Africa
I wrote the other day that there was a rumour Labour had allowed virtually unlimited immigration because immigrants were more likely to vote Labour in future and that any objections were likely to be branded racist. The very next day the Telegraph reported that not only was it true, as the following extract makes clear…
“It called for increases in foreign workers to meet the Government’s “economic and social objectives” but also stated that the public would be opposed to the shift because of “racism” and urged ministers to try to alter public attitudes towards immigrants…It emerged earlier this month that another draft of the same document suggested Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed at meeting “social objectives” as well as economic needs – but again passages were removed.”…
Worse, Andrew Neather, a former advisor to Blair, Straw and Blunkett, added that the sharp increase in immigration over the past 10 years was partly due to a “driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multi-cultural”.
It beggars belief. Whether or not the British people wish to change their culture to make it more multi-cultural is entirely up to them, and I assume they voted as such, but that’s not the point. What this document implies is that everyone who is deeply concerned about the biosphere’s ability to manage super-exponential population growth, and opposes immigration on such grounds is inherently racist.
This makes it impossible to ever take anyone in government for the last decade seriously at an ecological level again. Unless they have more luck than the gods of probability have ever seen, they’ve set Europe up for the Balkans on Steroids.
Back in the real world…
I want to return to the problem of Africa. First because it’s in the worst shape, and because many of the same issues come up in thinking about other collapsing regions, like the middle east. I’ve just discovered some research which throws some light on the troubles that Africa is in.
Research led by Dr. Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the critical component in the endemic wars of sub Saharan Africa is temperature. The team combined historical records of conflict with rainfall and temperature records. A 1°C rise in temperature produced a 50% greater probability of conflict.
The reason seems to be the reliance of the majority of Africans on crops which are sensitive to small changes in temperature. On the one hand it’s good to get some hard data, on the other it’s a nightmare because it means that as temperature increases in line with global warming Africa becomes even more unstable than it is now. Assume Dr. Burke’s analysis is correct and that, as he says:
“…when you put things like economic growth and better governance into the mix, the temperature effect remains strong.”
Then it means that Africans find themselves in a classic adaptational trap. Their cultural history and traditions will not necessarily be helpful, because their environment is changing rapidly, too rapidly to allow for natural rates of adaptation. Since half of the world’s failed states are in sub Saharan Africa, and many of them have barely any government, it may be we are already too far into the cycle of collapse to have any effective remedy for the whole population. I’m not suggesting a scenario in which International development projects, African aid, rock stars, and the UN continue as they have; the same sad story about which we can do little. I’m suggesting a radically worse situation in which the world comes to terms with its first billion person famine, the complete collapse of society and agriculture, and the effects of the inevitable billion plus diaspora on Europe.
It is absolutely critical that Africa is stabilized to the extent possible. Clearly the traditional approach of giving billions of dollars in Western taxpayer’s money to Dictators such as Omar Bongo, President of Gabon, who brought $1m in shrink wrapped notes into the US in a suitcase, isn’t working well. Or Teodoro Obiang, son of Equatorial Guinea’s President, who moved $100m in “suspect funds” into the US, including $30m for a nice little place in Malibu. Or Jennifer Douglas, fourth wife of a former Nigerian vice-president, who helped her husband bring $40m into the US. According to a Senate report this week many other African leaders have moved hundreds of millions of dollars out of the countries they were supposedly leading, with the help of US professionals. Read the full story here and feel your eyes roll. Let’s take it for granted, until we have better data, that buying Teodoro a Malibu villa (oh, and a $38m airplane, sorry I forgot) probably isn’t the quickest route to avoiding the world’s largest ever famine and its inevitable diaspora. It’s why I’ve come to the conclusion that western government sponsored Aid must be stopped. It’s failed both the recipients and the western taxpayers.
Despite the almost irresistible glamour of Bob and Bono, I’m not a huge fan of celebrity advocacy either. I remember a difficult meeting at the LSE in which Medecins San Frontieres was represented, talking about how to manage the often counter productive campaigns with celebrities. Perhaps it’s as Bishop Tutu says, that it’s important that we are “listening to what Africans actually want, that Africans drive their own development.” But I doubt it, because if that was working, then it really wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that Africans haven’t driven their own development. Are we going to recycle the same post-colonial arguments again? It’s been 50 years. But in the end Desmond may be right for reasons he may not like. It looks like that Africans will have no choice because the rest of the world is too busy. What Africa needs isn’t more help. I think the people of Africa have endured all the help they can stand.
