God's autumn notebook

Autumn is here again. It’s a time for gardeners to enjoy the fruits (literally) of their labours over the last year, to reflect on what went well and what went badly, and to consider how they might do things differently next year.  Like many gardeners, I keep an autumn notebook in which I jot down a few thoughts at this time of year.

The weather played havoc with the crops this year.  “Driest Manx summer since ‘95” – that says it all.  Last summer was dry too.  Crops which did particularly poorly were the raspberries, blueberries, corn and medicinal plants.  Crops which didn’t seem to mind the drought so much included the apples, strawberries, peas, potatoes, onions, rhubarb and Brussels sprouts.

So I don’t have much to put in my gardening notebook this year, except that it was wise to hedge my bets by growing a lot of different crops with different climate tolerances.  I was hoping to describe my ongoing experiments with toxic plants, but owning to not having many plants to experiment with, that will have to wait until next year.  Gardeners need to have a lot of patience.    

At this time of year, I often reflect on our civilisation and where it’s headed.  We are probably in the early autumn of our civilisation too, in the sense that in the past 600 years we have enjoyed a long spring and summer of achievement – the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution – we have enjoyed a bountiful harvest of the fruits, but now the signs of decay are appearing and we need to prepare for a long winter. 

So suppose that God (whoever you conceive Her to be) kept an autumn notebook in which She made a list of all the things which our civilisation did well, the things which it did badly, and what She might do differently when the dark age is over and the next great civilisation arises from the compost of the previous one?  I don't claim to know the mind of God, but I’ve made a list of what I think are our seven greatest achievements and our seven worst ideas.  Please feel free to add your own in the Comments section below.

Our seven greatest achievements

The Internet

People younger than 30 who have grown up with the internet probably can’t imagine life without it.  At 61, I’m old enough to remember the days when if you wanted to send a written message to someone in another country, you had to write it on paper, put it in an envelope, stick an expensive international stamp on it, put it in the post and wait about a month for a reply.  Today, you can email or text someone on the other side of the planet and receive a reply within seconds.  We forget how truly miraculous this is.  However, the internet has its dark side too, and I’m not convinced that Facebook or Twitter have contributed anything significant to human wisdom or happiness.

Canals

It may seem odd to speak of the internet and canals in the same breath, but canals are also miraculous in their own way.  Our civilisation didn’t invent them of course – the first canals were dug in Mesopotamia around 4000 BC - but the heyday of canal building in the UK was in 1790-1830 when some 4,000 miles of canals were built, which moved the goods around which kick-started the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution.

A canal provides an almost frictionless surface, allowing one man, or one horse, to pull a fully laden narrowboat weighing up to 20 tonnes, with minimal effort.  How cool is that?  Every bit as cool as sending a text halfway round the planet and back.  And I bet canals will be around a lot longer than the internet. 

Democracy / human rights / women's rights / the rule of law

I have lumped all four of these together because they tend occur together.  We have come a long way since kings and emperors had arbitrary powers of life and death over their subjects, and people were tortured to death as a form of public entertainment.  Even countries which have appalling human rights records like China, Russia and (recently) Afghanistan, know that in order to be accepted by the international community, they must at least pay lip service to these principles.

Modern medicine

I'm not talking about expensive "miracle medicine" like heart and brain surgery or operating on unborn babies.  I'm talking about basic surgery, hygiene and sanitation, immunisation against infectious disease, anaesthetics, basic maternal and child care, even eyeglasses and hearing aids.  All of these things can vastly improve the length and quality of life for a large proportion of the population.

Contraception

You might think that this should be part of "Modern medicine", above, but it's such an important topic that I'm making it one of the "seven greatest achievements" in its own right.  Not only does it liberate women from perpetual childbearing so that they can become scientists, doctors, judges or whatever else they want to be; it has the potential to correct the imbalance created by modern medicine.  

Here's the problem.  Modern medicine allows people to live longer and healthier lives, spend more time reproducing, and allows more babies survive into adulthood.  This increases the human population.  But the human population can't continue increasing forever, because eventually we would run out of planetary resources.  Therefore, we need to control our birth rate so that each generation has the same number of people as the previous one, and the total human population remains static. 

Unfortunately, we haven't done a very good job at this.  The human population of the planet was around 1 billion in 1800 at the start of the Industrial Revolution.  In 1900 it was 1.7 billion.  In 1960, when I was born, it was 3 billion.  Today it is 7.7 billion and continuing to increase.  During my lifetime it has already more than doubled, and looks set to triple before I die.  We have paid too much attention to decreasing the death rate and not enough attention to decreasing the birth rate. 

We do not know what the maximum sustainable world population is.  The population of 1 billion at the start of the Industrial Revolution was probably sustainable because that population did not rely on the unsustainable use of resources such as fossil fuels.  We do not know that any other figure is sustainable and we may already be in overshoot.  We don't know how this story ends, but it may not have a happy ending.

The arts

From the Renaissance onwards there has been a great flowering of all of the arts including painting, sculpture, music, literature and theatre.  The art of our civilisation probably surpasses anything produced by the Greeks or Romans.  However, not all art is equal.  I'm not sure that modern rap music is equivalent to Bach or Mozart, or that modern visual art is equivalent to the work of Michelangelo or Turner.  Maybe we should try to preserve examples of all of them and let our descendants in a thousand years' time be the judges.

