Collapse: The Coronavirus is not a Cause, it is a Trigger

Is the epidemic going to cause civilization to collapse? It may happen for good reasons

This is a version of the article that I published on the English version of "Al Arabiya" On March 26, 2020. It is not the same text I published there -- but I kept the wonderful illustration by Steven Castelluccia. It perfectly conveys the concept of "Seneca Cliff"

Do you remember the story of the straw that broke the camel’s back? It is an illustration of how overloaded systems are sensitive to small perturbations. Could the COVID-19 epidemic be the straw that breaks the back of the world’s economy?

Like an overloaded camel, the world’s economy is strained by at least two tremendous burdens: one is the increasing costs of production of mineral resources (don’t be fooled by the current low prices of oil: prices are one thing, costs are another). Then, there is pollution, including climate change, also weighing on the economy. These two factors define the condition called “overshoot,” occurring when an economic system is consuming more resources than nature can replace. Sooner or later, an economy in overshoot has to come to terms with reality. It means that it can’t continue to grow: it must decline.

These considerations can be quantified. It was done for the first time in 1972 with the famous report The Limits to Growth sponsored by the Club of Rome. Widely disbelieved at the time, today we recognize that the model used for the study had correctly identified the trends of the world’s economy. The results of the study showed that the double burden of resource depletion and pollution would bring economic growth first to a halt and then cause it to collapse, probably at some moment during the first decades of the 21st century. Even with very optimistic assumptions on the availability of natural resources and of new technologies the calculations show that the collapse could at best be postponed, but not avoided. Many later studies confirmed these results: collapse turns out to be a typical feature of systems in overshoot, a phenomenon called sometimes the “Seneca Cliff” from a sentence of the ancient Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

The base case scenario calculated in the 1972 version of "The Limits to Growth" 

The coronavirus, in itself, is a minor perturbation, but the system is poised for collapse and the epidemics may trigger it. We already saw how the world’s economy is fragile: it nearly collapsed in 2008 under the relatively small perturbation of the crash of the subprime mortgage market. At that time, it was possible to contain the damage but, today, the fragility of the system has not improved and the coronavirus may be a stronger perturbation. The collapse of entire sectors of the economy, such as the tourism industry (more than 10% of the world’s gross product), is already ongoing and it may be impossible to stop it from spreading to other sectors.

So, what exactly is it going to happen to us? Since we started with mentioning a camel, we may also mention a famous statement by Shaykh Rāshid that we can summarize as, "My father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son will ride a camel." Might that sentence have been truly prophetic?

Indeed, the coming crisis might turn out to be so bad to push us back to the Middle Ages. But it is also true that all major epidemics in history have seen a robust rebound after the collapse. Consider that, in the mid-14th century, the “black death” killed perhaps 40% of the population of Europe but, a century later, Europeans were discovering America and starting their attempt of conquering the world. It may be that the black death was instrumental in this rebound: the temporary reduction of the European population had freed the resources necessary for a new leap forward.

Could we see a similar rebound of our society in the future? Why not? After all, the coronavirus could be doing us a favor by forcing us to abandon the obsolete and polluting fossil fuels we use today. The current low market prices are the result of the contraction of the demand and are likely to be the straw that breaks the back of the oil industry. That will leave space for new and more efficient technologies. Today, solar energy has become so cheap that it is possible to think of a society fully based on renewable energy. It won’t be easy, but recent studies show that it can be done.

That doesn’t mean that the near term collapse can be avoided. The transition to a new energy infrastructure will require enormous investments, impossible to find in a moment of economic contraction we expect for the near future. But, in the long run, the transition is unavoidable and there is hope for a "Seneca rebound" toward a new society based on clean and renewable energy, no more plagued by the threats of depletion and climate change. It will take time, but we can heal the poor camel’s back.

Resignation and optimism on the brink of the apocalypse

Guest post by Federico Tabellini

Despite the misleading title, I will not talk to you today about the coronavirus, but of that other, far more insidious crisis that we cannot hope to solve with a vaccine. The global ecological crisis: a crisis in which we are the virus. I would like to share with you some brief reflections on human agency, human nature and their relationship with the possibility of a sustainable society. I know, philosophical stuff – but with very practical implications. 

The idea for this article came from a series of conversations I recently had with a reader of my book ‘A Future History of the 21st Century: How We Overcame the Crisis of Civilization’. The text debates the nature of the current socio-economic system, and analyses which of its structural elements constitute obstacles to our transition to a sustainable society. It then discusses how we could potentially overcome those obstacles, focusing on specific economic, institutional and political reforms. All of this while avoiding the well-known trap into which many Degrowth theorists still fall today, which can be summarized by the dead end idea that bottom-up change is the only way out of the crisis, and that to change the world we first need to change ourselves. In short, this is a dead end idea because it cannot be translated into concrete policies. Conversely, to be carried out successfully, a bottom-up change requires a top-down change that facilitates and supports it. In other words: institutional, political and economic reforms.

