually, considering research, I get a lot of fun out of combining advanced ideas from very different fields. Most of my articles are of that type, e.g. "sparse tensor numerics meets database algorithms and metalinguistics", or "Feynman diagrams meet lazy evaluation and continuation coding", or "Exceptional groups meet sensitivity back-propagation". Basically, I like to see myself in the role of a bridge-builder. Very often, powerful ideas that have been developed in one field are completely unknown in another where they actually can be used to great advantage.

Concerning sustainability, it actually was mostly soil physics that initially got me going. When dealing with a highly complex phenomenon such as human civilization, it is sometimes very useful to take a close look at matter and energy flows in order to get an overview over important processes that determine the structure and long term behaviour of a system. Just doing a few order-of-magnitude guesstimates and looking at typical soil erosion and soil formation rates, I found that, from that perspective, quite a number of fundamental things did not add up and told a story very different from the oh-so-glorious picture of human progress. That’s one of the great things about physical reasoning: it allows one to independently make up one’s mind about things where one otherwise would have little other choice than to believe what one is told. And so, I started to look deeper.

JB: So what did you discover? I can’t resist mentioning something I learned from a book Kevin Kelly gave me:

• Neil Roberts, The Holocene: an Environmental History, Blackwell, London, 1998.

It describes how the landscape of Europe has been cycling through glacial and interglacial periods every 100,000 years or so for the last 1.3 million years. It’s a regular sort of pattern!

As a glacial period ends, first comes a phase when birches and pines immigrate from southern refuges into what had been tundra. Then comes a phase when mixed deciduous forest takes over, with oak and elm becoming dominant. During this period, rocky soils turn into brown forest soils. Next, leaching from rocks in glacial deposits leads to a shift from neutral to acid soils, which favor trees like spruce. Then, as spruce take over, fallen needles make the soil even more acid. Together with cooling temperatures as the next glacial approaches, this leads to the replacement of deciduous forest by heathland and pine forests. Finally, glaciers move in and scrape away the soil. And then the cycle repeats!

I thought this was really cool: it’s like seasons, but on a grand scale. And I thought this quote was even cooler:

It was believed by classical authors such as Varro and Seneca that there had once been a "Golden Age", "when man lived on those things which the virgin earth produced spontaneously" and when "the very soil was more fertile and productive." If ever there was such a "Golden Age" then surely it was in the early Holocene, when soils were still unweathered and uneroded, and when Mesolithic people lived off the fruits of the land without the physical toil of grinding labour.

Still unweathered and uneroded! So it takes an ice age to reset the clock and bring soils back to an optimum state?

But your discovery was probably about the effects of humans…

TF: There are a number of different processes, all of them important, that are associated with very different time scales. A general issue here is that, as a society, we have difficulties to get an idea how our life experience is shaped by our cultural heritage, by our species’ history, and by events that happened tens of thousands of years ago.

Coming to the cycles of glaciation, you are right that these shaped the soils in places such as Europe, by grinding down rock and exposing freshly weathered material. But it is also interesting to look at places where this has not happened—to give us sort of an outside perspective; glaciation was fairly minimal in Australia, for example. Also, the main other player, volcanism did not have much of an effect in exposing fresh minerals there either. And so, Australian soils are extremely old—millions of years, tens of millions of years even, and very poor in mineral nutrients, as so much has been leached out. This has profound influences on the vegetation, but also on fauna, and of course on the people who inhabited this land for tens of thousands of years, and their culture: the Aborigines. Now, I don’t want to claim that the Aborigines actually managed to evolve a fully "sustainable" system of land management—but it should be pretty self-evident that they must have developed some fairly interesting biological knowledge over such a long time.

Talking about long time scales and the long distant past, it sometimes takes a genius to spot something that in hindsight is obvious but no one noticed because the unusual situation is that the really important thing that matters is missing. Have you ever wondered, for example, what animal might eat an avocado and disperse its fairly large seed? Like other fruit (botanically speaking, the avocado is a berry, as is the banana), the avocado plant co-evolved with animals that would eat its fruits—but there is no animal around that would do so. Basically, the reason is that we are looking at a broken ecosystem: the co-evolutionary partners of the avocado, such as gomphotheres, became extinct some thousands of years ago.

