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.
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.
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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