After this necessary introduction, let’s get to the core topic of the article. The reader I spoke of earlier agrees with the book’s analysis of our current situation and acknowledges that the solutions proposed could produce the desired transition to a sustainable steady-state economy. However, he argues that human nature will never allow us to implement those changes. In other words, not only can human beings not change themselves – they can’t even change the very institutions they created. And this is not an unlikely change either, he claims, but an absolutely impossible one. This is the same as saying that we are trapped in a car that is heading speedily towards a ravine, with a functioning brake in easy reach of our hands, but sadly we are programmed not to pull it.

To put it another way, the problem is not to be found in a defect of the hardware (our hands) or in the resilience of the system (the car), but rather in the software code (our head). The software, he argues, is programmed for accumulation, for a growth without limits and without purpose, for constant acceleration. These things are not cultural constructs, but rather inalienable characteristics of human nature.

He then proceeds to claim, based on fringe clyodynamic theories – which he of course accepts as undisputable scientific proofs – that history demonstrates this; that civilizations have always grown until they could, and when they stopped doing so, they without exception collapsed. The only solution, he concludes, is exactly that: collapse. A non-solution. Worse still: to embrace the very idea that a solution is not possible. That we cannot pull the brake. That we cannot change direction. That we need to give up and accept that we are going to fall into the ravine, and die along with the system. Not everybody, of course. Those of us that will survive will have the chance to start again, little by little, from down there, the slow climbing of the cliff. Only this time with fewer resources. And this ad infinitum, with our heads forever preventing us from learning from the mistakes of the past: until the final suicide.

Of course – I’m sure you’ve guessed it by now – I do not agree that this is the unavoidable destiny of our species. I do acknowledge, however, that we are indeed genetically programmed for accumulation and growth, and that we are not programmed to individually impose limits to ourselves. We get immediate pleasure from accumulation, while the most we get from limits is a kind of long-term serenity. To obtain the latter we need effort and perseverance, while to accumulate more and more, we just need to follow our instincts.

In other words, starting from a clean sheet and without culture, we tend to long for growth. To have more, to produce more, to do more. What I do not agree with is that our culture has to strengthen this inclination, and cannot instead compensate for it, for everyone’s sake.

Let me be clear: contemporary global culture intensifies these human tendencies more than any other culture that preceded it. The fact that we live inside this culture makes us see it as the most natural outcome of human nature, just as the ancient romans thought of their own culture as the peak of human civilization. Neither they nor we were right, of course. In the same way as we constrained our human tendencies to indulge in gratuitous violence, and no longer slaughter slaves in an arena, so people in the future can stop growing their production and consumption beyond the carrying capacity of the ecosystems. What allows us to do this is human agency: the ability to change our culture and our institutions based on what we think is right. In this case, what is right for most people (including the author of this article) is to increase the lifespan of the human race on this planet, and make sure that life is worth living for future generations.

In this sense, we should note that our current situation involves never before seen elements that work in our favour. Here are some of the most significant:

1.      Today, for the first time in history, we know that our socio-economic model is environmentally unsustainable, and that a change is necessary (although there is currently no complete agreement on what type of change we need, or how to produce it).

2. Today, for the first time in history, the entire world is interconnected, and can potentially discuss shared solutions (although coming to an agreement is not as easy as we hoped).
3. Modern technologies make producing the goods and services essential to human survival more efficient. We produce and consume too much, but each unit we produce and consume has a lower impact on the environment compared to the past.
4. It is now a consolidated fact that beyond certain levels of consumption, further consumption does not equal more well-being for human beings.[1] We already passed those limits, which means that a reduction of our per-capita consumption would not produce a reduction in aggregate well-being.

There is also historical evidence that points towards the possibility of complex social models that are not based on the relentless accumulation of material goods.

There have been entire communities in Asia and Africa that for centuries lived in societies in which the individual accumulation of material goods was socially sanctioned. These are examples of instances in which culture compensated nature, producing ecologically sustainable social models as a result.

Thus, the real fundamental question is not whether it is possible to build a sustainable society, but rather whether it is possible to do so without sacrificing the fundamental values of the West and people’s well-being. If by ‘fundamental values of the West’ we mean things such as human rights and political and civil liberties, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ (you can find a demonstration of this in my book). If we instead mean unchecked capitalism and a lawless market, then the answer is ‘realistically, no’.

However, we do not need to ask history to know this, because history does not include the full range of possible futures. If there is a constant in human history, it is novelty. The creation of new things that constantly confute the idea that history is destined to repeat itself. History is not the full toolbox we have at our disposal to build our future. Many things that exist today did not exist before. These things are as varied as computing technologies and the internet, but also liberalism, the state of law, and human rights. We also, for the first time, live in a full world, without new frontiers to exploit. Human history has always been a history of exploitation because, among other things, there was an abundance of resources to exploit; now we are consuming (far) more than what nature produces. The situation has changed, and there is no reason to believe that we cannot change also. Before we did not need to change. Now we do. The very fact that we can see this as a problem is a relatively new thing, and a hint that we have the power to solve it.