A blink with respect to the time scales of evolution, but an awfully long time for human civilizations. There is an interesting book on this subject:

• Connie Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms, Basic Books, New York, 2002. (Also listen to this song.)

Considering soils, the cycle of glaciations already should hold an important lesson for us. It is important to note that the plow is basically an invention that (somewhat) suits European agriculture and its geologically young soils. What happens if we take this way of farming to the tropics? While lush and abundant rainforests may seem to suggest otherwise, we have old and nutrient-poor soils here, and most mineral nutrients get stored and cycled by the vegetation. If we clear this, we release a flush of nutrients, but as the annual crops which we normally grow are not that good at holding on to these nutrients, we rapidly destroy the fertility of the land.

There are alternative options for how to produce food in such a situation, but before we look into this, it might be useful to know a few important ballpark figures related to agriculture—plow agriculture in particular.

The most widely used agricultural unit for "mass per area" is "metric tons per hectare", but I will instead use kilograms per square meter (as some people may find that easier to relate to), 1 kilogram per square meter being 10 tons/ha. Depending on the climate (windspeeds, severity of summer rains, etc.), plow agriculture will typically lead to soil loss rates due to erosion of something in the ballpark of 0.5 to 5 kilograms per square meter per year. In the US, erosion rates in the past have been as high as 4 kilograms per square meter per year and beyond, but have come down markedly. Still, soil loss rates of around 1 kilogram per square meter per year are not uncommon for the US. The problem is that, under good conditions, soil creation rates are in the ballpark of 0.02 to 0.2 kilograms per square meter per year. So, our present agriculture is destroying soil much faster than new soil gets formed. And, quite insidiously, erosion will always carry away the most fertile top layer of soil first.

It is worthwhile to compare this with agricultural yields: in Europe, good wheat yields are in the range of 0.6 kilograms per square meter per year, but yields depend a lot on water availability, and the world average is just 0.3 kilograms per square meter per year. In any case, the plow actually produces much more eroded land than food. You can see more information here:

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, FAOSTAT.

Concerning ancient reports of a "Golden Age"—I am not so sure about this anymore. By and large, civilizations mostly seem to have had quite a negative long term impact on the soil fertility that sustained them—and a number of them failed due to that. But all things considered, we often find that some particular groups of species have a very positive long term effect on fertility and counteract nutrient leaching—tropical forests bear witness to that.

Now… what single species we can think of would be best equipped to make a positive contribution towards long-term fertility building?

JB: Hey, no fair—I thought I was the one asking the questions!

Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe some sort of rhizobium? You know, those bacteria that associate themselves to the roots of plants like clover, alfalfa and beans, and take nitrogen from the air and convert it to a form that’s usable by the plants?

But you said "one single species", so this answer is probably not right: there are lots of species of rhizobia.

TF: The answer is quite astounding—and it lies at the heart of understanding sustainability. The species that could have the largest positive impact on soil fertility is Homo sapiens—us! Now, considering the enormous ecological damage that has been done by that single species, such a proposition may seem quite outrageous. But note that I asked about the potential to make a positive contribution, not actual behaviour as observed so far.

JB: Oh! I should have guessed that. Darn!

TF: When I bring up this point, many people think that I might have some specific technique in mind, a "miracle cure", or "silver bullet" idea such as, say, biochar—which seems to be pretty en vogue now—or genetically engineered miracle plants, or some such thing.

But no—this is about a much more fundamental issue. Nature eventually will heal ecological wounds—but quite often, she is not in a particular hurry. Left to her own devices, she may take thousands of years to rebuild soils and turn devastated land back into fertile ecosystems. Now, this is where we enter the scene. With our outstanding intellectual power we can read landscapes, think about key flows—flows of energy, water, minerals, and living things through a site—and if necessary, provide a little bit of guidance to help nature take the next step. This way, we can often speed up the regeneration clock a hundredfold or more!