Exploration

The Age of Exploration didn't end with the first circumnavigation of the globe.  Since then we have sent people to the depths of the oceans, the peaks of the highest mountains, the polar ice caps and even to the Moon.  Where people can't yet go, such as to other moons and planets in our solar system, we have sent robots to beam back pictures.  We have explored the outer limits of the universe using powerful telescopes.  We have looked and listened for signs of other intelligent life.  Unfortunately the lifetime of our civilisation is likely to be brief, and I do not think the question “Are we alone in the universe?” will be answered by us in what little time remains.  

Our seven worst ideas

The infinite growth paradigm

You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.  That's it - period.  It’s simply a wrong idea – in fact, it’s a preposterous idea because it contravenes all the known laws of physics.  Unfortunately, it has taken root as a core belief in all of our politics, economics and mainstream media, and like some noxious weed, looks impossible to eradicate.

The green revolution

Also known as the "third agricultural revolution", this was the transformation of farming in the 1950s and 1960s from a largely sustainable system based on animal power and fertiliser to a largely unsustainable system based on mechanisation and chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides.  This temporarily increased agricultural production and allowed the human population to increase.  However, as fossil fuels decline, agricultural production is likely to decline, followed by a decline in population.  Again, we don't know how this story ends, but it may not be happy.

The internal combustion engine

The internal combustion engine was invented in 1876 and probably seemed like a great idea at the time.  We harnessed oil to do useful work for us and invented increasingly complex machines such as motor cars, agricultural tractors and combine harvesters, long distance trucks, diesel powered ships and aeroplanes.  Internal combustion engines have transformed our manufacturing, food production and built environment.  We have built our lives around them.  But what happens when oil is no longer available at a reasonable price?  It's likely to be difficult or impossible to convert all of these high-powered, oil fired machines into solar or wind powered equivalents.  Once again, we don't know how this story ends, but it's likely to involve a lot of unravelling of the arrangements we have built up over the last 150 years.

Slavery

We didn't invent slavery - many other civilisations have practised it - but boy, did we pursue it enthusiastically.   Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million slaves were shipped from Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas.  Britain and America are still dealing with the fallout from this unspeakable trade, 150 years after it ceased.

Modern architecture and the built environment

Imagine a traditional English village - the sort of thing you might see on a picture postcard or a box of chocolates.  There would be cottages, a church, a pub, a school, a blacksmith's forge, possibly a parish or community hall, grouped around a communal space such as a pond or village green.  All the buildings would be built in a similar style and from similar local materials, whether timber, brick-and-timber or local stone.  The whole would look harmonious and be greater than the sum of its parts. 

A similar arrangement of buildings would be found in traditional English market towns, except that the buildings would be larger and more ornate, there would be shops, offices, a town hall instead of a parish hall, a bank instead of a church, and the public space would be a market square rather than a village green.  The space would be on a human scale, and the distance between buildings walkable.

So in the late 20th and early 21st century, what kind of environments did we build?  Strip malls and retail parks with no sidewalks, built around the car and only accessible by car, multi-story car parks, brutalist plain concrete buildings lacking any ornamentation, suburbs, freeways and "starchitect" designed tower blocks bearing no relation to their surroundings, the street or each other.  I do not think that anyone in their right mind would want to put any of this on a chocolate box.   

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

There are several definitions of MMT, but try this one from the Fraser Institute: "Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a policy model for funding government spending. ... The essential message of MMT is that there is no financial constraint on government spending as long as a country is a sovereign issuer of currency."

In other words, it's the long sought Magic Money Tree (also abbreviated MMT, strangely).  If you're a government you can spend as much as you like and cover your spending by printing as much money as you like.

The trouble is, every time this has been tried in the past, not only has it not worked, it has ended in disaster.  The Romans tried it: they diluted their silver and gold coins with increasing amounts of base metal which led to hyperinflation, soaring taxes, worthless money, political instability and eventually, the collapse of the Roman Empire.  The Germans tried it in the 1920s: they printed billions of deutschmarks to pay their debts which led to hyperinflation, worthless money, political instability and eventually, the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party.  

Since 2008 major central banks have pumped over $25 trillion into the global economy in "quantitative easing", otherwise known as money printing.  This includes 8 trillion from the United States alone.  This led to ... wait a minute, this time it's going to be different, right?  Well, let's say we haven't heard the end of this story yet.

Sending waste and pollution "away"

In Nature, there is no such thing as waste because nothing is wasted.  Everything gets recycled.  When an animal excretes, it fertilises the ground and allows plants to recycle the nutrients.  When an animal dies it gets eaten by scavengers.  When a tree dies it gets decomposed by fungi and its nutrients are recycled into new trees.

However, we think we know better than Nature, so instead of recycling things, we send them "away".  Unwanted gases are pumped into the atmosphere.  Unwanted liquids are pumped into seas and rivers.  Unwanted solids are buried as landfill or end up as giant artificial islands in the ocean.  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an island of floating plastic waste between Hawaii and California which covers an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometres, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.

Unfortunately, as we are now finding to our cost, there is no such place as "away" on a finite planet.  All the waste we have ever produced is still here and is coming back to haunt us.

If you would like to add your favourite greatest achievement or worst idea, please feel free to do so below.

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin