Really? And Then What?
15. Reimaging a Viable Life for Renormalizing Humans
The current modern human (metastatic) enterprise is being conducted (based on short-term self interest) as if intent on destroying the planet’s life-support system — the unintended outcome. The context for any potential long-term persistence of humanity (Homo sapiens sapiens), is the extinction of metastatic modernity (H. s. s. var. narrator).
[This is actually the last chapter of info/ideas (those that follow interweave 1–15) and reading no more than one section at a time may be best for most. Too many words, words, words… and sorry about that.]
Section I, Intro
Section II, The In? or Out? Decision Making Pathway
Section III, The Coming Great Selection
Section IV, A Naive Prepper Plan
Section V, A Less Naive Design
Section VI, The Proposed Plan Scales Up
Section VII, A Likelier Future
Section VIII, Ecolate Quotes
Section IX, A More Likely Future Because a Very Few Could Make It so
Section X, A Point That Should Be of Interest and Recap
SUBNOTE TO FILE
Section I
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who [not being elites] are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use [‘chop wood, carry water’]; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.” ―Leo Tolstoy, writer, regarded by writers as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time
If his longed for future is not your future, then you are a modern human. Tolstoy was a modern human too, but at least he had the right idea — metastatic modernity is lethal.
Tolstoy envisioned himself renormalizing as a viable, evolvable form of human living in a normal-sized (per Hominina ecology norms) community of trusted-with-your-life others (copykittens almost everyone), living the adaptive life of the K-selected (with a live within limits focus).
Well-being is not about financial wealth nor house size. What matters is having shelter, food, security, and being part of a community of others endeavoring to renormalize humanity, starting with themselves. Having fulfilling work (e.g. chop wood, carry water, spin fiber, tend children in a garden, tell better stories) to keep yourself grounded and sane matters. Everything else (e.g. abstracted systems of belief) is just a lethal distraction from the what-is that matters.
The natural baseline rate of species extinction is roughly one species per million per year. Currently, due to anthropogenic species extinction, modern humans can take credit for more than one species going extinct per hour. There are still some 8.7 million species of eukaryotes, and the ones we modern humans value are more abundant than ever. We are currently causing about 8k times more extinctions per year than baseline, soon to achieve a 10k fold increase. And then what?
The shorter of it: unsustainable means something ends. Hurricanes, full of sound and fury (signifying nothing), end. Modernity will end. To understand modernity (as a would-be evolvable animal) is to be choicelessly delivered from it.
“We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in.” — Gregory Bateson 1904–1980 CE, , anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist, and cultural physician
“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception — his epistemological premises — he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.” — Gregory Bateson
“Realize that no paradigm is ‘true,’ that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is ‘to get’ at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.” — Donella Meadows
“The highest activity a modern human being can attain is to endeavor to understand, because to understand one’s condition is to be delivered from it.” — Baruch Spinoza 1632–1677 CE, one of the most important philosophers — and certainly the most radical — of the early modern period
“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” ― Baruch Spinoza
“The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.” ― Baruch Spinoza
“Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.” ― Baruch Spinoza
And so if not delivered from one’s condition of…, why aren’t you? Oh, you don’t yet understand; you don’t know thyself (a condition not involving belief or disbelief) as a metastatic form of human, a form having no long-term evolvable future even if your kind somehow manages to go off-world to consume the Solar System, including the Oort cloud.
Perhaps metastatic humanity could expand out from Earth in spore ships to repeat the pattern of metastasis by turning the energy-matter of other star systems into Borg-like transhumans, beings that are similar to modern humans (as modern humans are similar to normal non-metastatic homininans), but have enhanced abilities, such as increased strength, intelligence, durability, and longevity (centuries to millennia) who go forth to turn their universe for the taking into more like unto themselves until they can expand no more and must consume or be consumed by rapacious others of their metastatic kind in a cosmic game of dissolution with no long-term winner.
The future most likely belongs to those who combine long-term planning with short-term tactical flexibility, hence the West is going down and BRICS is going up. And then what? Good news for BRICS and mutualists? Should you learn to read Chinese?
The modern techno-industrial (MTI) society, now global, that auto-organized from the debris of the Greco-Roman Empire in Europe in the late first millennium to become in the late second millennium the fossil fueled when wood, whale oil, and soil resources were becoming scarce (to briefly shift to the northern Amerind region in the 20th century) will climax in China (center of BRICS power as America had been of the West), hence the name: Euro-Sino Empire that has yet to climax (likely in mid-21st century).
And then what? Well, there is no Planet B. “Houston, we have a problem — the planet has been [nearly] taken — please tell us what to do now.” [Oh, but there is no Mission Control Center and never was. No foresight involved. For the sake of growth, the consensus narrative ignored the and-then-what question.]
Oh, but you may not understand that yet. So…, what’s a good animal to do? Listen to Nature who has all the answers to questions about what can persist long term. Mother has information corrective of metastatic modernity’s information deficit (mal-information system, e.g. the recent end of “fact-checking”).
The key to posterity’s salvation is, when a fellow metastatic human offers you a solution (e.g. green alt energy, permaculture, eco-fashion, carbon sequestration, higher consciousness, true democracy…), you always ask, “and then what?”