What Africa needs is intelligent systems. I’m a huge fan of small independent humanitarian organizations who engage local populations long term and personally, and it’s those organizations that are coming up with the solutions. Like kiwanja.net which enables humanitarian groups and those they serve to use communications technology in imaginative ways. We need to flood Africa with technology and knowledge systems. They need knowledge and they need friends who will work on a local level to stabilize populations. The Africans will figure out what new crops to plant, how to educate themselves, and how to manage their environment. They have to because years of paternalism, patronizing missionaries, the UN, and crooked tribal presidents, now living in Malibu, haven’t.
To come back to the African diaspora in Europe: As I said in my last post, I’m am afraid that this year, or very soon thereafter, we will see a backlash against this migration from Africa as the financial conditions in Europe worsen.
Ghost Acreage and British Immigration
I want to talk about a couple of things before I get down to Immigration in Britain and Ghost Acreage.
Last night I saw Avatar, the new James Cameron film. A truly remarkable piece of media. As I sat and watched the blue people in their perfectly realized forest ecology I thought ‘at last, we can do 3D biological reality’. Aside from the obvious impact on the entertainment industry I think it shows that computing got fast enough for us to be able fully implement an intelligent planet program. Just in time. We need to be able to produce and model large complex biologically coherent systems, like our own. We are approaching full neurological/cognitive immersion and it will change us fundamentally as a species. Cameron deserves to be congratulated on making this monster for $250 million. Well done.
The other thing is I’ve been spending the morning looking at the Burtynsky book, Oil. Rather than the rush of Avatar I sat and looked at the photos one at a time and had time to contemplate what the Oil civilization looks like on a global scale. We can’t go on doing this, it looks ridiculous. Do we really need to turn the left hand side of Canada into the world’s largest toxic lake district? We know better now.
Lastly, a quick word about today’s report on the BBC news site about Methane hydrate releases. This is very serious because we have no idea how quickly this quantity of Methane being added to the atmosphere and ocean can push us past some unseen tipping point into a temperature environment we can’t adapt to. I honestly believe we can technologically adapt to a new earth environment, but biological adaptation takes time and an enormous methane exhalation could radically alter the time frame against us.
Immigration in Britain and Ghost Acreage:
Which brings me to the real topic I want to talk about: Ghost Acreage in a world past Carrying Capacity. It’s probably helpful to define some terms here. Carrying Capacity is simply the population of any species that a given environment can support indefinitely. The term comes from shipping, as in ‘how much can she carry without sinking?’ In other words the maximum load. It all depends on what a species is taking from the environment. Populations tend to rise until they reach carrying capacity and then some critical resource, be it food, water, or something else, like oil or uranium, is sufficiently depleted that population is forced to adjust to the new depleted environment. Unfortunately populations tend to ‘overshoot’ the carrying capacity and subsequently crash, rather than adjust gradually over time. For those interested in serious chat about overshoot, William Catton is your man.
But how can a population exceed carrying capacity? In the natural world it doesn’t happen, but in the human world it does. Because of the concept of Ghost Acreage, which means the additional external acreage necessary to support the population. How does that work? Britain is a good example of a discrete ecologically defined habitat. Let’s just look at food. Estimates vary, but 35 million is a reasonable guess at the population that the island could support indefinitely, compared to its current population of 60 million. The UK imports around 40% of its food, so it seems about right. Okay so where is all the rest of the food coming from? Thailand, Brazil, India, Kenya, the US, etc. That’s Ghost Acreage – the land (or some equivalent) that’s not in Britain, but that it’s using to feed itself. Which means the people in those countries aren’t using it to feed themselves. This assumes that the countries supplying Britain with half its food have the spare acreage to do so, while maintaining the health of its own population. Aye, but there’s the rub. Population growth, especially in the developing world, has long since used up what spare capacity there was. Those people aren’t exporting food they have to spare (including the US, which is destroying its topsoil). The elites in those countries are exploiting landless labourers. We are in effect exporting hunger, drought, and ecological degradation to support our current population.