My reader, however, appears to be blind to the very possibility of change, any change. This is because he draws his arguments not from history, but from an interpretation of history. A highly deterministic interpretation that excludes human agency. Doing so, he looks at the forest as an actor independent from the trees it is made up of. In this way, culture becomes an entity separated from people, which controls them as a puppet master. It has its own will, or moves as if it had one. There is no way we can control it. And even when it looks like we are in control, in reality we are just executing its directives. It is not the trees that make up the forest; it is the forest that makes up the trees.

Conversely, my position is one shared by most social scientists: the forest makes up the trees and at the same time, the trees make up the forest. The influence is mutual. Under certain historical conditions, it is mostly the forest that shapes the life of the trees. It decides where they lay roots, where they extend their branches, where they spread their seeds. In times of uncertainty and crisis, however, the trees can shape the life of the forest. They can shape which direction it expands. Whether it grows or retreats. If it provides sufficient nourishment for the living beings that inhabit it.

In a similar fashion, human beings are not slaves to their culture, although going against it, to change it, requires a considerable effort. An effort that the majority will not want to undertake unless they perceive it as absolutely necessary. Unless – and this is the main message I want to pass here – they believe that a change is possible.

Such a change is not likely to occur spontaneously, without direction. Most great changes in history have occurred when capable and innovative leaders (not only politicians, but also intellectuals) come together with a mass of people united by a common goal. A mass that starts small, but little by little grows until it reaches the critical threshold necessary to spark a change. This happened with women’s rights, with workers’ rights, with the liberal-democratic model, with communist revolutions, with Nazism. Change is not always positive. But it is almost always possible.

This does not mean it is probable. Often it is not. Today I think it is not probable. But it is possible. And this is really, really important. Another thing is important: change becomes more probable if we believe it possible. If the ideas of my aforementioned reader spread, change would become less probable: a self-fulfilled prophecy that could condemn our race (and others, too) to a dreadful future.

It is true: human beings are, to a certain extent, programmed by genes and culture. But they can also reprogram culture. Often they can only do this indirectly, like when the standard working day was reduced to 8 hours (an institutional reform). This produced more free time for individuals, which in turn translated into a proliferation of new activities, giving birth, among other things, to the entertainment industry and sport (previously, sport had been something that only athletes and nobles engaged in).

In conclusion, between my reader and myself there is both agreement and disagreement. We agree that the world is hurrying towards a ravine. We disagree on the possibility of pulling the brake. I firmly believe that resignation is the worst enemy of change. It paralyzes us. And I believe that optimism is needed more, not less, on the brink of an apocalypse. If we want to produce a positive change in the world, we need to look at the ravine with a smile on our lips, but also – and especially – with rolled up sleeves and our brains at work. It may be highly unlikely that we will be able to pull the brake. Nonetheless, we have the moral obligation to try. Success might not be probable, but it is surely possible. And this possibility, being rooted in the present and not in the past, is something that no deterministic interpretation of history will ever be able to disprove.

[1] See, for example, D. G. Blanchflower, A. J. Oswald, Well-being over time in Britain and the USA, in “Journal of Public Economics”, 88 (2004), pp. 1359-1386; R. Layard, S. Nickell, G. Mayraz, The marginal utility of income, in “Journal of Public Economics”, 92:8/9 (2008), pp. 1846-1857; D. Kahneman, A. Deaton, High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being, in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”, 107:38 (2010), pp. 16489-93; E. Proto, A. Rustichini, A Reassessment of the Relationship between GDP and Life Satisfaction, in “PLoS ONE”, 8 (2013)_.

Fate is coming back. What do we do when no choice is good?

Guest post by Jacopo Simonetta 
Originally published in Italian on "Effetto Cassandra"



It is called 'triage'. It happens in the emergency departments when the influx of ill or injured patients exceeds the capacity of the hospital. So, doctors must decide whom to save first and whom to save later, if they are still alive. I have always thought this is the worst thing that a doctor may be forced to do, but it happens, and doctors, like other emergency professionals (firefighters, soldiers, policemen etc.), are, at least in part, prepared to face these situations.

We normal people are not, but this does not mean we can abstain from making choices, when even failing to make a choice will have consequences. In fact, the extraordinary bubble of peace and well-being that has cocooned the western world for 70 years is vanishing, making us completely unprepared to face the very idea of 'tragedy'.

I am not referring here to the crises of collective hysteria that overwhelm us at every little difficulty, but to our inability to sustain the weight of the responsibility of choices that, whatever we decide to do, will provoke great damage and suffering. Outside of our collapsing bubble, this kind of situation is instead frequent and has been masterfully illustrated in many masterpieces of ancient philosophy and literature.

These are the dynamics of Fate: men are not simply dragged by a 'scornful destiny'; they are instead called upon to make choices whose consequences will be inevitable so that not even Zeus could change them. Sometimes, in the range of possible choices, there is one that could put an end to the suffering and the tragedies. For example, Paris could put an end to the war by letting Helen return to Sparta or Hector could win, granting the Achaeans a dignified surrender and a return to home.

In both cases, the heroes make the wrong choice and the consequences overwhelm them and their people, but it was not inevitable.

There are instead cases in which every possible option will have disastrous consequences, and nevertheless the hero must choose. Orestes' dilemma is paradigmatic: it is his sacred duty to avenge his father, but this means to commit the sacrilege of killing his mother and he well knows that whatever he decides to do, the consequences will be catastrophic. A similar dilemma torments Antigone, who must choose whether to bury her brother, violating a precise order from her king, or leave him unburied, violating a precise duty of hers.

This kind of dilemma lies at the core of Tragedy that, not coincidentally, was closely connected to the cult of Dionysus: perhaps the most ancient and certainly the most enigmatic of the Greek Gods.

We have pretended and continue to pretend we are immune to this kind of situations, but the truth is knocking at our door harder and harder, and visible cracks have opened in the physical and psychical walls we have built against it.

Let us make an easy example of the kind of tragic choices that we are in any case forced to take. Taxing air flights so as to drastically reduce their number would surely have positive effects on the environment and climate, but, would immediately force tens of thousands of people out of their jobs, most of whom would not easily find another one.

So what should we do? This is just a little detail of the fundamental topic that humanity will have to face from now on: actual degrowth, which is appearing to be a lot more problematic than the theoretical one.

In fact, we could discuss details for a long time, but nobody in good faith can deny that humanity, as a whole, has largely passed the Planet’s limits of sustainability. Just to mention a few numbers, today the technosphere (a.k.a. anthroposphere, that is humanity with all its infrastructures and symbionts) amounts to about 40,000 million tons, some 4,500 tons per person.

We and our domestic animals are about 98% of the world’s fauna, about 40% of the Earth’s surface is completely artificialized (urban, suburban, agricultural, etc.), 37% is made up of natural habitats heavily modified for anthropic use (pastures and almost all forests), only 23% can still be classified as 'wild' (a few remote forests, but almost only deserts, mountain tops, and Arctic regions). (data from IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 1919, Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology, 2020).

Things are even worse at sea: we estimate that only 13% of the oceans is still basically intact (data from IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 1919).

But these are all very optimistic assessments, as factors like global warming and the related acidification of the seas, global diffusion of polluting agents of all kinds, the growing number of barriers to movement by wild species and the contemporary spread of alien ones, industrial fishing and hunting of rare species, the dying off of insects and amphibians, the worldwide alteration of nearly all bio-geo-chemical cycles tell us that the Earth is by now a planet inhabited by a single species (Homo sapiens industrialis, alias H. colossus sensu Catton) with its symbionts, commensal species and parasites.

Everything else survives in extremely precarious conditions in the interstices and cracks of the technosphere, but it is only these survivors that still ensure the existence of conditions favorable to biological life on Earth.

This means not only that substantial degrowth is the only sensible thing to do, but also that it is an inevitable fact. There is no way we can prevent it and postponing it will only mean paying a much bigger price, a little later.

However, the vast majority of people rejects this view, preferring to imagine strategies, even very ingenious ones, to have it both ways. They have very good reasons to do so because accepting 'overshoot' would mean accepting the price of the 'environmental debt' that we have piled up. Of course we will pay it anyway, but we cannot blame those who prefer looking the way. In fact, I have the impression that, even among 'degrowthers', there are few that have deeply reflected on how much it will be necessary to degrow to stabilize the climate and stop mass extinction.

Obviously it is impossible to make a precise estimate, but to have a rough idea we will make a very easy calculation, using energy consumption as an indicator of general impacts. This is an approximation, but it is close enough to reality.

On a global level, we estimate that humanity passed the planet’s carrying capacity in the early 1970s, when worldwide energy consumption was in the order of 70,000 Twh, whereas now it is about 165,000. Let us imagine going back to the 70,000 Twh of fifty years ago, what would per capita consumption be? Between 1970 and 2020, human population has doubled; this means that, to bring global consumption back down to about 70,000 TWh, per capita availability would be less than a quarter of what it is now. This means a level of consumption similar to what we find today in Moldavia, Albania, Egypt or Nigeria, to make some examples.
Speaking about Italy, it would mean going back to nineteenth-century per capita consumption levels, without considering that such poor societies would probably not be able to produce the technologies that consent the life of 8 billion people, starting from the sophisticated devices necessary to convert sunlight and wind into electricity.

With this I am not saying that in few years we will be living with candles and horses, I just want to clarify that we do not have to give up just the unnecessary; we have to give up a lot that we see as necessary or an acquired right, starting from a life expectancy of over eighty years.

This opens a wide range of questions that, whether we like it or not, we will have to face because when the blanket gets too short, we have to choose whether to cover our feet or our shoulders. In actual terms, this means choosing who must be sacrificed so that the others have more chance of surviving.

Right now, we are seeing a practical example of choices that we will have to make more and more often, with the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic. We have seen that this disease is particularly treacherous because it spreads easily and has a relatively low death rate, but on condition that long and costly care is available.

We have several possible choices.

We can try to stop the outbreak in every way, but this would have devastating economic consequences that could even throw the global economy into a crisis much worse than that of 2008.

We can keep the main economic flows active, but this would mean a lot more infections, and thus sanitary costs that could send entire states in bankrupt. Without counting that the saturation of hospitals would also mean a definite rise of mortality.

