18 Sep 2006
An Interview with Dennis Meadows – co-author of ‘Limits to Growth’.
I was very lucky at ASPO 5 to get to interview Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of what is probably the most famous environmental book in history, “Limits to Growth”. He had just given an excellent talk, and I managed to get him to come and sit under a stone pine tree for what I thought was going to be a fairly straightforward run through of the 8 ‘Skilling Up for Powerdown’ questions you’ve seen me ask various other people at **Transition Culture**, such as Fritjof Capra and Stephan Harding. As you’ll see though, Dennis’s view of peak oil and the environment is so gloomy that by the time of the second question, all my powerdown-centred questions that had worked so well before ended up becoming somewhat redundant!
**Do you see peak oil as a crisis or an opportunity?**
Well, I mean it’s both. I think it will develop in a way which is catastrophic. In theory we could use peak oil as an opportunity to reconceptualise our society, and rethink our reliance on the military and so forth. In practice we’re not going to do that. In practice what will happen, as it becomes clear that peak oil is a reality, the rich and powerful will grab as much as they can, and not worry much about the poor and the weak. What happens after that I’m not sure.
If the rich and the powerful can manage to grab a lot, they can sustain a lifestyle for a long time! There’s still going to be a lot of oil, so I think that’s how is going to unfold. It isn’t going to be the ushering in of a golden age for humanity. We also have 5 or 6 other peaks to contend with, leave aside peak oil; peak water, peak food, peak climate and so forth, and so collectively they are going to cause a lot of problems.
**So, hmmm. The next question is “If the approach you propose were to come to fruition and you woke up 20 years from now, what would it smell like, feel like, look like”, but is your vision of that time not something you want to….**
Well I didn’t talk this morning about my vision. I didn’t make any prescriptions, I didn’t tell anyone what they should do about these problems. In the original ‘Limits to Growth’ in 1972, there was a chapter about what it could be like in a sustainable society. There’s a very different kind of chapter in the latest edition called ‘Tools for Sustainable Development’ (I didn’t write that, Donella (Meadows) wrote that…). I’m not offering a utopian vision, you know. I have my own thoughts about what’s going to happen, I’m doing things to structure my own personal living situation, but I don’t imagine … my attitude is kinda like the one we talk about in that book.
When we run our computer and we see the first curve peak over and go down, we just quit paying attention, because we know that when that happens its going to bring so many changes into the system that our ability now to know what’s going to happen is zero, so we just don’t pay attention to it. That’s my attitude. I think climate change, and the oil peak, either of them and certainly together, are going to introduce so many changes, that I don’t know what it’s going to be like.
In my speeches sometimes, I say that if you think about the degree of change you saw in the last 100 years, social,, technical, cultural, political, environmental, all those changes, its less that what you’ll see in the next 20 years. What will they be? I would venture the opinion that there’s be a lot less people 20 years from now, or 40 years, it’s hard to tell how that’ll be, I have some anecdotal thoughts but no coherent utopian vision.
**To what extent do solutions to the energy crisis involve actionin other non-energy fields?**
I said this morning (in his address to the ASPO conference) there are 4 ways you respond to an energy shortage, deprivation, efficiency, alternative fuels, and cultural change. Overwhelmingly the most attractive options open to us are non-technical. They are ethical, cultural, social and psychological. Will we manage to do them? I don’t know about that, but my attitude is acknowledge the problem, start doing those things you can do technically to cope with it, being careful not to take technical solutions that will damage the environment, and cause a lot more damage through conflict and income distribution, things like that, and then get busy with the social, cultural and psychological change which is where the real solutions lie. Can you support 6 billion people on this planet under any circumstances? I’m not sure, but certainly not with our current culture we can’t.
**What do you see as the main problems and bottlenecks to moving towards a low energy society?**
A key one is Time Horizon. For a variety of political, psychological and other reasons people have a very short time horizon. It’s like an alcoholic. If you say to a friend who is an alcoholic “quit drinking and you’ll feel better”, and his time horizon is the next 10 minutes or even the next day, he knows you’re wrong. If he quits drinking he’ll feel worse a day from now. He has to have a time horizon of 6 months or more, before he can start to catch sight of a time when he’ll feel better if he quits drinking now. So one is Time Horizon, so if you have a bunch of short sighted people, they’re not going to cope with it.
There is this hysterisis effect related to conflict and anger…
**Hysterisis?**
Hysterisis. It’s a very important concept. Its an engineering concept. You have two variables. Let’s say that as this variable goes this way it goes up, I just took x from here to there, now I’m going to bring it back. If it comes back on the same curve, its not hysterisis, but often what happens is that if I take it back it will go here or there, not follow the same path. So that is the hystorisis effect. This is how it is with violence. You and I could have a friendship for 10 years and then if I come and punch you in the nose, suddenly we can’t go back.
Our relationship isn’t based on averages, it’s based on recent events, and so one of the obstacles we have is that we are moving into a conflict filled time, where people are going to do terrible things to each other, and when they do, it builds up a history which is impossible to overcome. We were talking about Yugoslavia, the Croats and the Serbs were killing each other in the 1800s, and then Tito came in and for years they intermarried, they lived peacefully, and then he went away and rather quickly it went back. So that’s a problem for us, its the way our psychology works, you could do 100 nice things for me but if you do one bad thing I’ll focus on the bad thing, and that’s going to happen, people are going to do bad things to each other.
An attribute of the issue is that there are time delays. The reason collapse occurs is because of long delays. In the case of oil, we built all these oil fired powerplants. They’re going to be there for the next 40 or 50 years. You can’t just suddenly tomorrow turn them into photovoltaic or windmill installations, they’re all planned. This drastically reduces your capacity to respond. Other things too, such as cultural differences.
I don’t want to harp on this, but when you have a lot of Americans thinking, really, that God is going to come down and save them… you know, I joke about it and you smile, but when they get up in the morning they just know, that’s reality for them! Most Americans have never been out of the country, and certainly most don’t speak another foreign language.
So you get into these incredibly arrogant, like George Bush, he just … let’s suppose he’s smart, I mean I don’t really know so much, he’s not really smart but let’s say relatively smart, he just does not understand the way things work! He accepted theories as to what would happen if we sent the military into Iraq which were falsified by 2000 years of history, but he doesn’t notice history! So you have ignorance and egocentrism. It’s like that guy (at the end of Dennis’s ASPO talk) who stood up and said “why don’t they understand?