In an ecologically rational world, there can be no argument that we are entitled to run our population at someone else’s expense. It’s ironic that the countries and cultures from which we draw most of our immigration are also those we use for ghost acreage to support our over population. By allowing immigration, and thereby increasing Britain’s population, we are impoverishing another country’s population, which makes it less attractive to live in, and encourages further immigration (legally or illegally) to already over populated Britain (or another part of the developed world). It’s classic positive feedback.
What makes the situation even more bizarre is that as we impoverish people from the countries supplying us with ghost acreage we send aid, which runs to about £9 billion/year in Britain, and when the situation deteriorates to the point where the country fails, we send in the military and/or deal with the mass migration that results.
Britain is just a good example of the developed world. The current political environment in most of the West reflects the utter ecological illiteracy necessary to maintain the dogma that immigration is vital to the nation. On the contrary, it is lethal to the country’s ability to support itself, and lethal to the impoverished countries supplying the ghost acreage. As such it’s hard to see the ethical case for allowing immigration to either Britain, or the rest of Europe, which shares similar population dynamics.
It’s time we stopped the political equivalent of magical realism in thinking about immigration.
Copenhagen
I’ve been trying not to say anything about Copenhagen. It’s cruel to make fun of so much hope betrayed. For three decades we’ve watched as one city after another has hosted these jamborees for politicians and assorted hangers-on. Geneva, Rio, Kyoto and half the other cities in the world capable of housing for a few days the tremendous circus of luggage and limos and fussy interns and security guards and banquets and chain link barricades and self congratulatory paeans to the impossible have had their hospitality insulted. And in the vanguard come the bespoke suited leaders, buffed and polished to within an inch of their lives. Leaders of nations, united nations, banks, oil cabals, international organizations of this and that ad infinitum.
And for nothing.
Thank goodness. Can you imagine the damage that might have been done to innovation had they passed some nonsense? We got away with that by the skin of our teeth.
The Lie
Where was I? Oh yes, the lie. It’s not so much that the truth hurts, it’s that it’s so boring and pompous. Yes, the Cadillacs may go creeping now through the night and the poison gas, but that’s no way to encourage the young people. Endlessly telling them that the most ecologically sensible thing to do is commit suicide is no help. So we’re going to lie and see if we can turn it into the truth.
There are two competing trajectories, critical paths if you will, amongst the futurati. The most popular at the moment is 6 degrees of Apocalypse, you oil drunk fools, you will die horribly. The other, much less well known, is the Singularity: Humanity stands on the verge of the most thrilling period in its history. Now I ask you, which sounds like more fun?
In case you’ve been on a Buddhist retreat for the last 150 years in a Bhutanese cave I’ll run through the anthropogenic climate catastrophe for you. We were running out of whale oil and it looked grim, until Colonel Drake discovered real oil, which was a great relief to us, and the whales were thrilled to bits. We made Cadillacs and giant roads to drive ourselves to death on. We built towns in the middle of nowhere for no other reason than that we could. We found that Oil was the greatest aphrodisiac ever, so we all had way too many babies. We invented plastic which is shiny, cheap, lives forever and now we have a giant island of floating plastic rubbish in the Pacific the size of America. In the process we pumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and poisoned the ocean, which turns out to have been a mistake. Now it looks like the average temperature on earth will make Reykjavik look like St Tropez and civilization will drown in warm plastic soup. Which sounds terrible of course.
Okay, now for the lie, the Singularity. It’s really about the convergence of computing, space travel, biology and nanotechnology. Or utilitarian transhumanism if you want to get philosophical about it. Here’s what happened – just the highlights.
Computing: In the second world war a gay English cryptographer called Alan invented computing. Which was pretty incredible considering he was busy beating the Nazis at the same time. After the war the English, rather than develop a gigantic new industry and make billions, hid the computer, called Colossus, in a colossal warehouse like the one where they put the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones and refused to talk about it. When they realized Alan was gay they took away his security clearance in case he became a communist and he was so miserable he committed suicide. Which tells you a lot about the English.
But luckily computing continued to develop in America and we got ENIAC, IBM and mainframes. The spooky part is that in the mid 50s some boys were born within about a year of one another: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy and of course Steve Wozniak. Between them they gave us pretty much all the rest of computing, including the internet. Makes you wonder about cluster reincarnation. Nah, probably just a coincidence.
