Living in small homes built entirely from locally available resources and using manpower alone is not a fairy tale. However, it will take an awful long time and a lot of hardship till we get to that point… again. This is how the story of building one civilization after the other based entirely on non-renewable resources always ends, and it won’t be any different this time either.
After a couple of deep-dive articles on human energy consumption — and before leaving for a holiday break — I suggest to take a broader look on where we headed as a global civilization. And while many argue that there is no ‘we’ let alone a ‘global civilization’ to talk about, at the end of the day almost each and every one of us serve the same globalized extraction scheme. Except for the very few entirely self-sustained indigenous villages and tribes scattered around the globe, many of us give our labor to feed the globalized human system with raw inputs (food, energy, minerals etc.) or working on and with technologies consuming those resources, turning them into products and services and ultimately: waste. None of this would be possible without global trade and, of course, access to these essentials. Thus from the poor boy sacrificing his health in a Congolese cobalt mine to the high tech worker in Texas using that metal to build batteries from, or from the roughneck extracting the blood of this Earth to the farmer burning it as fuel in Mexico, ‘we’ are all part of one big ‘civilization’ — for a lack of a better term.
As a direct consequence to our increasing reliance on technology we as a civilization / economic super-organism / species (pick your favorite) have become totally dependent on non-renewable resources for our continued existence on this planet. Again, unless you are living in one of those very few tribes scattered around in the wilderness — which is highly unlikely since you read this on a screen — you, too, are dependent on this system to a greater or lesser degree. If you, just like me, work with metal tools or burn any amount of fossil fuels, perhaps use electricity or buy anything in a shop, you are part of that global extractive system. And what’s the problem with that? Well, beyond the pollution it creates, our technology uses non-renewable materials processed with non-renewable energy. And while its tempting to believe that so-called “renewables” harness the power of the Sun, these technologies, too, are built from non-renewable materials processed with non-renewable energy.
A dystopian scene of societal collapse (Image: Tanjent/Copilot)
Our food production, too, has become largely dependent on a range of one-time resources: from fertilizers made from natural gas, phosphate rock and potash to diesel engines, ships and trucks ‘our’ global food system uses up a one-time inheritance of easy-to-get minerals, metals and energy at a frenetic pace. So far it managed to feed 8 billion of us, and who knows it might be able to feed even 10 billion or more. For now. But what happens when the amount of one-time resources harvested each year start to dwindle? Again, unless you live in a food garden cultivating your crops with a wooden stick, you are dependent on this system delivering resources to production plants world wide — to a greater or lesser degree, of course.
The obvious “problem” with such a reliance on non-renewable materials and energy is that all such resources deplete one day. While economists, mainstream scientists and academics believe that everything is fungible, in reality we are already using the entire periodic table of elements and all what nature has to offer. “Then surely, technology will unlock even more of those! Earth’s crust is full of metals and other minerals — enough to last thousands of years!” While that might be factually true, practically we face an insurmountable limitation here. Out of the billions and billions of tons of ores in the ground only a tiny-winy portion is accessible to us. The rest lies too deep, or is of a much lower quality — i.e.: they’re not worth going after.
Read more: Honest Sorcerer