We can also pretend nothing is happening and bury the dead in secret, but we cannot predict how many they would be, nor the practical consequences of the panic that would overwhelm the world a lot more than it does now.

We can look for compromises between the different options, but in any case we cannot avoid very painful and largely unpredictable consequences.

Another example, even more brutal, is the drama that is taking place these days at the border between Greece and Turkey. Putting aside the complicated story that brought tens of thousands of people to try to break through the barbed wire, we find ourselves in front of another tragic choice.

We can welcome the refugees, but this would have devastating social and political consequences in Europe (there is no need for guesswork here, because we already made the experiment in 2015).

We can drive them back, but these are people that cannot go back to Syria where the government would kill them, nor can they remain in Turkey because the Turks are sending them away.

We can confine them in 'refugee camps', which are actually prison camps with no foreseeable release.

We can please Erdogan so he takes them back, and support him in his war against Syria.

We can also think of other solutions, but anything realistically feasible will mean tragic consequences for someone.

There are many other fields where we see similar dilemmas: how do we face the situation? Because, in the end, every one of us will have to find a compromise between our mental model of the world and the physical reality that is coming back into our lives, peaceful up until now.

I would say we basically have two options:

The first is to deny one or more pieces of the puzzle, so as to simplify it and restore the satisfying dynamics of good versus evil. At this point we must choose our side, and then assume things do not work because of the other side, whatever happens.

The second is to accept that in many key matters of the present and the near future we have several possible choices, but none of them will not cause major damage and suffering for which we will share responsibility. Even if we choose not to choose:  because there will be painful consequences anyway. Just like it was for Orestes and Antigone.

Translation by Maddalena Martinez. Link to the version in Italian

Collapse: Where can we find a safe refuge?

Does it make sense to have a well-stocked bunker in the mountains to escape collapse?

 

Sometimes, you feel that the world looks like a horror story, something like Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth.." Image from F.R: Jameson.

Being the collapsnik I am, a few years ago I had the idea that I could buy myself some kind of safe haven in the mountains, a place where I and my family could find refuge if (and when) the dreaded collapse were to strike our civilization (as they say, when the Nutella hits the fan). It is a typical idea of collapse-oriented people: run away from cities, imagined being the most vulnerable places in a Mad Max-style scenario.

Maybe I was thinking also of Boccaccio's Decameron, when he describes how in the mid-14th century a group of wealthy Florentines finds refuge from the plague in a villa, outside Florence. And they had a leisured time telling stories to each other. I don't own a villa in the countryside, but I took a tour of villages in the Appennini mountains, a few hundred km from Florence, to seek for a hamlet of some kind to buy. I was accompanied by a friend of mine who is a denizen of the area and whom I had infected with the collapse meme.

We found several houses and apartments for sale in the area. One struck me as suitable, and the price was also interesting. It was a two-floor apartment with the windows opening on the central square of the village where it was located. It had a wood stove, the kind of heating system you can always manage in an emergency. And it was at a sufficient height you could be reasonably safe from heat waves, even without air conditioning.

Then, I was looking at the village from one of the windows when a strange sensation hit me. People were walking in the square and a few of them raised their glance to look at me. And, for a moment, I was scared.

Did you ever read Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow over Innsmouth"? It tells the story of someone who finds himself stuck in a coastal town named Innsmouth that he discovers being inhabited by fish-like humanoids, the "deep Ones," practicing the cult of a marine deity called Dagon.

Don't misunderstand me: the people I was seeing in the square were not alien cultists of some monstrous divinity. What had scared me was a different kind of thought. It was that I knew that every adult male in that area owns a rifle or a shotgun loaded with slug ammunition. And every adult male in good health engages in wild boar hunting every weekend. They can kill a boar at 50 meters or more, then they are perfectly able to gut it and turn it into ham and sausages.

Now, if things were to turn truly bad, would some of those people consider me as the equivalent of a wild boar? For sure, I couldn't even dream to be able to match the kind of firepower they have. I thanked the owner of the place and my friend, and I drove back home. I never went back to that place.

A few years later, with a real collapse striking us in the form of the COVID-19 epidemics,  I can see that I did well in not buying that apartment in the mountains. At the time of Boccaccio, wealthy Florentine citizens could reasonably think of moving to their villa in the countryside. These villas were nearly self-sufficient agricultural units, where one could find food and shelter provided by local peasants and servants (at that time not armed with long-range rifles). But that, of course, is not the case anymore.

The current crisis is showing us what a real collapse looks like. And it shows that some science fiction scenarios were totally wrong. The typical trope of a post-holocaust story is that people run away from flaming cities after having stormed the shops and the supermarkets, leaving empty shelves for those who arrive late. That didn't happen here. At most, people seemed to think that what they needed most in an emergency was toilet paper and they emptied the supermarket shelves of it. But that was quickly over. Maybe we'll arrive at that kind of scenario, but what is happening now is not that the supermarkets are running out of goods, everything is available if you have the money to buy it. The problem is that people are running out of money.

In this situation, the last thing the government wants is food riots. And they especially care about cities -- if they lose control of the cities, everything is lost for them. So they are acting on two levels: they are providing food certificates for the poor, and, at the same time, clamping down on cities with the police and the army to enforce the lockdown. People are facing criminal charges if they dare to take a walk on the street.