Anyhow by 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, realized that semiconductor capability was doubling about every two years. He called it Moore’s Law (no surprise there) and the amazing thing was that it seemed to work not just for semiconductor capability, but the whole course of technological development for the last 40 years. In a few years it’s very possible we’ll make a machine smarter than us. Not science fiction, but really.
Biology: Then shortly after the war four scientists at Cambridge discovered DNA. Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin. There’s an argument that Rosalind Franklin was really behind it all, but we’ll never know. We all know how guys are about girl scientists. Suddenly we could understand everything Darwin had been trying to say: we had a language of biology – molecular biology – and it went ATCG. Everything changed in the lab. By 2000 we’d mapped the human genome, three years earlier than anyone thought possible. Thank you Mr. Venter, who is now finding genomes all over the world’s oceans on his giant yacht Sorcerer II.
Nano: In 1959 Richard Feynman gave a talk called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom in which he said he saw no reason we couldn’t manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level. Not only was he one of the funniest men in science, he was also one of the smartest. He’d discovered Quantum Electrodynamics so when he started talking about molecular size engineering no one just laughed him off. But it wasn’t until the invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope that we could see what we were doing. By the 80s Eric Drexler had published Engines of Creation and really got down to some detail about how we could proceed. 20 years later and we can build things at the molecular scale. It’s called Nanotech because it deals with structures less than 100 nanometres in size. That’s 0.0000001m. We are on the verge of mastering matter. In 10 years we’ll be there.
And then there was space. Space got off to a good start and when I was a kid lots of us thought we were on our way. It wasn’t to be. Arthur Clarke was maybe the only one who foresaw that there would be a hiatus after the moon landing. Me? I was packed and ready. We were going to live in space stations at the Langrange points and go out into the Galaxy. It was disappointing, but in the meantime things were going on. We got very good at satellite technology and NASA sent probes out into the solar system. What most people don’t know is that in the background big things have been happening: space drive. One of the overwhelming problems with space travel is the time it takes. 2 years to Mars. But a Venezuelan Chinese astronaut, Frank Chang Diaz, has developed plasma drive – VASIMR – and it works. Okay, it’s not Warp Drive, but it’ll get us out there.
You see what’s going on here? While a lot of us were having sex in the back of the Cadillac, some of us were getting some work done. In the last 50 years we’ve discovered more than in centuries before. I talked the other day about how the human cognitive system doesn’t like a downer, well it has a worse problem. It doesn’t have a good intuitive grasp of exponential change. It’s an evolutionary thing. We’re built for a linear change environment, so exponential change sort of creeps up on us and then we get surprised.
For the last half century technology has been accelerating – but it’s been the slow acceleration. Exponential curves have this inflection point where it’s going along slowly getting bigger and then boom, it heads for the sky. That’s where we are, the inflection point. These technologies are at the point of converging and the rate of change becomes almost instantaneous. Science fiction stops being in the future.
So what was the lie? It wasn’t. I was kidding you.
But doesn’t that sound like more fun than hunkering down in the disused nuclear bunker with the last three cans of organic carrots?
The Lords of the Aether
I am flattered and terrified that the Lords of the Aether appear to be reading my blog. How else to explain the immediate synchronicity, but to assume the intervention of those of the psychic realm? I’d no sooner posted a little piece on Simon Cowell’s phone-in democracy than here he was being interviewed by Newsnight’s favorite dominatrix Kirsty Wark. He actually intends to make a show in which “big issues” are discussed and voted on by the X Factor demographic. Can you imagine? In the last UK election 24 million people voted. In the last X Factor 20 million people voted. Which means he now has the ability to clone the entire parliamentary process and produce virtually instant referenda. The gothic edifice of representative democracy is technologically obsolete. In the days of the horse and carriage we had to have representatives because there was no other way to approximate the so called voice of the people. Now Simon can just ask the people and they can phone in the vote. Immigration, the War for Oil, the European Magisterium, The Underclass, The Overclass…sorted in no time. Go Simon.
Apocalypse Now: The Musical
I know. The oil. The gas. The arctic, the albedo effect. The thermohaline. 386 ppm. 8 billion starving refugees by next week. I know. I spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get a major documentary on peak oil made for PBS (American Public TV). I’ve met and interviewed most of the serious peak oil ecologists and geologists. Last night I sat watching Fora.tv (“the world is thinking”, oh really?). An hour long presentation on a tiny web screen by Dan Miller called A Really Inconvenient Truth. Yes, it is worse than Al Gore dared tell you. Yes, I already knew everything Dan had to tell me, as would most of the eco-oilers I know. We are like some goth punk death cult, avid for the new terror numbers of ice melt, storm surge or oil field decline.