In all breathless techno-optimism you can learn on YouTube that we can, thanks to AI, keep on growing the economy by building a Dyson sphere. Okay, and then what?
Alright, we build a Dyson sphere, consume all material within the Oort cloud (including all planets except maybe Earth for recreational use), and we turn Earth into a Trantor. And then what?
For a metastatic cancer cell, modern human or transhuman, there is no long-term viable/evolvable outcome. It may take what seems like a long time to turn the Milky Way into more humans, but then what [given that only a few can leave by spore ship to nearby galaxies]?
Modernity was not conceived on an ecologically sustainable foundation. Modernity auto-organized. Those meeting in smoke-filled rooms were merely trying to figure out what would be in their best short-term self interest. The Industrial Revolution has been a controlled (positive feedback profitable) explosion of a planetary larder of fossil fuels/non-renewable recourses for the taking, a growth explosion that has grown even faster (100 fold) than human (8 fold), crop, livestock, and pet populations until maybe mid-21st century. And then what?
Those who didn’t meet in smoke-filled rooms self-selected out of becoming captains of industry, or leaders at any level from city council to Secretary General of the UN (or pastor, Pope, CEO, NGO Executive Director, media pundit, celebrity influencer…) who imagine they are running the show — the whirlwind they (profitably) ride by trying to not fall off of.
None, from the beginning to end of modernity, could or will question the dynamic they (who pretend to control it) are being dragged along by.
Some mutants can come to question their presuppositions. Unknown is whether a critical mass of mutants can auto-organize while it is still possible to do so (before the downslope dynamic kicks in), and maybe help posterity sidestep extinction (or avoid becoming modern humans in space, i.e. Borg-like expansionists).
So what can a mutant, who has some inkling of the remorseless dynamic we moderns are, do?
Section II
“The first thing you have to realize is that you are an animal.” — David Suzuki
The In? or Out? Decision Making Pathway
Fact or fiction: “I’m an animal, not different in kind from other eukaryotes, nor brother prokaryotes who came first.” Right? If affirmative (you are not a human centrist, human exceptionalist, human supremacist, humanist — one who believes in the necessary primacy of the human enterprise), opt in, maybe.
If living within limits dictated by the biophysical nature of things (Nature) is rejected, you are a fully modern r-selected (live by maximizing, more is better) human, so opt out.
If living as a non-sovereign, cooperative/responsible member of a group of 12–50 is too many to command and control, then freely build a bug-out bunker for yourself and maybe a few others needed to serve you, even if you are not Jeff Bezos.
If you view the long-term persistence of your community of 12 to 50 as independent of the long-term persistence of neighboring communities, then opt out.
If living as a member of a community of 12–50 trusted others interacting with 3 to 50 other communities is too few, then opt out (enjoy life in an urban landscape of thousands to tens of millions of others you do not/cannot trust, i.e. do what most modern humans are doing now because that’s where the food, energy, services, and middle income Walmart bling is to die for).
If limiting humans to the environmental productivity of 20% or less of a biotic community each human serves as a ‘handmaiden’ or ‘agent of the Earth’ [H.T. Odum] is too limiting, then you should have opted out at point 2.
If someone asks you what you have done for posterity lately, and you reply, or are tempted to reply, “what has posterity ever done for me?,” then opt out (stop reading) and have a nice Anthropocene.
Okay, Maybe I’m In
What you are maybe opting into is the Great Selection. Modern humans are entering a bottleneck future in which few to no viable humans come out. If some non-viable humans come out, their descendants will, typically, after 500 years of environmental recovery (e.g. of soils, forests, fisheries) that allows for regrowth, repeat the pattern of empire building, overgrowth/overshoot and descent/collapse as this is the r-selected culture’s history of the last 75k years, especially of the last 12k years of agrarian empowered expansion (empire building). The repetition of a non-viable metastatic pattern has extinction as a long-term outcome, whether in 500, 5k, 50k or 500k years (and not because any human says so, not even if Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, or Elon Musk says so).
Section III
The coming Great Selection will be the first and last global descent/collapse event due to the precondition of needing a planetary larder of fossil fuels and mineable materials to build a globalized complex society or monetary culture, hence “great” will be the selection. Figure a collapse to extinction will take 600–1,000 years, 24–40 generations on the downslope (e.g. Indus Valley Civilization’s descent to cultural-ethno-linguistic extinction which took 24 generations, so doing it globally may take longer).
If remnant populations of denormalized humans do persist, humanity as a non-metastatic form of homininan will not “be saved” as they will merely come to rebuild to repeat the pattern regionally over and over until they can’t.
Is there a potentially viable pathway towards a long-term future for a non-metastatic form of human, i.e. one that succeeds in renormalizing as an evolvable animal (homininan) and comes to replace remnant populations of metastatic modernity who will see them as resources for the taking?
If there is a potential to renormalize, no one can KNOW. The next 1,000 years of the future’s past may reveal whether extinction or renormalization is humanity’s future (or worse, the remnant populations become Borg-like spacefaring expansionists no longer Earth bound).