Not an easy situation, but at least we have food and the cities are quiet. Think of what would have happened if I had bought that apartment in the mountains. I wouldn't even have been able to go there during the coronavirus epidemics. But, if somehow I had managed to dodge the police, then I would be stuck there. And no supermarkets nearby: there is a small shop selling food in the village, but would it be resupplied during the crisis? The locals have ways to survive also with local food, but a town dweller like me doesn't. And I never tried to shoot a wild boar, I think it is not easy -- to say nothing about gutting it and turning it into sausages. Worse, I am sure that no police would patrol that small village, surely not the woods. So, maybe the local denizens would not shoot me and boil me in a cauldron, but if I were to run out of toilet paper, where could I find some? And, worse, what if I were to run out of food?

So, where can we find refuge from collapse? I can think of scenarios where you could be better off in a bunker somewhere in an isolated area, where you stocked a lot of supplies. But in most cases, that would be a terribly bad idea. A well-stocked bunker is an ideal target for whoever is better armed than you, and they can always smoke you out. Of course, you can think of a refuge for an entire group of people, with some of them able to shoot intruders, others to cultivate the fields, others to care for you if you get sick. Maybe, but it is a complicated story: you need to build up a whole group of people with similar ideas and complementary skills, but most collapsniks are good intellectuals but poor peasants or hunters. You could join the Amish, but would they want you? It has been done often on the basis of religious ideas and in some cases, it may have worked, at least for a while. And never forget the case of Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana.

In the end, I think the best place to be in a time of crisis is exactly where I am: in a medium-sized city. It is a place that the government will try to keep under control as long as possible, and not a likely target for someone armed with nukes or other nasty things. Why do I say that? Look at the map, here.

This is a map of the Roman Empire at its peak. Note the position of the major cities: the Empire collapsed and disappeared, but most of the cities of that time are still there, more or less with the same name, the new buildings built in place of the old ones, or near them. Those cities were built in specific places for specific reasons, availability of water, resources, or transportation. And so it made sense for the cities to be exactly where they were, and where they still are. Cities turned out to be extremely resilient.

But how about Roman villas in the countryside? Well, many are being excavated today but, after the fall of the Empire, they were abandoned and never rebuilt. It must have been terribly difficult to defend a small settlement against all the horrible things that were happening at the time of the fall of the Empire.

So, overall, I think I did well in moving from a home in the suburbs to one downtown. Bad times may come, but I would say that it offers the best chances of survival, even in reasonably horrible times. Then, of course, the best plan of mice and men tend to gang agley, as we all know.  In any case, collapses are bad and that's doesn't change for collapsniks.

Reactions to coronavirus and climate crisis: A question of age group?

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 NASA scientist James Hansen arrested by the police in 2009

Guest post by Lukas Fierz

Prompt response to an epidemic 

So far, the coronavirus has killed less people in four months than the global traffic in two weeks. Only in the worst case will the epidemic last a year and a half and kill as many people as road traffic will kill in a year or two. In contrast to the traffic fatalities, the corona dead will be mainly old people with previous illnesses who would have blessed the time anyway in a foreseeable future. In addition, there will be collateral damage other sick people not being adequately treated because of clogged intensive care units. The economy will suffer a severe dent, after which the world will return to the order of the day, just like after the flu epidemic of 1918 or after the financial crisis. Pension funds will suffer financial losses, but will be somewhat relieved by over-mortality of pensioners. The problem of overpopulation remains unaffected. The public and the media only needed a few weeks to months to understand the problem. Everywhere the scientists were given a platform, and depending on the level of information, competence and courage of the decision-makers, the political reaction came more or less quickly, not everywhere in time or quite adequately, but finally reaching impressive proportions almost everywhere. An estimated quarter of media content is concerned with this problem. All possible scenarios are expanded and discussed at a high level. The existing basic consensus is only disturbed by a few Russian trolls and a few self-proclaimed pseudoexperts, neither of whom is taken seriously by serious media. And despite all this agitation, the coronavirus epidemic will be history by 2021 at the latest. So what?

Inadequate response to the environmental crisis 

Let us compare the reaction to the climate and environmental catastrophe: overpopulation and overconsumption blow up the foundations of life. Space for nonhuman creatures is rapidly disappearing due to overuse and to loss and poisoning of habitats. Damaged ecosystems and monocultures are sensitive to new plagues. An increase in temperature due to greenhouse gases was predicted by James Hansen back in 1988 and his predictions have turned out accurate up to now. The consequences such as floods, droughts, hunger, wars and migration are already apparent. But even decades later, the public, the media and politics have not understood what will come. Science has been neutralized in the government-dependent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which hides the match-determining feedback mechanisms, that can double the officially predicted temperatures or even accelerate them uncontrollably at any time. Anyone who, like the tried and tested expert James Hansen, still speaks out what's going on (Climate Change in a Nutshell - The gathering storm ") is ignored or taken away by the police (picture). And even as far as science has its say, it is drowned in a flood of climate-nonsense. Even so-called "reputable" media denigrate scientists as "alarmist" and their reasoned proposals as "extreme". The result is a lack of political response disguised by declarations such as the Paris Agreement which has not even been able to stop the absurd billion dollar subsidies for the fossil industry.