Then, because of an unavoidable social context, I watched the penultimate final of X Factor. I watched for a while in sneering disbelief at the demented Karaoke of these guileless kids and Simon, their gurning svengali, all lit up like the Nuremberg Rally. I saw the crowds, crowds of 20 million – crowds for which any politician would sell their soul – cheering and screaming for their Stacey or Olly or little Joe. Every single ambulatory person in these kid’s hometown was on the street. This was the democracy they’d always wanted, the chance to vote on something they really cared about. The aspirational Viagra of instant celebrity, not just of the kids, but them, the hometown crew who have never ever known anyone on the telly before and now their hometown exists, and they exist, because of X.
And then the terrible truth dawned on me. We, the Collapse Literati, are doomed to write our pitiful blogs and make our tiny webscreen docs of impending Apocalypse to no avail whatever, unless we are simply entertaining ourselves. Al Gore had to train a legion of “Town Hall” speakers to spread the Inconvenient Truth. You see Simon Cowell wrestling with how to get his message out? No you don’t. Because one of the fundamental things about the human cognitive system is that it doesn’t like a downer. It likes up and preferably cute. It prefers bright lights shining on a perfect cleavage to earnest old men talking geology. I’ve watched for years as some of the most informed scientists and commentators on earth have put on their best suit and teeth to bore the living beejesus out of believers decked out in white people rasta hair and greenpeace fleeces, sitting on hard chairs in dank halls. For all the difference it made they could have been shooting heroin in the lavs.
The Association for the Study of Peak Oil, or ASPO, (pronounced Asspo, not a moment of marketing genius), began in 2000. Colin Campbell should be given the Nobel Save the Goddamn World Prize. I love these guys. They have done their best to make the world sit up and look at the oil horror movie coming to a planet near you. And Mike Ruppert, lovely guy, with his Collapse documentary. I hope it makes it to theatres. But do you for a moment think it’s going to have the impact, or the box office, of Roland Emmerich’s 2012? No, it won’t because neither Colin or Mike look as good as Amanda Peet in underwear.
My species likes stories where 5 good looking people save the world, or sing us to an anodyne consumer coma, or best of all, show us the perfect kitchen. They don’t like to be told no, you can’t have that, no it’s bad for you, no it will destroy the atmosphere and your children and grandchildren, forevermore, will live in a boiling desert next to a dead ocean. They don’t like to be told that now we’ve burned all the easy oil and had a damn good time whizzing up and down those freeways, it’s over and we may have to share the expensive stuff that’s left with everyone who didn’t get their go in a Cadillac yet, like the poor people from those countries we go to on holiday. How the hell is Cheryl Cole the hair extension replicant going to make that sound bouncy? Not even Cheryl could pull it off. (Yeah Cheryl, pull em off, nice one innit. Sorry. No disrespect intended.)
So we’ll have to lie.
We are never going to sell the great ruminant herd out there on the shopping Serengeti the idea that we’d better grow up and get responsible and treat the earth like the fragile little Christmas tree ornament it is. People don’t want to hear about efficiency, or cutting down, or organic carrot soufflé, or wearing a woolly over their lingerie because of green morality. Never going to sell.
So we’ll have to lie. Here we go.
We are moving into an unimaginable future of free energy, space exploration, bio and nano engineering, and artificial intelligence embedded throughout our lives. War, want, pestilence and decay will be things of the past. Old age and decrepitude will be remembered like images from a Breugel painting. Social networking will enable us to solve humanity’s problems in completely new ways. With 350,000,000 people working on a problem, be it poverty or middle east conflict, facebook will vote on the most democratic solution – X factor style. You can be part of the greatest experiment in history: to re-engineer the whole planet in 3 decades.
Details to follow. Stay tuned.
