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By Root 1162 0

source that cannot grow? My prediction has always been that the economy would begin to wobble and collapse, debts would prove to be unserviceable in total and begin to default, and monetary policy would lose traction and cease to be effective, as it is finally revealed that money is merely a tertiary abstraction that gets its meaning from real forms of wealth. My secondary prediction has always been that the monetary and fiscal authorities would attempt to solve this predicament by printing money out of thin air and spending wildly in an attempt to keep things moving along.

This isn’t an indictment of capitalism or any particular “–ism” at all. I’m an equal-opportunity critic who places under indictment any particular “–ism” that seeks perpetual growth. Ditto for any political party, religion, economic model, or any other social organizing structure that seeks endless growth in any form. It really does not matter to me in the slightest whether someone calls their perpetual growth paradigm Marxism or Capitalism or Socialism or whether they hail from a country that is located south of the equator or north of it. Perpetual growth of resource consumption is mathematically impossible. Sooner or later the growth must stop; the only unknowns are when and under what terms.

I focus on the economy because this is where the most immediate impacts to our daily lives will surface, but the warning signs have been available for some time to those in the fields of mining, petroleum engineering, oceanology, ecology, farming, climatology, fishing, and every other specialty that taps into or studies the earth—our primary source of wealth. If you care about your future prosperity and access to wealth, then an initial focus on the economy is the right place to start.

More broadly, perhaps it’s time to think of ourselves as one of many interconnected strands that together form a robust, but not indestructible, web of life, and not separate in some important way. The sound of snapping strands has been with us for a while, some more frightening than the rest:

40 percent decline in oceanic phytoplankton since 1950

Birds, bees, and bats in serious population decline over the past few years

Fisheries collapsing all over the globe

Mercury levels in marine mammals so high that the EPA would treat their carcasses as toxic waste

Sterilized soils and advancing deserts

Species extinction rates that rival anything in the geologic records

And so on. The point here isn’t to be alarmist over the fate of the planet and its species (there are plenty of more rigorous books in which that can be addressed), but merely to illustrate that signs abound, for anyone who cares to look, that the age of growth is drawing to a close. We’re not closing it by ourselves on our own terms; nature is doing it for us, which is somewhat concerning because nature doesn’t do bailouts.

When we turn our gaze to minerals and energy, we see the same sorts of warning signs:

Oil discoveries peaked in 1964.

New oil discoveries have been outpaced by oil consumption by nearly 4 to 1 each year.

Known deposits of several critical minerals will be completely exhausted within 20 years, assuming the energy is there to extract them. Others will peak all on their own soon thereafter and even sooner if Peak Oil limits our ability to obtain them.

New ore deposits are getting harder to find, more remote, deeper down, more dilute, and/or all of the above.

Again, we see more warning signs for food and water:

World population will climb to 9.5 billion by 2050.

Nearly all high-quality arable land is already under production.

Food yields are heavily dependent on fertilizers, which are either energy intensive to make or are being depleted and will someday peak.

Soils are being mined by the practice of removing essential nutrients without replacing them.

As we scan these lists, my hope is that reasonable and prudent people will arrive at the conclusion that our current economic approach to the world and trends in our