We moderns are playing a high-stakes end game. So far, perhaps 99.999% of modern humans don’t realize this and so are not even contenders. Is there a minimum number of contenders?
The smallest potentially viable founding population size is about 150 provided they exist in viable sized groups as interacting communities; our homininan biology/ecology normal range would be 3–12 communities for a population of 150. The maximum population size compatible with human biology long term is about 2,500, or 50 communities of 50 people each on the maximum end for potentially renormalizing humans.
For renormalizing modern humans, the optimal population size for a potential founding population is in a range of 400 to 800. If given a 2,500 maximum, modern humans will presuppose that the closer to 2,500 one can get the better, but that is why they need to renormalize as closer to 400 is more adaptive than pushing maximum limits (the r-culture norm).
Section IV
If a group of 400 exceptionally able modern survival-enthusiast humans, with all the survivalist stuff they could want, could buy enough land needed to support a population of 400. They will plan to live off their land and wait for everyone else in the area to mostly go away. They may fully realize their plan, may live within carrying capacity, but as modern humans, they would be wrong again. as usual.
Preppers typically plan to live in their bunkers for several weeks to a few years depending on the severity of the anticipated disaster and the design of their bunker, with some high-end “survival condos” aiming to sustain occupants for up to five years or more.
Modern humans are time blind. To be marginally time sighted, think the next 2,500 years (100 generations) minimum. COVID was a “pretend pandemic” and the global 1929 Great Depression will be viewed as a pretend depression when global supply chains break, as in 1929 the world economy was primed for growth. “This time it’s not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history… Soon all the oil is going to be burned [that can be] and all the metals mined and scattered [that can be].” — M.K. Hubbert
If you are running an animal shelter with 100 cats and 400 dogs in it dependent on goods (e.g. kibble) and services (e.g. waste removal) and supply chains end, including money to pay staff, the last best thing you can do is open all the doors before leaving — and don’t bother turning off the lights.
If in 25 years, descendants of any of those released persist in the valley humans abandoned (perhaps radiation level deemed too high), it can only be via a Great Selection. Towns to megacities are modern human shelters for 500 to 40 million each.
Preparing to get through some future downturn to then become among those who rebuild (bigger and better of course) and prosper greatly will select for a repeating of the pattern of incurring an overshoot debt for posterity to pay via a collapse/descent event such as the one the last 300 years of fossil-fueled growth has selected for.
So why be a part of such a dynamic? For a viable future, humans who can think/plan/live long term need to be selected for, i.e. self-select into a potentially long-term future.
A naive design/plan would be to construct 8 communities of 50 people in an area that could support 400 people. They plan to occupy and persist long term without any selection beyond the initial 400 who agreed to make everything work long term without any individuals failing to do or be what they believe they are and can do. The bug-out facilities will be just for them and before they die of old age, they will have begat enough children who become like them to maintain the population at 400 (until it is again possible to grow, expand, prosper greatly…). So the plan seems viable (but the r-selected culture is not).
Modern metastatic humans who are non-viable cannot even entertain the idea of “system over self” much less why “selection” is a needed precondition for an evolvable form of K-selected human. After 75k years of r-selected denormalization, a “Great Selection” could be the best thing ever (i.e. posterity’s only hope).
Section V
A less naive design/plan would be to construct 80 communities having a potential to support 50 people each in an area having a long term carrying capacity for 400 humans who agree to live in an appropriately sized human habitat defined by ridge and trough boundaries, i.e. a watershed management unit (WMU). The WMU would maintain a limited to some number (e.g. 400, 150–2500 range) of humans, determined by best-guess systemic management principles, best for renormalizing humans long term (i.e. as the centuries/millennia pass).
Some potentially viable WMU designs could be smaller than optimal or larger, but let’s use a low-optimal WMU as an example.
• In a watershed management unit [WMU], the long-term population range is 150–2,500, or optimally 400–800/WMU, an optimal homininan norm, interconnected with a network of tens to tens of thousands of other WMUs to share information about what works to persist.
• low-min., starting population 1,500, 6 clusters of 250 people/cluster in 5 communities of 50; or 25 clusters of 60 in 5 communities of 12; ending population 150 in 6 communities.
• low-opt., starting population 4,000, 16 clusters of 250 people/cluster in 5 communities of 50; ending population 400 in 16 communities, i.e. when defending against attack is a low priority (few/no enemies), 16 clusters contract to 16 communities of extended families averaging 25 members.
• high-opt., starting population 8,000, 32 clusters of 250 people/cluster in 5 communities of 50; ending population 800 in 32 communities.
• high-max., starting population 25,000, 100 clusters of 250 people/cluster in 5 communities of 50; ending population 2,500 in 50 communities.
Variations: cluster size 3–10 communities; community size 12–50 members, communities per WMU 3–50 except during transition phase when more than 50 may be needed for refugees for a time during the birth-off phase to avoid a die-off.
The Low Opt. Example
4,000 MTI refugees contracting to 400 without premature deaths
Do the math. Eighty communities of 50 is 4,000, or ten times too many if 400 is the sustainable number that the WMU supports without degrading the environmental productivity of the WMU (there are currently 10 to 1,000 times too many humans on a rapidly degrading planet where fossil fuels soon cannot be turned into food).