Why the different reaction? 

The coronavirus epidemic is receiving a huge and quite efficient media and political response, even though it doesn't really threaten anyone except the very old. The environmental and climate crisis, on the other hand, receives only a small, trivializing and completely inefficient media and political reaction, although in the coming decades or even years it will most certainly threaten the existence of our civilization, that of humanity and of large parts of the biosphere. Where can this grotesque discrepancy come from? With the older people, the corona virus threatens exactly the age group that actually leads society, sitting in suits and ties on boards of directors and governments. They have the leverage to get the media, politics and society to defend their old lives and interests and they certainly use it. In contrast, the environmental and climate crisis is sparing these same older decision-makers, because they are likely to die before the problems become acute. Therefore, the most comfortable thing for them is "business as usual" and the sufferers - the young generation - have little leverage to defend themselves, except repeating the “alarmist” and “extreme” teachings of science in impotent protests.

Italians are not singing anymore: No joke for this April 1st

The latest data on the COVID-19 epidemic in Tuscany, similar data describe also the situation in Italy.  The spread of the epidemic has been contained, but the true problems start now (data courtesy of Aldo Piombino) 

For some years, every year, I published an April's fool joke on Cassandra's Legacy. This year, I was thinking of something, but, really, I couldn't do that. It is no time for jokes. The situation in Italy, as everywhere, is dramatic and the worst has yet to come. Not so much in terms of the epidemic -- although it has hit hard,. But because of the consequences on the economy.

The reaction of the Italian government to the epidemic could have been worse, but it was far from perfect. It was uncertain at the beginning, then haphazard and focused only on day-to-day survival. Mostly, newspapers did what they do best: terrorize people by emphasizing the bad news. People have been bombarded with numbers always out of context, and with fake news exaggerating the threat. Then, politicians quickly discovered that scaring people pays and that, when people are scared, any politician can gain popularity by looking tough. It has been a race to look like the toughest of the pack.

Several prominent leaders from the right took the occasion to blame the European Union for everything and people seem to have swallowed the bait. They lashed out against Europe, Germany, and Angela Merkel, seen as ancestral enemies of Italy, as if we were still living at the time of the Roman Empire. The European flag has been taken down in many offices and government buildings, not yet burned and stepped upon, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that happening. People are seriously talking about using the virus as an excuse to leave the European Union. This is worst than playing with fire: it is more like playing the Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

All this has been hard on people. We have been all locked inside our homes for more than 3 weeks, initially people took it as a joke: you heard the story of Italians singing from their windows and their balconies. But now we see an atmosphere of reciprocal suspicions: people have been reporting their neighbors to the police if they saw them walking out of their apartment. And the police took as their duty to sanction, sometimes with criminal charges, people who just interpreted in different ways the decrees of the government. Being locked at home with the police patrolling the streets is a nightmare: a dystopic science fiction movie, something one would never have expected to see in real life.

But the real problem is that the economy is wrecked. We lost the revenues from international tourism and several industrial sectors took such heavy blows that it is hard to see how they could ever recover. Lots of people have lost their jobs and they are at zero income for the foreseeable future. And they still have to pay their rent, their mortgages, their groceries. We have already seen food riots in Southern Italy, that has scared the government which is rushing to provide food stamps for the people who can't buy food. The government is expected to give money to almost everyone. Why not? They can print it, can't they? Sure...........

The good news that the epidemic is abating. Maybe we can still recover -- Italians are known to be resilient and enterprising. But, for this April 1st, there are no jokes to be told.

The March of the Holobionts: Why Gaia is one of us

As a Goddess, Gaia may not be all-powerful, but She does what She can.

Image from Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.

One of the good things about the current epidemic is what it is teaching us. Apart from a welcome slap to human hubris, it is a test of population models (right now, it seems that everyone I know is busy at fitting data with logistic equations). But there is more than population dynamics in this story. It is the occasion for a reflection of the role of viruses in the ecosystem. In my case, it led me to discover concepts that I only vaguely knew before. One is that of "virome," a term analogous to that of "genome" -- the idea that viruses are part of us. Did you know that 8% of the human genetic code is directly derived by viral genes? The role of viruses in our metabolism is still largely to be discovered, but surely most viruses are not pathogens, they are commensals or symbionts. Companions of our travel to an unknown destination.

And then there is the related concept of "holobiont" -- a term originally invented by Lynn Margulis, the co-discoverer, with James Lovelock, of the idea of "Gaia" as a homeostatic planetary system. Once you learn what a holobiont is, your view of the world changes completely. The evolutionary unit of the ecosystem is not the organism, but the holobiont: an ensemble of creatures that cooperate with each other without sharing the same genetic code as multicellular organisms do: a tree is an organism, a forest is a holobiont. The forest holobiont includes not just trees, but all the animals together with the microbiome of fungi, bacteria, archaea, viruses, and everything.