Fractal Collapse
In Michael Caine’s new film Harry Brown, he plays an elderly ex-marine forced by the violence on his London housing estate to become a vigilante, killing the drug dealers and thugs that have made life impossible. It’s a grim depiction of modern Britain, and will resonate in the rest of Europe and the US. If the Elephant and Castle area of London, where the film is set, were a small state, would it qualify for the Failed State Index published every year by Foreign Policy? When we talk about collapse are we using data at too low a resolution? Suppose we started thinking about collapse at much higher resolution. Instead of measuring nation states, what about failed cities, failing counties and states (in the US sense of states). Would you rather live in one of the shining new developments in Bangalore or in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, recently cited as the most deprived area of Britain? Is Bangalore part of the developed world, and is Liverpool a failing city in the post development world? By only thinking in terms of collapsing nations we are getting a very skewed idea of the real condition of our global civilization. Not that it’s very encouraging even at nation state resolution. The interactive map in the Failed States Index 2009 is chilling.
The Failed States Index measures 12 indicators: Demographic Pressures, Refugees/IDPs, Group Grievance, Human Flight, Uneven Development, Economic Decline, Delegitimization of the State, Public Services, Human Rights, Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, and External Intervention. The British Department for Communities and Local Government used generally similar metrics: Crime, Education, Housing, Health, Income etc., and the ones that don’t directly apply, like Delegitimization of the State, would be applicable to the Elephant and Castle if we thought to ask. The US uses much the same metrics in its urban analysis. Does anyone really believe that those gangstas in Harry Brown consider for a moment the existence of legitimate governance in their lives? Maybe we’re measuring much the same things and what we’re seeing is that failure is occurring in a much more nuanced way than we imagine. I don’t have anything like the resources to collect and collate the kind of data sets to make an interactive map at the resolution of cities and counties, but I’m willing to bet it would show us a very different picture of the state of play. My point is that while we look at the Failed States Index it’s tempting to ignore the real condition of the so called rich countries.
If we can imagine a higher resolution world map of socio-economic and ecological conditions what detail might we see? On the one hand we’d see places in the developed world that are slipping out of development. They are becoming feral: once part of the domesticated planet, now slipping back to the wild. Basic infrastructure gone, population declining, local resources used or scattered, education and health of the remaining population retreating, mafia organizations replacing legitimate governance, post industrial pollution leaving some areas too toxic to live in or reclaim.
Although below the public radar, there are plans to manage this decline in many countries now. There is an acceptance that it is impossible to reverse this and it’s better to manage it. Look at the work of Karina Pallagst at UC Berkeley and SCiRN. It’s all about shrinking cities. But what does it say about the era of ‘progress’ we’ve believed for the best part of a century. Unlike previous eras in which cities shrunk and populations declined, the populations of the US and Europe aren’t declining. Rome’s population collapsed from around a million at the peak of its power, to 20,000 in the 14th Century. But a lot of that was centuries of famine topped off by the Black Death. There is (as yet) no Black Death in the US, so where are the new centres of population? What happened to the people from Flint, Michigan, from Detroit, from Baltimore?
They’ve moved to the US southwest – an ecological desert without the water and other resources to support anything like the present population after peak oil. Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in America. The same demographic shift is true in Europe. What were once thriving industrial cities in the north of France and England, for example, are now drifting towards wasteland. Property values have collapsed, people have left, then buildings are abandoned and set on fire. The result is that more and more people gravitate towards the larger cities: London, Paris, Hamburg, Munich etc. All of this internal migration starts to look startlingly like the FSI’s Internally Displaced Persons category. Any number of international agencies are sounding alarm bells about mass international migration, and internal migration in the developing world as a result of conflict and climate. I haven’t seen much in the way of alarm at the collapse in the formerly industrial developed world.
My point is that the pattern of collapse we are seeing in the developing world is increasingly mirrored in the developed world. We are thinking about collapse in a “them over there in those other countries” kind of way. It is partially a function of the way we gather data and partially because the political elite of the developed world has to maintain a media storm of positive spin, which is getting more difficult every day in the face of the facts. What we are actually seeing is an increasingly fragmented world map of wealth and resource distribution, with little reference to national boundaries. What is problematic is that I don’t see any sign in the developed world of alarm at this fragmentation.