To support a 10-fold too large a population, long-term anoxic food storage would have to be initially in place along with other dry goods, e.g. fiber and fertilizer. Fertilizer allows the same land to be farmed each year to support the population during decline due to the number of births being limited to what is needed to sustain a population of 400 (6 births/year).
Per a 6 births/year limit needed to maintain a population of 400, few of the initial 4,000 can expect to reproduce, while in 50 years women will need to average 2.2 births (or more depending on death rate) each — reproduction is renormalized in 50 years.
If supported for 80 years, the initial population will decline by old age death to a dozen or so elders (initial demographic would likely skew towards the elderly) likely to be zero within 80–90 years when the oldest member not born in the WMU or a neighboring one dies of old age.
The final population, if 400, is not determined by the initial population even if it is 40k instead of 4k. The difference is that if 4k, few women can expect to reproduce and if 40k, 10x fewer can, but either way, in 50 years human biology/ecology norms are restored. Cultural/behavioral /genetic renormalization will take longer (centuries/millennia).
Section VI
Note that if 5 billion modern human adults could agree and were provided for, a contraction of the human population (a condition that will come anyway) could be done “rapidly” (mostly within 80 years, WITH NO ONE DYING A MALTHUSIAN OR CONFLICT DEATH).
The proposed plan scales up
In principle and practice, if 25,000 WMUs take in 25,000 each, and on average contract to 600, the initial population would be 625,000,000. The final population, if 600 is average, is 15 million, which is within a likely viable range of 7 to 35 million planet wide. As K-selected humans endeavoring to renomalize, 15 million should be viewed as an initial maximum, three times larger than needed to preserve human cultural ethno-linguistic diversity.
If on average 600 is too many, WMUs will on average contract by slightly reducing annual births (all have and know how, e.g. instead of 6 births/year, change to 6 every year except every third year have 5). Within 500 years, environmental productivity may significantly increase, and population can increase slowly. If the average WMU population is between 280 to 1,400 then a renormalizing humanity sidesteps extinction and prospers well enough.
If 5 billion adults with 3.2 billion dependents agreed, then 164 million transition communities would be needed (in place before needed), but could not be evenly dispersed between WMUs.
If there are 8,200,000,000 people other than in an actual WMU, construct virtual WMUs (VWMUs) that occupy an expanse of a valley floor during the transition period of about 80 years. The location would be habitable without heating or cooling, with groundwater within hand pump depth (less than 7 meters, 25 feet, or up to 325' with deep low volume hand pump).
Each VWMU would differ mainly in not being within a natural watershed habitat. Each starts at a max-opt size of a 25,000 initial population. So for 8.2 billion, 328k VWMUs are needed.
If more than 150 million people were to agree to join a WMU, they would live in a VWMU until an opening within a WMU opened up. So within actual WMUs, when a person dies, someone from a VWMU could replace them. The number of people in a WMU would not decrease until all VWMUs had depopulated by natural death. Those within VWMUs would not reproduce. Maximizing everyone's reproductive potential is not possible. Again, selection is posterity’s friend.
Those in the 25,000 final WMUs would have to take in members of VWMUs, so it would take longer before the population in each WMU began to contract, so more dry goods would initially be stored within each WMU. At some point on the downslope, humans willing to join a WMU will exceed the supply, so those with humanitarian concerns should seek to construct at least 300k VWMUs.
If all humans agreed to transition, there would be no need for bunker structures. If the global economy stops building weapons and unnecessary consumer products, stops feeding grain to animals or making ethanol with it, and builds shipping containers (or reinforced masonry structures) and provisions them before the global economy shuts down (another condition that will come anyway — when to the nearest decade is unknowable), then nobody anywhere dies a premature/conflict death during the Great Simplification/Selection. Of course modern humans, being too clever by half, are likely not smart enough to transition gracefully (being part of or being consumed by a marauding horde is not graceful).
[Fortunately for humanity’s long term benefit, almost all modern humans will likely not agree, likely not anywhere near 150 million, and so no VMMUs will be built before climax (due to lack of demand) nor on the way down (because they can’t be). That not all modern r-selected metastatic humans will be part of the envisioned and hoped for Great Simplification will benefit posterity. Perhaps modern humans lacking foresight intelligence, those who opt out, need not be and cannot be saved — sorry about that.]
Section VII
A Likelier Future
Assume a group of 400 people with foresight intelligence auto-organize and are willing/able to “vote with their feet” now. Assume 3,600 others would if they could and are willing to invest in 1/50th of the cost of building one community designed to support an initial population of 50 for 80 years on stored dry goods (e.g. food, fiber, and fertilizer) “just in case.”
Initially, fresh food production supplements stored food. When stored food runs out, stored fertilizer will allow the same land to keep producing while the population contracts to carrying capacity limit without fossil fuel inputs or any fossil-fueled industrially produced/transported fertilizer.