Let me give some specific examples. Technologically, these are often embarrassingly simple—yet at the same time highly sophisticated, in the sense that they address issues that are obvious only once one has developed an eye for them.

The first one is imprinting—in arid regions, this can be a mind-blowingly simple yet quite effective technology to kick-start a biological succession pathway.

JB: What’s "imprinting"?

TF: One could say, earthworks for rainwater harvesting, but on the centimeter scale. Basically, it is a simple way to implement a passive resource-concentration system for water and organic matter that "nucleates" the transition back from desert to prairie—kind of like providing ice microcrystals in supercooled water. The Imprinting Foundation has a good website. In particular, take a look at this:

• The Imprinting Foundation, Success Stories.

This video is also well worth watching—part of the "Global Gardener" series:

• Bill Mollison, Dryland permaculture strategies—part 3, YouTube.

Here is another example—getting the restoration of rainforest going in the tropical grasslands of Colombia.

• Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI), Reforestation.

Here, the challenge is that the soil originally was so acidic (around pH 4) that aluminium went into the soil solution as toxic Al³⁺. What eventually managed to do the trick was to plant a nurse crop of Caribbean pines, Pinus caribbea (on 80 square kilometers—no mean feat) that have been provided with the right mycorrhizal symbiont (Pisolithus tinctorius, I think) that enabled the trees to grow in very acidic soil. An amazing subject in themselves, fungi, by the way.

These were big projects—but similar ideas work on pretty much any scale. Friends of mine have shown me great pictures of the progress of a degraded site in Nepal where they did something very simple a number of years ago—puting up four poles with strings between them on which birds like to gather. And personally, since I started to seriously ponder the issue of soil compaction and started to give double-digging a try in my own garden a few years ago, the results have been so amazing that I wonder why anyone bothers to garden with annuals any other way.

JB: What’s "double-digging"?

TF: A method to relieve soil compaction. As we humans live our lives above the soil, processes below can be rather alien to us—yet, this is where many very important things go on. By and large, most people do not realize how deep plant roots go—and how badly they are affected by compaction.

The term "double-digging" refers to digging out the top foot of topsoil from the bed, and then using a gardening fork to also loosen the next foot of soil (often subsoil) before putting back the topsoil. Now, this method does have its drawbacks, and also, it is not the "silver bullet" single miracle recipe for high gardening yields some armchair gardeners who have read Jeavons’s book believe it to be. But if your garden soil is badly compacted, as it often is the case when starting a new garden, double-digging may be a very good idea.

JB: Interesting!

TF: So, there is no doubt that our species can vastly accelerate natural healing processes. Indeed, we can link our lives with natural processes in a way that satisfies our needs while we benefit the whole species assembly around us—but there are some very non-obvious aspects to this. Hacking a hole into the forest to live "in harmony with nature" most certainly won’t do the trick.

The importance of the key insight—we have the capacity to act as the most powerful repair species around—cannot be overstated. There is at present a very powerful mental block that shows up in many discussions of sustainability: looking at our past conduct, it is easy to get the idea that Homo sapiens‘ modus operandi is to seek out the most valuable/powerful/convenient resource first, use this up, and then, driven by need, find ways to make do with the next most valuable resource, calling this "progress"—actually a downward spiral. I’ve indeed seen adverts for the emerging Liquefied Natural Gas industry that glorified this as "a motor of progress and growth". Now, the only reason why we consider this is that the more easily-accessible, easy-to-handle fuels have been pretty much used up. Same with deep-sea oil drilling. What kind of "progress" is it that the major difference between the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Ixtoc oil spill in 1979 is that this time, there’s a mile of water sitting on top of the well—because we used up the more easily accessible oil?

• Rachel Maddow, Ixtoc Deepwater Horizon parallels, YouTube.

Now, there are two dominant attitudes toward this observation that we despoil one resource after another.

