February 15 2015
PEAK EVERYTHING
I have been a columnist for some 25 years, and an occasional feature writer before that. My first column for the Christian Courier was an evaluation of the then new Ontario Premier, Bob Rae, who, to his own immense surprise replaced David Petersen in 1990. From 2000-2010 I wrote a weekly column for the Intelligencer, the Belleville (On) daily, also placing this on my web site, where I still post a new article each week. While my Intel column was limited to maximum 800 words, the blog I now write is usually around the 2000 words length: it is easier to write a longer column than a short one.
While I am contemplating what to write next, my eye falls on a book in front of me with the title The March of Folly. If there ever is an age that qualifies for that epitaph it is the contemporary scene. Barbara Tuchman wrote the book in 1984 and I bought it in 1985. She ends the book with the Vietnam War which did not prevent the USA from repeating this folly in both Afghanistan and Iraq in quick succession. Obama knows this, reason why he is hesitant to get involved in the ISIS mess and in the Ukraine debacle.
However, the folly to PEAK ALL FOLLIES is our relentless war on creation. This profound stupidity trumps all other ones because our very existence is at stake there, as war on creation essentially means War on God, something we simply cannot win. It’s all because we worship idols, the idols of Economic Growth especially. That’s the reason why we have lost all connection with reality: we have eyes but we see not, ears but we hear not, to quote Psalm 115.
Closely connected to this is PEAK FAITH. The church I attend was built in 1890 with a seating capacity of some 250. This past Sunday our choir of 10 people equaled the size of the audience. The average attendance is perhaps 25 and the average age about 70 years. Now with four times as many people in the world since 1890, church attendance is a tenth of what it was 125 years ago, a real reduction of more than 95 percent. Faith has become unfashionable, faith that is belief in God as the Creator and Jesus as the Redeemer. Isn’t there a saying that when people stop believing in God they start to believe anything? That makes sense to me because The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, even though that text has become a cliché. What it really means is that we garner wisdom only when we acknowledge God’s wisdom as evident in creation, and treat creation as a holy gift from God. That is confirmed in Jesus’ prompting to First seek the Kingdom of God – which is the welfare of creation – and everything else will fall into place. By and large Christianity has failed to make this the heart of the Gospel, and this is the principal reason for the church’s decline and the global disasters we daily experience. The sad news is that, just as the corporate world can no longer alter its approach to the natural world – inevitable leading to the demise of the earth – so the church too no longer can change its approach to the spiritual world. Call it PEAK POWERLESSNESS.
In the natural world we experience all sorts of peaks, and I don’t refer to Switzerland or Nepal. Take bees, those little insects that provide us with honey and are vital for pollinating fruit trees, from almonds to apples. No bees, no fruits, so needed for our food supply. Bees have been dying off in droves, and no one has been able to pinpoint the real cause. Blame it on the all-pervasive pollutants that, in humans, cause cancers, and in animals, death and deformation. The die-off is now world-wide.
I see peaks everywhere. Peaks everywhere really mean that from here on everything is going downhill. We now have PEAK MARRIAGE. Of our 9 grandchildren of marriageable age, only two have officially tied the knot. Failure to a faith commitment is also evident in marriage. There’s little desire to commit to a partner for life. Perhaps the economy is to blame in case of marriage. Somehow I sense a connection to Jesus’ words where he said that in the New Creation there will not be marriage. I maybe all wrong there, but that’s how I would like to explain this. I also believe that young people sense the darkness of the future and their reluctance to increase the world population, already far beyond what the earth can support.
Again this week I experienced computer fraud. My credit card was again compromised. Although for me charging purchases on credit cards means acquiring air-miles, I have decided to sever that connection, because it is increasingly my experience that the Internet and all its connections suffer from PEAK INSECURITY. I therefore will drastically reduce my exposure to the Internet and have already invalidated one credit card, determined as I am to use my debit card, cash and cheques from now on, even though I forfeit the chance to accrue air-miles. Moreover flying is one of the filthiest ways to travel in terms of air pollution.
All sorts of other peaks come to mind such as PEAK MONETARY DEBT. I just Googled the word and out came $250 Trillion as the total amount of global debt. This translates into more than $30,000 for every human being on the earth, including the 2 billion or more who have an annual income of less than $1,000. That means that we, the rich, with personal income of more than $20,000 each, owe astronomical amounts, never to be repaid, just as the Environment will never become pristine again as we also have PEAK ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT. There too we are beyond the point of no return. Some time ago, a scientist went on his biannual tour of the Russian arctic ocean, checking for toxic plumes of methane gas bubbling up from the ocean. He’d previously seen hundreds of these plumes, about a meter wide each, emitting gas 50 times more damaging to our climate than carbon dioxide. This time, as he came across the first plume, he couldn’t believe it. It was a KILOMETER wide. A vast column of gas entering our atmosphere. He sailed on and found another a kilometer wide, and another, and another. Hundreds of them. The Paris meeting in the Fall to discuss Climate Change is mere window dressing: just so much more pollution-causing airflights for the thousands of delegates.