So 400 committed people (pioneers) pick an area within a potentially viable WMU, buy land and construct 80 community sites consisting of 40' and 20' shipping containers (or build masonry structures) together forming a square with a central courtyard. This could be done prior to all 3,6oo future occupants investing in 1 share per person ownership of a portion of their share of the home and bunker (HaB) community.
In an all-shipping container design, four of the 40' containers would provide sleeping rooms for 12 each, a total of 48, and smaller container community designs could support 36, 24, or 12 voluntary, intentional by foresight refugees). Masonry communities would be sized to accommodate 12 to 50 refugees. Entrance areas and other space would include shelves for the community library of 5k-6k books.
A one-person tent is up to 88" long, 38" wide (2.2x1 m), 38" high, so an 87"-132" deep 32"-44" wide room, 7.5' standing room, with a raised platform with adjustable backrest with an opening window behind to allow natural light in to read by that lowers for sleeping, with storage above entrance door and under the bed, will be room enough, four times more than a one-person tent and far more than a sailor’s bunk on an around the world sailing voyage of three to five years.
For a couple or family, sections between beds and wall panels can be removed. A couple with young child? When the child is too old to cohabit, three conjoined rooms, mommy gets the middle bed, and with adolescence, the panels are put back. Initially, no children are born until someone dies, by all intent, a natural death or foreseeably will within a few years. After the first decade, the number of empty sleeping rooms will increase until in 80 years maybe five families of five occupy a cluster of five communities that once supported 50 people each, a 1:10 depopulation, as needed, but without any premature deaths by starvation or conflict (violence).
The mattress may be on a slider board, so an elder/ill/injured person could be slid out, tilted to near upright, and helped to stand or transfer to a wheelchair. Small can be big enough (and better insulated than a tent). If a community leader emerges, they live materially the same as everyone else, just as their ancestorial homininans did, who worked for social approbation and to serve posterity. Humans with foresight intelligence will seek to renormalize and persist long term, sooner being better.
Within the interior courtyard would be enclosed kitchen/dining areas on the shaded size and garden areas would be in the sunny inside, perhaps as raised beds. The tops of the shipping contains support container gardens and there would be an elevated covered walk-around on the outside upper edge of the containers/structure for a 360 degree protected view. A tower or towers for a better (and protected) view would allow the community to be watched over. A cluster of three to five up to ten communities within sight of each other could cover/assist each other.
A pioneer founder population = 150 to 2,500 who create the conditions for taking in 1,350–22,500 better-late-than-never vote-with-your-feet others who applied for and were judged to be potentially viable, renormalizable humans, will have a place to go when the going becomes imperative.
Members would help finance construction/provisioning by paying for a 1/50th to 1/12th interest in a community of 50–12. If it cost $750k for land, construction, and provisioning, then 50 people with $15k each could buy in now to bug in later. Grandparents may be willing to pay for a place for their children or grandchildren willing to opt in (if approved). Or invest $15k in a below average used car. All WMU HaB community projects need to be non-profit LLCs owned by 50–12 investors/members of their home and bunker (HaB).
Though designed as middle income transition (MTI) communities (lower to upper middle income currently $53k/yr to $161k/yr), those with higher incomes will need to buy more shares, one for themself (or family/friends) and one (or more) the community can decide later to gift to someone they would have as a member (e.g. for each $108k above 161k, add 1 gifted membership).
A billionaire judged acceptable could buy one share or more for family/friends also judged acceptable, but would gift more than a few for each. If there were 80 HaB communities in one WMU, a billionaire could gift five places in each for those the community judged to be as or more deserving than most, for half the cost of a modest mid-sized private jet. [Someone someday might feel compelled to paint a mural in appreciation — or not.]
Home being “where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” pre-paid and vetted members could join at some point in their future (or a descendant’s future — if a member dies or decides not to join a community, descendants/friends would be considered and approved or not as replacements).
There isn’t time enough for 1,500 to 25,000 people to understand the predicament of modern humans (their own and/or descendants) and figure out what to do that could actually have a viable outcome. So, for the 99% who don’t have the time to figure out the details — based on human ecology and biophysical matter-energy flow determinants of carrying capacity without industrial inputs, they who yet have foresight and intuition can consider a potentially viable design and opt in — or remain out.
For a brief, recent, and minimal understanding of the predicament of modern humans, consider William Rees’ Climate Change, Overshoot and the Demise of Large Cities for the context of the above and below.
Section VIII
‘For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity’s grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large….’ — Edward O. Wilson, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life 2016
‘If the habitability of Earth is to be preserved for all our descendants, we have no choice but to end and reverse population growth, limit our consumption of resources, replace damaging technologies with gentler ones, and attempt to design a better, more sustainable civilization.’ — Anne H. Ehrlich, Paul R. Ehrlich, Too Many Rich Folks 1989
The basic proposition is ‘that continued industrialization and population growth will only lead to increased stresses… A growing inclination to face the problems of growth has appeared among engineers, businessmen, social scientists, and politicians. Seminars, panel discussions, and debates have proliferated on the future of economic growth. But questioning the present trends of economic growth is much easier than finding answers to the questions of when, how, and for whom economic growth should stop’. — Jay Forrester 1973. [Therefore by the 1990s most academics and intelligentsia pundits came to believe that The Limits to Growth/World Dynamics studies made predictions that had failed to materialize and so the concerns raised could be dismissed, ignored, marginalized, obfuscated, denied, and those who still have them could be vilified, demonized, and ridiculed as chicken littles with computers.]