One is some form of "denial". This is quite widespread amongst professional economists. Ultimately, the absurdity of their argument becomes clear when it is condensed to "sustainability is just one problem among many, and we are the better at solving problems the stronger our economy—so we need to use up resources fast to get rich fast so that we can afford to address the problems caused by us using up resources fast." Reminds me of a painter who lived in the village I grew up in. He was known to work very swiftly, and when asked why he always was in such a hurry, wittily replied: "but I have to get the job done before I run out of paint!"

The other attitude is some sort of self-hate that regards the key problem not as an issue of very poor management, but inherently linked to human existence. According to that line of thinking, collapse is inevitable and we should just make sure we do not gobble up resources so fast that we leave nothing for our children to despoil so that they can have a chance to live.

It is clear that as long as there is a deadlock between these two attitudes, we will not make much progress towards a noticeably more sustainable society. And waiting just exacerbates the problem. So, the key question is: does it really have to be like this—are we doomed to live by destroying the resources which we depend on? Well—every cow can do better than that. Cow-dung is more valuable in terms of fertility than what the cow has eaten. So, if we are such an amazing species—as we like to claim by calling ourselves "Homo sapiens"—why should we fail so miserably here?

JB: I can see all sorts of economic, political and cultural reasons why we do so badly. But it might be a bit less depressing to talk about how we can do better. For example, you mentioned paying attention to flows through systems.

TF: The important thing about flows is that they are a great concept tool to get some first useful ideas about those processes that really matter for the behaviour of complex systems—both for the purpose of analysis as well as design.

That’s quite an exciting subject, but as you mentioned it, I’d first like to briefly address the issue of depressing topics that frequently arise when taking a deeper look into sustainability—in particular, the present situation. Why? Because I think that our capacity as a society to deal with such emotions will be decisive for how well we will do or how badly we will fail when addressing a set of convergent challenges. On the one hand, it is very important to understand that such emotions are an essential part of human experience. On the other hand, they can have a serious negative impact on our judgment capacity. So, an important part of the sustainability challenge is to build the capacity to act and make sound decisions under emotional stress. That sounds quite obvious, but my impression is that, still, most people either are not yet fully aware of this point, or do not see what this idea might mean in practice.

JB: I’ve been trying to build that capacity myself. I don’t think mathematics or theoretical physics were very good at preparing me. Indeed, I suspect that many people in these fields enjoy not only the feeling of "certainty" they can provide, but also the calming sense that the universe is beautiful and perfect. When it comes to environmental issues there’s a lot more uncertainty, and also frequently the sense that the world is messed up—thanks to us! On top of that there’s a sense of urgency, and frustration. All this can be rather stressful. However, there are ways to deal with that, and I’m busy learning them.

TF: I think there is one particularly important lesson I have learned about the role of emotions, especially fear. Important because it probably is quite a fundamental part of the human condition. Emotions do have the power to veto some conclusions from ever surfacing in one’s conscious mind if they would be painful to bear. They can temporarily suspend sound reasoning and also access to otherwise sound memory.

This is extremely sinister, for you are not acting rationally at all, you are in fact driven by one of the most non-rational aspects of your existence, your fear, yet you yourself have next to no chance of ever discovering this, as your emotions abuse your cognitive abilities to systematically shield you from getting conscious access to any insight which would stand a chance of making you question your analysis.

JB: I think we can all name other people who suffer from this problem. But of course the challenge is to see it in ourselves, while it’s happening.

TF: Insidiously, having exceptional reasoning abilities will not help the very least bit here—a person with a powerful mind may be misguided as easily as anybody else by deep inner fears, it’s just that the mind of a person with strong reasoning skills will work harder and spin more sophisticated tales than that of an intellectually average person. So, this essentially is a question of "how fast a runner do you have to be to out-run your own shadow?" How intelligent do you have to be to recognize it when your emotions cause your mind to abuse your powerful reasoning abilities to deceive itself? Well, the answer probably is that the capacity to appreciate in oneself the problem of self-deception is not related to intelligence, but wisdom. I really admire the insight that "it’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."

JB: Richard Feynman put it another way: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." And if you’re sure you’re not fooling yourself, then you definitely are.

