Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [27]
Non-equilibrium systems--what we find in nature, economics and history--are dynamic systems which can exhibit what is known as self-organized criticality (SOC). (These ideas also find expression in fractals and chaos theory.) The classic example is a sand pile. As sand is slowly added to the top of the pile, small "sand slides" occur as the sand piles up into unstable formations. Every once in awhile, a large sand slide occurs, completely reshaping the entire pile.
This model helps explain why stock markets can suddenly crash after months or years of near-equilibrium and why large forest fires occur far less frequently than small fires, even as their proximate cause (a lightning strike, for example) is essentially identical.
Within the SOC concept lies an even more powerful analytic tool, the Stick/Slip hypothesis. During the long "stick" phase (when the sand adheres to the pile) things appear stable. But the longer this phase lasts (the pile growing without disruption), the more likely it becomes that the forces building within the pile will be released suddenly and violently. This dynamic is the explanation for how shifting tectonic plates build up energy which is unpredictably released in many small tremors and rare but massive earthquakes.
I am indebted to oftwominds.com contributor Harun Ibrahim for his introduction to these profoundly practical (if initially abstract) concepts.
Together, these concepts explain how decades of relative equilibrium can suddenly give way to instability, volatility and collapse once unseen forces build to threshold levels.
I will cover these ontological forces and analytic tools in more detail in Chapters Seven and Eleven.
Context Six: The Environment
It is tempting to hope that all the structural environmental challenges will "sort themselves out" or be solved by some new technology that magically scales from the lab table to global ubiquity. But the realities do not lend themselves to either benign neglect (that is, just leave everything alone and it will rebalance itself naturally) or technological "fixes."
The human population has exploded in a geological eyeblink from several hundred million to 6.5 billion. In terms of energy and resource consumption, each resident of the First World (Europe, North America, Japan) has an environmental impact up to 100 times larger than that of a Third World person. As 2 billion people in China, India and elsewhere aspire to an energy-intensive consumerist First World lifestyle, that the planet does not have the resources to support 3 billion middle-class consumers is readily visible.
The list of global environmental ills is well known. Overfishing driven by insatiable demand and politically popular subsidies of national fishing industries has driven the world's fisheries to the point of collapse. The technological "fix" is aquaculture, but artificial fisheries spawn another entire host of their own challenges to long-term sustainability.
Fresh water aquifers are being drained everywhere from the American southwest to China, and there are no sustainable ways to compensate for this drawdown of irreplaceable fresh-water resources.
Schemes to desalinate vast quantities of seawater requires stupendous amounts of energy; a recent plan by Saudi Arabia would burn fully 1 million barrels of oil a day--1 million barrels that could no longer be exported to the U.S.
Regardless of what we believe the causes might be, glaciers are melting at increasing rates. Once the Himalayan and Andean glaciers vanish or recede to mere patches of ice, the rivers 2 billion people rely on for irrigation water will become seasonal.
Add in massive soil erosion in China and elsewhere, extended droughts in Australia, etc., and you get a picture of global resources stretched to the breaking point.
The more you know about the technical details of supposedly miraculous technological