Alternatives to continued business-as-usual (BAU, a myopic and unchanging worldview) ‘will involve fundamental changes in laws, values, religious attitudes, and expectations. Years of debate lie ahead in synthesizing a new political rationale that is compatible with a finite world in which human problems can not much longer be solved by expansion. The challenge is to design a path for both industrial and underdeveloped nations through the transition from growth to a viable equilibrium. Time is short. We must move quickly if we are to keep future options open’. — Jay Forrester, World Dynamics, 2nd ed. 1973, from preface to 2nd edition.
Albert Schweitzer’s personal paradigm shift from human to Nature centric occurred in 1915 when the words Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben [Venerate all Life] came to him as the solution to the question of on what principle would a viable civilization have to be underpinned by? ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth’ were thoughts occasioned by the destruction of beehives due to pesticide (technology) misuse. ‘Good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil’ is a life-affirming view, an algorithm for living properly with the Earth (world system). ‘Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life’, or thought can deny, deny, deny as it does now, and humans can go extinct. ‘I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live’ is the hominin condition (there being only one hominin, the displacer, left). Descartes reasoned that the only thing he knew, could be sure of, was that he could think and therefore existed, a tale told by an idiot (i.e. hu-man). An alternative story is that all organisms live and behave in such a way as to go on living. All life is Gaia, whose body those who would persist must live properly in. To live is to maxmize empower (MEP/MPP/MePP) of the system (ecological unit to biosphere) that one is a product of and depends on (and therefore serves to persist). A cancer cell is a pathological form of life not to be venerated, and death is essential for life (evolution), so venerating all life includes, at times, death. As a civilization, we idiots need to shift from human centric short-term self interest to venerating the evolving life/death system we would be part of (Nature) were we to persist.
‘Here’s the essence of our planning failure: we have built up civilization to a scale that can temporarily be supported by finite and polluting energy sources, and we have simply assumed that this scale of activity can continue to be supported by other energy sources that haven’t yet been developed or substantially deployed. Further, we have incorporated limitless growth into the requirements for civilization’s success and maintenance — despite the overwhelming likelihood that growth can occur for only a historically brief interval. Failing to plan is often the equivalent of planning to fail…, we have collectively bet our fate on the vague hope that “somebody will come up with something.”…, we’ll fail to produce enough renewable energy to power society at the level at which we want it to operate. So, we’ll continue to get most of our energy from fossil fuels — until we can’t, due to depletion. Then, as the economy crashes and the planet heats, the full impacts of our planning failure will finally hit home.’ — Richard Heinberg, 2021
‘Are intensive agriculture, ecocide, genocide, large-scale warfare, poverty, self-justifying elites, what happens when humans blunder into an ecological black hole?’ — Helga Vierich 2017
‘To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two…. We need an entirely new narrative for a successful energy transition. Only by abandoning the flawed paradigmatic source of our ecological dilemma can we formulate realistic pathways for averting social–ecological collapse…. the quest for a magical source of free energy ignores the overriding overshoot crisis — which, paradoxically, was enabled by abundant, cheap fossil energy. We argue that the only viable response to overshoot is a managed contraction of the human enterprise until we arrive within the safely stable territory defined by ecological limits. This will entail many fewer people consuming far less energy and material resources than at present…. Not only is the GND technically flawed, but it fails to situate climate disruption within the broader context of ecological overshoot. Anthropogenic climate change is merely one symptom of overshoot and cannot be treated in isolation from the greater disease. The GND offers little more than a green-washed version of the unsustainable growth-based status quo. Even if feasible, its operationalization would only exacerbate human ecological dysfunction.’ — Megan K. Seibert and William E. Rees, 2021, Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition
‘So, here’s the conundrum: modern techno-industrial society is addicted to abundant cheap energy, primarily fossil fuels, and is sleep-walking into eco-disaster. To avoid climate catastrophe, we must abandon fossil fuels but there are no quantitative substitutes. (Get used to a low-energy future.) To complicate matters, global warming is not even the primary threat, ecological overshoot is. There are too many people — particularly wealthy people — consuming and polluting too much; humans are destroying the biophysical basis of their own existence. Climate change, plunging biodiversity, tropical deforestation, soil/land degradation, pollution of everything, etc., etc., are all co-symptoms of overshoot and none can be solved in isolation from the others. William E. Rees, 2022, War and sustainability: Dispelling the renewable energy illusion.
‘What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere’s handmaiden anew.’ — Howard T. Odum, Energy, Ecology, & Economics, 1973
Section IX
A More Likely Future Because a Very Few Could Make It so
The technology needed to engineer a virus is now within the means of any country or CEO who could fund a lab. There are 2,800 or so billionaires who could fund a half dozen graduate students to engineer a high mortality virus (or one that caused infertility) more contagious than COVID.