TF: Of course, everything that has an impact on our ability to conduct a sound self-assessment of our own behaviour matters a lot for sustainability related issues.

But enough about the role of the human mind in all this. This certainly is a fascinating and important subject, but at the end of the day, there is a lot of ecosystem rehabilitation to be done, and mapping flows is a powerful approach to getting an idea about what is broken and how to repair it.

JB: Okay, great. But I think our readers need a break. Next time we’ll pick up where we left off, and talk about flows.

---

Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than
against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system. – Bill Mollison

The Stockholm Memorandum

In May this year, the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium produced a document called The Stockholm Memorandum signed by 17 Nobel laureates, presumably from among these participants. It’s a clear call to action, so I’ll reproduce it all here.

I. Mind-shift for a Great Transformation

The Earth system is complex. There are many aspects that we do not yet understand. Nevertheless, we are the first generation with the insight of the new global risks facing humanity.

We face the evidence that our progress as the dominant species has come at a very high price. Unsustainable patterns of production, consumption, and population growth are challenging the resilience of the planet to support human activity. At the same time, inequalities between and within societies remain high, leaving behind billions with unmet basic human needs and disproportionate vulnerability to global environmental change.

This situation concerns us deeply. As members of the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium we call upon all leaders of the 21st century to exercise a collective responsibility of planetary stewardship. This means laying the foundation for a sustainable and equitable global civilization in which the entire Earth community is secure and prosperous.

Science indicates that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity.

Humans are now the most significant driver of global change, propelling the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems.

We cannot continue on our current path. The time for procrastination is over. We cannot afford the luxury of denial. We must respond rationally, equipped with scientific evidence.

Our predicament can only be redressed by reconnecting human development and global sustainability, moving away from the false dichotomy that places them in opposition.

In an interconnected and constrained world, in which we have a symbiotic relationship with the planet, environmental sustainability is a precondition for poverty eradication, economic development, and social justice.

Our call is for fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change and move toward fair and lasting prosperity for present and future generations.

II. Priorities for Coherent Global Action

We recommend a dual track approach:

a) emergency solutions now, that begin to stop and reverse negative environmental trends and redress inequalities in the inadequate institutional frameworks within which we operate, and

b) long term structural solutions that gradually change values, institutions and policy frameworks. We need to support our ability to innovate, adapt, and learn.

1. Reaching a more equitable world

Unequal distribution of the benefits of economic development are at the root of poverty. Despite efforts to address poverty, more than a third of the world’s population still live on less than $2 per day. This needs our immediate attention. Environment and development must go hand in hand. We need to:

• Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, in the spirit of the Millennium Declaration, recognising that global sustainability is a precondition of success.

• Adopt a global contract between industrialized and developing countries to scale up investment in approaches that integrate poverty reduction, climate stabilization, and ecosystem stewardship.

2. Managing the climate – energy challenge

We urge governments to agree on global emission reductions guided by science and embedded in ethics and justice. At the same time, the energy needs of the three billion people who lack access to reliable sources of energy need to be fulfilled. Global efforts need to:

• Keep global warming below 2°C, implying a peak in global CO₂ emissions no later than 2015 and recognise that even a warming of 2°C carries a very high risk of serious impacts and the need for major adaptation efforts.

• Put a sufficiently high price on carbon and deliver the G-20 commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, using these funds to contribute to the several hundred billion US dollars per year needed to scale up investments in renewable energy.

3. Creating an efficiency revolution

We must transform the way we use energy and materials. In practice this means massive efforts to enhance energy efficiency and resource productivity, avoiding unintended secondary consequences. The “throw away concept” must give way to systematic efforts to develop circular material flows. We must:

• Introduce strict resource efficiency standards to enable a decoupling of economic growth from resource use.

• Develop new business models, based on radically improved energy and material efficiency.