The world is doing everything to generate more growth. Nothing works, which also means that we have PEAK GROWTH. The entire global economy is built on growth. Just as a bike stops and falls down when the forward momentum ceases, so too the world economy collapses when growth stops. In connection with this PEAK LIES are part of the parcel. No public statements can be trusted anymore. Take everything with a scoop of salt, which reminds me of PEAK FOOD and PEAK SOIL and PEAK FERTILIZER and PEAK OIL. Closely connected to Peak Food is Peak soil. It derives from the more concrete concept that we are “mining” the soil: degrading and exhausting it by growing single-crop “monocultures”, using too much fertilizer and irrigating too enthusiastically, all in the name of higher crop yields. Since it is Oil that we eat – each food calorie requires 10 oil calories – once we reach PEAK OIL the food supply too will collapse.
Here’s what I read this week. “We know far more about the amount of oil there is globally and how long those stocks will last than we know about how much soil there is,” said John Crawford, Director of the Sustainable Systems Program in Rothamsted Research in England. “Under business as usual, the current soils that are in agricultural production will yield about 30 percent less…by around 2050.”
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 25 percent of the world’s soils that are currently under cultivation are severely degraded, and another 8 percent moderately degraded. (Even “moderately degraded” soil has lost half its capacity to store water.) And the only way to access new, undamaged soil is to deforest the rest of the planet.
All of which brings me back to the issue of PEAK FOOD. This year prices for corn, soybeans and wheat are so low that next year farmers will plant less of it. The low 2013 crop and the high prices then tempted farmers to grow much more in 2014, so much more that commodity prices collapsed. In 2015 they will plant less, much less with the result that there won’t be enough come September.
During the latter part of the 20th century, food production grew at around 3.5 percent per year, comfortably ahead of population growth, but the dramatic rise in crop yields was due to new inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, much more irrigation, and new “green revolution” crop varieties. Now those one-time improvements have largely run their course, and global food production is rising at only 1.5 percent a year. In food there already have been several peaks. A report by scientists at Yale, Michigan State University and the Helmholtz Centre in Germany in the journal “Ecology and Society” stated that peak corn happened in 1985, peak rice and wild fish in 1988, peak dairy in 1989, peak eggs in 1993, and peak meat in 1996. More recent peaks were vegetables in 2000, milk and wheat in 2004, poultry in 2006, and soya bean in 2009. Indeed, sixteen of the 21 foods examined in the “Ecology and Society” report have already peaked, and production levels have actually flattened out for key regions amounting to 33 percent of global rice and 27 percent of global wheat production.
So we are already in trouble, and it will get worse even before Climate Change really kicks in. There are still some quick fixes available, notably by cutting down on waste: more than a third of the food that is grown for human consumption never gets eaten. But unless we come up with some new “magic bullets”, things will be getting fairly grim on the food front by the 2030s.
Of all the peaks, PEAK FOOD AND WATER are the most scary. Billions will go hungry. Everything impacts the food supply.
So what must we do? What can we do?
I hope that we also have PEAK AWARENESS because there certainly is PEAK STUPIDITY. Most people give little thought to tomorrow. But tomorrow always comes. Last month the rich of the earth gathered in Davos Switzerland. There are reports that even these billionaires fear for their future. And well they should. For too long the Western Governments have protected the banks and by implication the rich from collapsing. Once the Debt mountain disintegrates the rich more than the poor will suffer. Ted Turner may hide away at his 500,000 acre ranch in Montana but drones with bombs are now a middleclass toy. Nobody and nothing will be secure in the near future.
This week frantic conferences in Europe and elsewhere are signs that we are in an endgame of sorts. Little Greece with only 11 million people, comprising a mere 2 percent of the Euro population, may yet cause the money world to implode. The lowly honey bee, one of the smallest animals, may yet cause the food supply to be reduced by 30 percent.
We live in a totally integrated world. Collapse of one segment, however small, will have disastrous domino effects.
The Chinese have a curse: may you live in interesting times. For the few who still have eyes to see and ears to hear these interesting times are not a curse but a wake-up call.