The first symptom of a lethal virus could be sudden death or infertility would have the same outcome, but take longer. Assume at least 3,000 players (from billionaires to nation-states) could, and that a vaccine could be developed, but hasn’t been yet. How long before one of the players having such technology uses it?
Kim Jong Un can make missiles with nuclear war heads happen. An empty world ready for him and his supporters/loyalists (not all but mostly North Koreans) could turn the planet into a vast resource for the taking.
An engineered virus could rapidly reduce the human population, but without selecting for the mostly renormalizable K-selected humans having foresight intelligence (e.g. likely zero of a Kim Jong Un’s or an Elon Musk’s handpicked loyalists), the long term outcome would be to repeat the pattern.
An absence of selection would not change the r-selected form of modern humans, their culture or civilization. If the only humans who inherit the planet are North Koreans loyal to Kim Jong-Un, then the same form of human will merely replace the existing. If Xi Jinping, Elon Musk, Ali Khamenei, or Putin loyalists alone remain, and then what?
A near-future collapse of the current world disorder could be the best thing ever, and the more WMUs out there, the better chance humanity could have for a viable long term future. Or in a natural plague, a WMU that is wholly self-contained could wait out its passing.
We may be playing (mostly not playing) a higher stakes endgame than we know or can know. Earth’s 8.2 billion humans are currently so interdependent as to be effectively in one basket.
Section X
A Point That Should Be of Interest
A long-term potentially viable proposal needs to select for a viable form of human (e.g. K-selected with foresight intelligence) in addition to bringing human demands on Nature’s resources into balance with the Earth system by both ending the Anthropocene mass extinction event and leaving enough room for Nature to allow new species to evolve to restore species diversity, a condition that by best-guess systemic management requires reducing human population to 7 to 35 million global population (no fossil fuel use and no exploitation of 80% of land and sea — e.g. 20% or less of a seashore could be fished to within 2 km of shore, but no more).
Before agriculture, almost all of a planet that was far less degraded than today supported a human population of about 5 million. If all of today’s cultural-ethnic-linguistic diversity is initially preserve within WMUs, a total human population of 5 million would be enough for one or more WMUs for each group of diverse humans. A population of 15 million would be more than enough, but allows for errors in estimating to conserve more human diversity that may exist.
Once 15 million was achieved, each of the 25k WMUs would continually reassess (with informed help) their population to raise, lower, or leave the same as the centuries go by. A total global population would be the outcome, the sum of all WMUs. There would be zero global population management. The K-selected cultures of 25k WMUs would listen to Nature and thereby auto-manage human demands on Nature’s resources. No World Dictator need apply.
If 150 million of the most renormalizable humans self-select into the plan (that excludes the delusional/dysfunctional, so there would be community selection too), the proposed plan, if it proves viable, could allow all humans on the planet who could come to know of the plan to potentially opt into it (those below middle income would be subsidized), then what is needed is a planned by intent Great Selection that also simplifies/reduces the human impact on the biosphere.
To Recap
To just cut to the what-you-would-need-to-do part:
I. Agree to live within limits determined by the biophysical system of mass and energy flows (avoid ecological overshoot), and human biology/cognitive limits (redress civilizational overshoot) that all members, including former billionaires, must comply with.
A potential human habitat shall provide enough sustainable environmental productivity to support 400 to 800 people (150 to 2,500 range) limited to 20% or less of the total biotic community area (to leave room for Nature) defined by ridge and trough boundaries, i.e. watershed boundaries (not political lines) termed a Watershed Management Unit (WMU) area of which Nature (aka Mother) gets 80%.
For modern humans to renormalize over multiple generations, no one shall live in a group of more than 50 (20–50 = homininan norm). Smaller than 20 allowed down to 5 (rarely 1, e.g. a Thoreau or Ted Kaczynski), another limit modern humans who would renormalize/persist long term do not get to vote on, so if 50 is too few people to live in community with (e.g. too few for urbanized humans), then opting out is your vote.
Communities of up to 50 shall be clustered in groups of 3–10 communities close enough (100–500 meters apart) to allow for mutual protection and support.
By intent (design) each WMU will initially support ten times more foresighted refugees than the long-term carrying capacity of the WMU can support for reasons both practical/adaptive and humanitarian — selection benefits posterity.
Each community is designed to initially support a population of up to 50 that will contract over a 100 year period (if an initial member is a newborn and lives to be 100) towards a population of 5 by, in so far as possible, natural death by old age.
A cluster of 3–5 communities of 50 will become a cluster of 3–5 family homesteads supporting 25 on average members.
II. If any community or cluster of communities is attacked, members of all communities agree to help defend them, and if a neighboring WMU is attacked (a fellow member of the United Federation — UF of Watershed Management Units), other UF WMUs will help defend them, i.e. mutual agreed upon defense is presumed or each community or WMU could be picked off one at a time by an attacker. An attack on one is an attack on all UF WMUs.
III. No human supremacy presupposed, i.e. no reproductive sovereignty. If long-term carrying capacity of a WMU is 400 people and expected lifespan is 73 years, then 6 babies need to be born per year regardless of initial population — the how to limit births to 6/year is secondary. The homininan norm is the Mothers (who listen to Mother) decide and make it so.