4. Ensuring affordable food for all

Current food production systems are often unsustainable, inefficient and wasteful, and increasingly threatened by dwindling oil and phosphorus resources, financial speculation, and climate impacts. This is already causing widespread hunger and malnutrition today. We can no longer afford the massive loss of biodiversity and reduction in carbon sinks when ecosystems are converted into cropland. We need to:

• Foster a new agricultural revolution where more food is produced in a sustainable way on current agricultural land and within safe boundaries of water resources.

• Fund appropriate sustainable agricultural technology to deliver significant yield increases on small farms in developing countries.

5. Moving beyond green growth

There are compelling reasons to rethink the conventional model of economic development. Tinkering with the economic system that generated the global crises is not enough. Markets and entrepreneurship will be prime drivers of decision making and economic change, but must be complemented by policy frameworks that promote a new industrial metabolism and resource use. We should:

• Take account of natural capital, ecosystem services and social aspects of progress in all economic decisions and poverty reduction strategies. This requires the development of new welfare indicators that address the shortcomings of GDP as an indicator of growth.

• Reset economic incentives so that innovation is driven by wider societal interests and reaches the large proportion of the global population that is currently not benefitting from these innovations.

6. Reducing human pressures

Consumerism, inefficient resource use and inappropriate technologies are the primary drivers of humanity’s growing impact on the planet. However, population growth also needs attention. We must:

• Raise public awareness about the impacts of unsustainable consumption and shift away from the prevailing culture of consumerism to sustainability.

• Greatly increase access to reproductive health services, education and credit, aiming at empowering women all over the world. Such measures are important in their own right but will also reduce birth rates.

7. Strengthening earth system governance

The multilateral system must be reformed to cope with the defining challenges of our time, namely transforming humanity’s relationship with the planet and rebuilding trust between people and nations. Global governance must be strengthened to respect planetary boundaries and to support regional, national and local approaches. We should:

• Develop and strengthen institutions that can integrate the climate, biodiversity and development agendas.

• Explore new institutions that help to address the legitimate interests of future generations.

8. Enacting a new contract between science and society

Filling gaps in our knowledge and deepening our understanding is necessary to find solutions to the challenges of the Anthropocene, and calls for major investments in science. A dialogue with decision-makers and the general public is also an important part of a new contract between science and society. We need to:

• Launch a major initiative on the earth system research for global sustainability, at a scale similar to those devoted to areas such as space, defence and health, to tap all sources of ingenuity across disciplines and across the globe.

• Scale up our education efforts to increase scientific literacy especially among the young.

We are the first generation facing the evidence of global change. It therefore falls upon us to change our relationship with the planet, in order to tip the scales towards a sustainable world for future generations.

Time to Wake Up?

Read this:

• Jeremy Grantham, Time to wake up: days of abundant resources and falling prices are over forever, The Oil Drum, 29 April 2011. Original in PDF.

Jeremy Grantham is the chief investment officer of GMO Capital, a big investment firm. His essay is so readable that there’s no point in trying to outdo it. I’ll just include his summary, which you won’t find on The Oil Drum.

Also, this graph is worth staring at (click to expand):

Many claim that human ingenuity will always keep the price of resources dropping. That was true from 1900 to 2002, with average price decline of 1.2% per year in constant dollars. There were upward spikes for world wars… but the inflationary oil shock of the 1970s was something new: I remember the puzzled, upset mood in the US. But since 2002, according to Grantham, we’ve started seeing something even bigger.

If he’s right, this is very important. What do you think?

Personally I agree completely with his general point that exponential growth is always unsustainable in the long term. Even a civilization expanding through the universe at nearly the speed of light will only grow in a roughly cubic way. Exponential growth is ‘transient behavior’ that happens only near the beginning of a process. So to me, the really interesting question is the empirical one of whether we’re seeing, right now, the transition to a world where resources continue to become more expensive. If you think otherwise, you should convince us that this is a temporary glitch that will end when… something happens.

Summary of the Summary

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

Summary

• Until about 1800, our species had no safety margin and lived, like other animals, up to the limit of the food supply, ebbing and flowing in population.

• From about 1800 on the use of hydrocarbons allowed for an explosion in energy use, in food supply, and, through the creation of surpluses, a dramatic increase in wealth and scientific progress.