Perhaps what we will see as the financial crisis continues is a truly new world order in which the old divisions of developed vs developing world give way to a fragmented map of rich pockets surrounded by vast areas of poverty and decline – like the medieval republics of post Roman Europe as famine and war take their toll and populations decline. Only this would be on an unimaginable global scale. Maybe we’d better start imagining it.
milspec.gov
I’m not suggesting for a moment that it will be Mass Migration by itself that initiates the move to military governments in the West. It was Lester Brown’s recent article in Scientific American, in which he put forward his idea that failing states may be what causes civilization’s collapse, that made me realize that as the failure rate continues to accelerate the pressure of mass migration may be the earliest catalyst for the end of democracy in the West. As he points out, the pressures of desertification, water shortages, collapsing fisheries, famine, civil war and overpopulation etc., are already impacting states in the developing world to a far greater extent than the West. Some military planners in the US are coming to the conclusion that these pressures will pose a greater threat than terrorism and drugs. So assume that the stream of the dispossessed continues, climate continues toward chaos, population continues to explode, and the technological basis for a military state already exists in the US and Europe. Then how robust are our vaunted democracies?
We in the West have assumed for a long time that democratic government is our inalienable right, fought for over centuries by heroes of liberty. We also assume, somewhat more questionably, that it is by definition the ne plus ultra of political evolution and therefore the ultimate aspiration of people the world over. There are a number of problems with these ideas; mostly that they aren’t true. Democracy is notoriously fragile and there is nothing inalienable about it. Its progression in Europe, beginning (more or less) in 6th century BC Athens, has been sporadic. Athenian democracy fell to Alexander’s monarchy, the Roman republic to Octavian, the first Emperor in 31 BC. It wasn’t until the 18th century that anything we understand as a democracy re-emerged. Since 1960 the great majority of nation states self identify as democracies. This is a little like asking people if they are honest. The majority of the world’s population lives under regimes that are corrupt, incompetent or worse. For example Zimbabwe, Colombia, and Turkmenistan consider themselves to be democracies. Francis Fukuyama famously announced in “The End of History”, that liberal democracy had won the day as the peak of socio-political evolution. It is possible he may have been over optimistic.
In his new book, “From Democrats to Kings: The Brutal Dawn of a New World from the Downfall of Athens to the Rise of Alexander the Great”, Michael Scott makes some chilling comparisons between the current situation and those that caused the collapse of Greek democracy: crippling economic downturn, uncontrolled immigration and unpopular wars. In other words, emergencies that overwhelmed the ability of democracy to adapt fast enough. Sooner of later a powerful elite takes control. Much the same story could be told of the rise of fascism in 20th century states. When democratic governments fail authoritarian/military governments tend to be the default. It’s hard to see what makes the present crisis different, except the scale of the problem is global rather than local. Given the fact that western governments have thus far failed completely to make any effective changes regarding either climate or resource depletion it’s reasonable to imagine that if there is, as Kunstler calls it, a long emergency, then Democracy will fail and be replaced by more authoritarian regimes.
The Pentagon, NATO, and the military establishment in Europe are well aware of the challenges and there is now a significant defence literature dealing with Peak Oil, Climate and Migration. Some of the scenarios being investigated by military planners are bolder than others, and include the prospect of taking control of more than just the states they are charged with defending. In his award winning paper entitled “Imperialism 21: Hedging and Abandoning History”, Lieutenant Commander Joey Dodgen wrote:
“As far-fetched as it sounds, the advantages captured through colonial or imperial ventures would be numerous, including, but certainly not limited to, resource control and forward military basing…Economic imperialism is crucial to securing resources, maintaining favourable trade, and calming America’s business market amidst the daily turmoil of global terrorism. Economic imperialism is of no less importance to the United States than military imperialism.”
The attitude is understandable, even if on the basis of our performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, unlikely to be crowned with success. The Pentagon is tasked with defending the “American Way of Life” or at least the integrity of the developed countries, and it will do so to the best of its ability. The same stance is true of European military and intelligence. They are clearly expecting to deal with an increasingly chaotic environment and are examining ways to succeed. So the stage is set; the technological triumvirate is in place and there is no reason to expect that as the 21st century progresses the West will not become increasingly militarized.
So the answer to the last question of the Rare Events post, “At what point are people scared enough of the influx to want what is essentially a military government?” is that they won’t be asked. Our responses to the Drug War and Terrorism have already laid the groundwork for such a transition. All that would be required is the continuation of the current crisis until a permanent state of emergency can be declared. We will likely adopt a far harsher view of mass migration as conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America and Mexico, India, and a host of lesser failing states continue to deteriorate.