That opens up a whole new evolutionary frontier: multicellular organisms transmit genetic information by the complex process of sexual reproduction followed by competitive selection. Holobionts do something similar, but they don't have a genome that they pass to their descendants by sexual transmission, they have a hologenome that successful holobionts can transmit using different strategies. And that answers a difficult question: who is Gaia, exactly? You guessed it, the Queen of Heaven and Earth is a holobiont! As a Goddess, She may not be benevolent and merciful, surely not all-powerful, but she does what she can. She is one of us.


Below, a translation of an article that I submitted to an Italian newspaper, "Il Fatto Quotidiano" where I try to explain some of these concepts. These submissions are limited to ca. 650 words, so you have to be extremely synthetic and also take into account that the readers are ordinary people, not scientists. So, I didn't mention the concept of holobiont, maybe in a future article. But I thought that also the readers of "Cassandra's Legacy" will find it interesting in this short text. (BTW, as a translation service, Yandex seems to be somewhat better than Google).


Coronavirus: what's happening?
Submitted to "Il Fatto Quotidiano" by Ugo Bardi

Translated using Yandex, slightly revised and modified

The most recent data indicate a decrease in the number of coronavirus infections in Italy. That means we could get out of the epidemic in the coming months. But why do we expect this trend? It is explained in the field of Science called "epidemiology" that studies how epidemics spread.

The first epidemiology studies date back to 1927, when two British researchers, Kermack and McKendrick, developed the "SIR" model (susceptible, infected, removed), still used today. However, the basis of these studies was the previous work of the American Alfred Lotka and the Italian Vito Volterra. A few years earlier, they had developed the model that we now call “Lotka-Volterra,” but also “predator-prey,” or “foxes and rabbits” (although neither Lotka nor Volterra ever spoke of foxes or rabbits).

Let's explain. Imagine a green islet in the middle of the sea, populated by only two species: foxes and rabbits (there is no such island, but let's take it as a hypothetical example). The population of foxes (predators) tends to grow when rabbits (prey) are abundant. It grows so fast that, at some point, the surviving rabbits can no longer reproduce quickly enough to replace those eaten by the foxes. The rabbit population reaches a maximum and then falls. At this point, Foxes starve. With few foxes around, the remaining rabbits can reproduce peacefully and the cycle begins again.

The model is based on the idea that predators tend to take more resources than nature can replace: it is what we now call "overexploitation” It always ends badly, but the model describes the trajectory of the populations that first grow and then collapse as a bell-shaped curve. An example of a real case is that of St. Matthew Island in the Pacific. There were no reindeer on the island before the US Navy brought some, in 1944. In a couple of decades they became thousands, they devoured all the grass, and then almost all died of starvation. Then, a couple of particularly harsh winters exterminated the last individuals, sick and hungry. Reindeer was the predators and grass the prey: a classic case of resource overexploitation.

Not that the model can explain the complex interactions in a whole ecosystem, but it is useful to provide us with a framework for what's happening. And we can use it to understand the current epidemic. It is the same thing: the virus is the predator and the prey is us. The population of the virus is growing rapidly as it always happens when resources are abundant. But soon the virus will begin to run out of prey, fortunately not because infected people die (some, unfortunately, do). They are no longer prey because they become immune. Indeed, the epidemic is following the bell-shaped trajectory predicted by the Lotka-Volterra model.

So, nothing unexpected. Viruses are creatures looking for resources just like we do. They're doing nothing different than what we did in the past by exterminating species like mammoths or the dodo. And, today, with the huge expansion of the human population over the last 1000-2000 years, we have become a great hunting ground for so many micro-organisms, also because of our tendency to live in crowded cities where it is easier to get infected. Thus, the past history is full of epidemics: plague, smallpox, cholera, influenza and many others.

In a way, we are at war: viruses attack us and we defend ourselves with vaccines, antibiotics, hygiene, and our immune system. But, if it's a war, we won't necessarily win it. Maybe we'll find a vaccine for the Sars-VOC-2 virus, but don't expect miracles.

Actually, species do not make wars against each other: they adapt, that's how the ecosystem works. Viruses and bacteria are seen almost only causes for diseases, but our body hosts a large number of them and of many different species. They are not parasites, many are "symbionts" – creatures that help us with so many things, think of our intestinal bacterial flora. So, in time, we'll end up adapting. And the virus will adapt, too.

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A comment from Ugo Bardi's personal troll: Mr. Kunning-Druger

Mr. Bardi, you are just beating the bush, as you and your warmunist friends usually do to confuse the public. Now you mix magniloquent words at random, goddesses, viromes, holothis and holothat. And what does that mean? That we should welcome being infected by a virus and die? You are being exposed once more for what you are: an enemy of mankind.  So, if it has been all a fault of those stupid pangolins and bats (and those disgusting Chinese who eat them), well, there is a simple solution. As you said, our ancestors exterminated stupid animals like those dodos, why not exterminate pangolins and bats, which must be just as stupid? Problem solved. The reality is that man has no obligation toward nature, except to put it back in its proper place when needed. Now, it is the time to shelve those silly plans such as the energy transition and the green new deal. We need to go back to growth, and do that fast.