• Since 1800, the population has surged from 800 million to 7 billion, on its way to an estimated 8 billion, at minimum.

• The rise in population, the ten-fold increase in wealth in developed countries, and the current explosive growth in developing countries have eaten rapidly into our finite resources of hydrocarbons and metals, fertilizer, available land, and water.

• Now, despite a massive increase in fertilizer use, the growth in crop yields per acre has declined from 3.5% in the 1960s to 1.2% today. There is little productive new land to bring on and, as people get richer, they eat more grain-intensive meat. Because the population continues to grow at over 1%, there is little safety margin.

• The problems of compounding growth in the face of finite resources are not easily understood by optimistic, short-term-oriented, and relatively innumerate humans (especially the political variety).

• The fact is that no compound growth is sustainable. If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash. We must substitute qualitative growth for quantitative growth.

• But Mrs. Market is helping, and right now she is sending us the Mother of all price signals. The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70%. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II.

• Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.

• Climate change is associated with weather instability, but the last year was exceptionally bad. Near term it will surely get less bad.

• Excellent long-term investment opportunities in resources and resource efficiency are compromised by the high chance of an improvement in weather next year and by the possibility that China may stumble.

• From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives. This will increasingly slow down the growth rate of the developed and developing world and put a severe burden on poor countries.

• We all need to develop serious resource plans, particularly energy policies. There is little time to waste.

Mathematics of Planet Earth

While struggling to prepare my talk on “what mathematicians can do”, I remembered this website pointed out by Tom Leinster:

• Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013.

The idea is to get lots of mathematicians involved in programs on these topics:

• Weather, climate, and environment
• Health, human and social services
• Planetary resources
• Population dynamics, ecology and genomics of species
• Energy utilization and efficiency
• Connecting the planet together
• Geophysical processes
• Global economics, safety and stability

There are already a lot of partner societies (including the American Mathematical Society) and partner institutes. I would love to see more details, but this website seems directed mainly at getting more organizations involved, rather than saying what any of them are going to do.

There is a call for proposals, but it’s a bit sketchy. It says:

A call to join is sent to the planet.

which makes me want to ask “From where?”

(That must be why I’m sitting here blogging instead of heading an institute somewhere. I never fully grew up.)

I guess the details will eventually become clearer. Does anyone know some activities that have been planned?

Mathematical Economics

My student Miguel Carrión Álvarez got his Ph.D. in 2004. This is when I was still working on loop quantum gravity. So, he decided to work on a rigorous loop quantization of the electromagnetic field. I like his thesis a lot:

• Miguel Carrión Álvarez, Loop Quantization versus Fock Quantization of p-Form Electromagnetism on Static Spacetimes.

However, he decided to leave mathematical physics when he got his degree… and he switched to finance.

There’s a lot of math in common between quantum field theory and mathematical finance. When you take quantum fluctuations in quantum fields, and replace time by imaginary time, you get random fluctuations in the stock market!

Or at least in some models of the stock market. One difference between quantum field theory and mathematical finance is that the former is famous for predicting certain quantities with many decimal digits of accuracy, while the latter is famous for predicting certain quantities with no digits of accuracy at all! I’m talking about the recent financial crisis.

Miguel and I share an interest in the failures of neoclassical economics. My interest comes from the hope — quite possibly a futile hope — that correcting some mistakes in economic theory could help show us a way out of some problems civilization now finds itself in. In fact, the Azimuth Project has its origins in my old economics diary.

Right now we’re having a little conversation about mathematical economics. Maybe you’d like to join in!

Miguel wrote:

I’ll be teaching parts of two courses on mathematical finance and financial risk management in an ‘Mathematical Engineering’ MSc course at the Universidad Complutense here in Madrid.

I replied:

Cool! Has the way people teach these subjects changed any since the economic crisis? I would hope so…

Miguel replied:

I don’t think it has.

First of all, these courses are mostly technical, as part of a Master’s programme intended to teach people what people do in practice. I don’t think criticizing the foundations is part of the program.