Of more immediate concern is the effect of mass migration on those states nearby failing states – contagion. It is happening all across Africa as one state fails and as populations become displaced they are naturally moving into neighbouring states, themselves already fragile. Recent analyst meetings and war games in the US have concluded that the next 20 years of climate and ecological degradation will produce catastrophic events, including storms, migrations, droughts and pandemics, which will require US military intervention.
I believe that the economic collapse of the West will make such expensive interventions impossible in the future and that the developing world is close to a tipping point, after which recursive feedback effects will overwhelm the developed world’s ability to place failing states on life support – they’ll be on life support themselves. Which leads me to think that we will be taking more of a defensive position as our politicians give up on the idea of bombing the world into democracy and focus on maintaining order at home. Which brings me to my next topic: Fractal Collapse.
Triumvirate
In thinking about the possible military response to the increasing mass migrations from failing states it’s not necessary to invoke science fiction scenarios. It’s closer than you think. The infrastructure for military government is already well established in most of the West. Well before rafts of Somalis were drifting across the Mediterranean annoying sunbathers and the Italian Coastguard, police tactics and surveillance were becoming ever more military. There is more surveillance in Britain on a daily basis than the Stasi or KGB dreamed of in their wildest flights of authoritarian fancy. Estimates run at over 4 million cameras. There are 32 within sight of George Orwell’s flat in Canonbury Square. As Open Europe’s recent paper “How Brussels is watching you – the rise of Europe’s surveillance state” makes plain, Europe is in the process of following Britain’s lead, and no democratically elected body has the right to veto it.
Another aspect of this militarization is the rise of SWAT, that is to say Special Weapons and Tactics, policing. SWAT began in Delano, California as a response to protests by Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Union. It’s interesting that this was a response to what was essentially a migration issue: the treatment of Mexican farm workers. SWAT teams are now taken for granted all across America and, although the acronym SWAT isn’t used, increasingly the same squads are in place in Europe. It is now routine for members of these police teams to be trained by and with members of special forces, including Delta Force and SEALS. Of course it is a natural career choice for those leaving those same parts of the armed services. Never mind for the moment the rise of private ‘executive security’ – I don’t mean the fat guy in uniform standing at the door of the supermarket. I mean Blackwater (now Xe, LLC), ESTS, etc. These are the same guys. There is a vast informal network of former special forces personnel employed in all these organizations. You think they didn’t keep each other’s email and phone numbers when they left the service? The lines that have traditionally separated soldiering and policing have now all but disappeared.
The third arm of this militarization is a function of computing. Before the advent of the network and the titanic server farms that store petabytes of data it was simply impossible to collect and analyse data on the scale necessary to implement a database state. Yes, it’s true the Stasi was credited with having nearly 100 miles of files, but it was a scrapbook compared to what Google can do, never mind the NSA. For example, there seems to be little information published on the byte size of the UK DNA database, NDNAD, but it is said to hold the records of 5 million people, or 7% of the population. Perhaps most impressive is the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s World Trace Archive database of all the DNA sequences published by the science community. In January 2006 it hit a billion records, was 22 terabytes and doubling every 10 months, so I assume it’s getting pretty big by now. You get the idea.
The point here is not that databases are by definition part of some global conspiracy, but that they allow previously unimagined levels of personal data to be held by governments and corporations, neither of which have a particularly great record in this regard. In the UK, this week’s news is that millions of phone contract records were stolen and sold to rival mobile phone companies, by employees of T-Mobile. The list of incompetent or dishonest data security breaches is legendary. But it is now past the point of recall. Privacy is history and it would be idiotic to assume that should a more military government come to power under the pressures of resource shortages, depression and climate chaos, it would not seek to use databases for its own purposes.
So the answer to two of the questions posed in my last post seem to be straightforward. What kind of government does that call for? Probably more military than we imagine right now. What does it look like and how would it happen? It looks remarkably similar to life now, and all it takes is some ‘emergency’ – whether it is from terrorism or economics or climate is irrelevant. The infrastructure is there: the combination of surveillance, combat policing and the database state form the critical technological triumvirate for an emerging military response to ecologically driven mass migration.
The third question, ‘at what point are people scared enough of the influx to want what is essentially a military government?’ is not quite so easy.
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