IV. Any exploitation of Nature’s 80% will be viewed, as the centuries and millennia pass (when no WMU would think to attack another), as an attack upon all, including any exploitation by the members of the same WMU. Otherwise the Anthropocene mass extinction event will not end as all K-selected human animals would understand and support.
Individuals, families and small groups who prefer to persist and iterate towards becoming more functional human animals (i.e. renormalize) should seek out places that increase their odds of surviving the descent of modern techno-industrial society and severe population bottleneck.
The only thing that is crystal clear about where those places might be is that they are not in any city, nor in any urban area, e.g. Coos Bay, North Bend, or Charleston (Allegany was never much more than a post office, and is reachable by boat from the bay).
As the best port between San Francisco and Portland, Coos Bay will be a relatively high value energy/info/materials flow hub WMU, and likely site of an ecoregion, bioregion, or even sublate academy. Water transport involves far less energy than overland. Large wooden sailing ships were once made in Coos Bay in the late 19th century.
SUBNOTE TO FILE
Jack Alpert has a design for a viable civilization that could allow for a remnant population of modern techno-industrialized humans to persist for 300 to 500 years, and perhaps learn to renormalize enough by not denormalizing their children. As modern humans, they would be dependent on 96,000 KWh per year per person of energy with material flows stockpiled, accounted for, and returned to the stockpile insofar as possible. The energy source would be the combined output of hydroelectric dams in three regions delivered to three megacities, in Northwest US, SE South America, and Eastern Asia. The design could allow modern humans, up to 50 million in addition to perhaps 5-15 million UF WMUs, to live modern lives and continue to learn more about how the world really works. No biophysical laws of the universe violated.
To construct 1 to 3 megacities would be a large-scale project and would involve large-scale nation-state approval and involvement. Getting a majority (or any) citizens of democracies to vote for this project has so far proved unsuccessful in forcing political, financial, and intelligentsia leaders to make it happen top-down because forced to by a bottom-up movement.
Constructing a community for 12-50 citizens (investors) that involves placing shipping containers, or masonry structures (up to a 95' x 95' area) on 1 acre or more of land, with sleeping rooms for 12-50 would require county zoning approval to construct if occupied, but as a storage site occupied by a few pioneer members living in conventional homes to protect/watch over the site (a group of one to four ‘pioneers’ living in conventional homes), a potentially occupiable community would be permitted.
The assumption would be that as long as there was a county government and enforcement, occupying the site would be unnecessary. A 1/50th to 1/12th investment could be less than the average cost of a used car. If 80 potential communities were built, paid for by 4,000 investors, this is a bottom up design.
If residents are not involved with those on the chaotic downslope and not taken/attacked/overrun as a resource (because not takeable), then in 50 to 80 years the remnant population of takers may pose no significant threat to the 80 communities. Whoever inherits the rubble will not persist long when there is noting for the taking left that can be taken.
No top down agreement needed, just 4,000 middle income investors (for the price of 1 used car/person) in their own future as founders of 1 WMU. Scale up to 5 million investors, and 12,500 WMUs could be founded worldwide, about half of the potential number of WMUs that could be established. So 10 million share holders, about 0.2% of adult humans today, could build 25k WMUs worldwide whose residents would mostly persist and not be part of the denormalizing downslope culture and its race to the bottom (extinction) post-climax of the world socioeconomic-political system. This could have a different outcome than planning to inherit the rubble.
The United States population in 1929 was about 122 million. In 2029 the population is projected to be 348 million, or 2.86 times more. In 1929 (Great Depression) there were still many people who knew how to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without’.
They also knew that food didn’t come from supermarkets. A collapse of a bigger house of cards could be much worse, especially since the 1929 depression was self-inflicted — there was no biophysical basis, it was a collapse of a financial system, not a food production system and global supply chain 90% dependent on turning fossil fuels into food to feed a world population now 4 times larger.
In a Greater or Greatest Depression, there is no basis to believe that in maybe 3–5 years the economy will be well into recovery and fully booming in a decade or so (like in the Great Depression when, although murder rates increased a bit, citizens largely did not loot, burn down cities or put heads on pikes).
“Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know… I was in New York in the 30’s. I had a box seat at the depression. I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We’re doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929–30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it’s not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history… Soon all the oil is going to be burned [that can be] and all the metals mined and scattered [that can be].” — M. King Hubbert
You're clear-eyed about the future, Erik, which is good, but I think you are over-analyzing it. If it happens soon, collapse and dieoff to a remant population of 5 million will leave enough habitable planet so that humanity can survive over the long term, regardless of how they organize themselves or whether they are "K selected" or "r-selected".
Social evolution will determine which societies survive out of the whole range of cutural possibilities. The important factor is that after MTI collapse, no culture will be able to do enough damage to the global ecosphere to put Gaian health at risk. As long as the global human reproductive rate matches the global death rate, which it must in the end, everything will be just fine.
There are thousands of communities all over the world which roughly match your requirements for watershed living. Most of the more viable communities are in the global south. An example is Vogo, Papua New Guinea. Look it up on Google Maps.