But you may have noticed (for instance, if you follow Krugman in the NYT) that the economic establishment has been very resistant to recognizing that the crisis is an empirical refutation of neoclassical economics. This crisis doesn’t fit within the conceptual framework of NCE, but that’s not a problem as they can just call it an “external shock” and continue pretending that the economy will trend to equilibrium from its new perturbed position. Related jokes of mine include that the recession part of the economic cycle is considered an outlier.

And this is not to speak of mathematical finance, where the situation is even worse. Academics still think that the best way to manage a new risk is to quantify it, define an index, and then create derivatives markets to trade it. In other words, turn all risk into market price risk and then push it all to the least solvent participants on the periphery of the financial system.

I think there is good progress being made by non-mainstream economists. Notably Steve Keen – see here:

• ARGeezer, Steve Keen’s dynamic model of the economy, European Tribune, 23 September 2009.

One of the problems with economics that Steve Keen complains about is that economists generally don’t know much about dynamical systems. I doubt they know what the Lotka-Volterra equation is, let alone understanding it (if you discretize it, the predator-prey model displays chaos like the logistic equation). I also doubt economists know about chaos in the logistic equation:

even if they know about logistic growth models which may not be generally the case either. Their model of the economy seems to be basically the Clausius-Clapeyron equation.

I believe the proper way to look at macroeconomics is as a flow network and as such ideas from category theory may be useful at least to organize one’s thinking.

The economy is a network whose nodes are “agents” and links are “economic relations”. Economic relations are flows, of goods and services in one direction and of money in the other direction (opposite categories via arrow reversal?).

Each node also has a balance sheet: assets and liabilities, and it’s the liabilities that are the key here, because they are mostly monetary. But they are also intertemporal. When you buy on credit, you get a physical asset today in exchange for the promise of cash at a later date. Presumably, the discounted present value of that future cash covers the value of the asset today, and that’s what you book as an asset or a liability. But the asset/liability accrues interest over time so its value changes on the balance sheet, and every so often you still need to make an actual transfer of cash along the an edge of the network. And when IOUs become tradeable (you issue me a bearer-IOU which I can then give to someone else who trusts your credit) they become money, too. And the relative variations in the prices of all these different kinds of money, their liquidity, etc, are key in understanding a recession like the one we’re in, or the growth (ehm, bubble) phase of a business cycle.

I don’t have a theory of this, but I keep thinking in these terms and one thing that seems to come out of it is a sort of “fluctuation-dissipation” relation between market fluctuations in prices and trade volumes, the creation of money-as-debt, and inflation. Because nodes abhor insolvency, fluctuations in cash flows lead to the creation of IOUs, which inflate the money mass. With the analogy inflation ~ dissipation, you get a sense that the more intense the market-induced cash flow fluctuations, the higher the inflation rate of the money mass, through the creation of money-as-tradeable-credit.

But none of this is mainstream economics, though there is an active community around “modern monetary theory”, “chartalism” or “monetary circuit theory” working on similar ideas.

But “Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium” is not going to cut it.

Anyway, maybe I could do a guest post on your blog about these things… It’s all very inchoate as you can see.

I also think the parallels between these economic flow networks and ecosystems and climates as matter/energy flow networks are important and such dynamical systems are a relatively unexplored area of mathematical physics – it’s just too difficult to say anything general about them!

Best,
Miguel

Miguel allowed me to post this exchange, noting that he could fill in gaps or moderate excessive claims in the comments. It would be nice if together we could all figure out how to take his thoughts and make them a bit more precise.

In week309 I plan to give an explanation of the Lotka-Volterra equation, based on work Graham Jones has done here:

• Quantitative ecology, Azimuth Project.

I’m also dying to talk about flow networks in ecology, so it’s nice to hear that Miguel has been thinking about them in economics.

But here’s a basic question: in what sense do economists model the economy using the Clausius-Clapeyron equation? Is the idea that we can take this equation and use it to model economic equilibrium, somehow? How, exactly?