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“Intelligent Design Without the Bible”

November 13, 2008 admin

The debate that rages between evolutionists and supporters of intelligent design is a simplistic reduction of what doesn't come down to an either/or. As humankind unceasingly explores its origins, this mind-jamming conflict needs fleshing out into a bigger picture. Thanks to Roy Gibbon sending this around, I got exposed to Deepak Chopra's intelligent food for thought.

Deepak's piece comes from The Huffington Post, where he is a blogger. I've just gotten my feet wet there, as Huffington Post just accepted me as a blogger. I have made only one entry, and, being an old codger, am still fuzzy about the ramifications of that — like if you blog and nobody reads it, are you still blogging? If there is interest in what gets posted it rises to some level of visibility, soooco, if you guys would read what I wrote, which is a version of a post I made on my blog that I sent to you, and add your comments or flags or bells or whistles or whatever lets them know you like what you read, I would appreciate it. Here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzanne-taylor/a-call-for-attention_b_135730.html.

Intelligent Design Without the Bible

by Deepak Chopra

It is disturbing to see that the current debate over evolution has become us-versus-them. To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn't make you a Christian fundamentalist. Einstein said as much, and a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle has been seriously considered by Stephen Hawking, among others. The anthropic principle tries to understand how a random universe could evolve to produce DNA, and ultimately human intelligence. To say the DNA happened randomly is like saying that a hurricane could blow through a junk yard and produce a jet plane.

It's high time to rescue “intelligent design” from the politics of religion. There are too many riddles not yet answered by either biology or the Bible, and by asking them honestly, without foregone conclusions, science could take a huge leap forward.

If anyone here is interested in placing this debate on a higher plane than us-versus-them, I think the main issues are these:

1. How does nature take creative leaps? In the fossil record there are repeated gaps that no “missing link” can fill. The most glaring is the leap by which inorganic molecules turned into DNA. For billions of years after the Big Bang, no other molecule replicated itself. No other molecule was remotely as complicated. No other molecule has the capacity to string billions of pieces of information that remain self-sustaining despite countless transformations into all the life forms that DNA has produced.

2. If mutations are random, why does the fossil record demonstrate so many positive mutations — those that lead to new species — and so few negative ones? Random chance should produce useless mutations thousands of times more often than positive ones.

3. How does evolution know where to stop? The pressure to evolve is constant; therefore it is hard to understand why evolution isn't a constant. Yet sharks and turtles and insects have been around for hundreds of millions of years without apparent evolution except to diversify among their kind. These species stopped in place while others, notably hominids, kept evolving with tremendous speed, even though our primate ancestors didn't have to. The many species of monkeys which persist in original form tell us that human evolution, like the shark's, could have ended. Why didn't it?

4. Evolutionary biology is stuck with regard to simultaneous mutations. one kind of primordial skin cell, for example, mutated into scales, fur, and feathers. These are hugely different adaptations, and each is tremendously complex. How could one kind of cell take three different routes purely at random?

5. If design doesn't imply intelligence, why are we so intelligent? The human body is composed of cells that evolved from one-celled blue-green algae, yet that algae is still around. Why did DNA pursue the path of greater and greater intelligence when it could have perfectly survived in one-celled plants and animals, as in fact it did?

6. Why do forms replicate themselves without apparent need? The helix or spiral shape found in the shell of the chambered nautilus, the center of sunflowers, spiral galaxies, and DNA itself seems to be such a replication. It is mathematically elegant and appears to be a design that was suited for hundreds of totally unrelated functions in nature.

7. What happens when simple molecules come into contact with life? Oxygen is a simple molecule in the atmosphere, but once it enters our lungs, it becomes part of the cellular machinery, and far from wandering about randomly, it precisely joins itself with other simple molecules, and together they perform cellular tasks, such as protein-building, whose precision is millions of times greater than anything else seen in nature. If the oxygen doesn't change physically — and it doesn't — what invisible change causes it to acquire intelligence the instant it contacts life?

8. How can whole systems appear all at once? The leap from reptile to bird is proven by the fossil record. Yet this apparent step in evolution has many simultaneous parts. It would seem that Nature, to our embarrassment, simply struck upon a good idea, not a simple mutation. If you look at how a bird is constructed, with hollow bones, toes elongated into wing bones, feet adapted to clutching branches instead of running, etc., none of the mutations by themselves give an advantage to survival, but taken altogether, they are a brilliant creative leap. Nature takes such leaps all the time, and our attempt to reduce them to bits of a jigsaw puzzle that just happened to fall into place to form a beautifully designed picture seems faulty on the face of it. Why do we insist that we are allowed to have brilliant ideas while Nature isn't?

9. Darwin's iron law was that evolution is linked to survival, but it was long ago pointed out that “survival of the fittest” is a tautology. Some mutations survive, and therefore we call them fittest. Yet there is no obvious reason why the dodo, kiwi, and other flightless birds are more fit; they just survived for a while. DNA itself isn't fit at all; unlike a molecule of iron or hydrogen, DNA will blow away into dust if left outside on a sunny day or if attacked by pathogens, x-rays, solar radiation, and mutations like cancer. The key to survival is more than fighting to see which organism is fittest.

10. Competition itself is suspect, for we see just as many examples in Nature of cooperation. Bees cooperate, obviously, to the point that when a honey bee stings an enemy, it acts to save the whole hive. At the moment of stinging, a honeybee dies. In what way is this a survival mechanism, given that the bee doesn't survive at all? For that matter, since a mutation can only survive by breeding — “survival” is basically a simplified term for passing along gene mutations from one generation to the next — how did bees develop drones in the hive, that is, bees who cannot and never do have sex?

11. How did symbiotic cooperation develop? Certain flowers, for example, require exactly one kind of insect to pollinate them. A flower might have a very deep calyx, or throat, for example than only an insect with a tremendously long tongue can reach. Both these adaptations are very complex, and they serve no outside use. Nature was getting along very well without this symbiosis, as evident in the thousands of flowers and insects that persist without it. So how did numerous generations pass this symbiosis along if it is so specialized?

12. Finally, why are life forms beautiful? Beauty is everywhere in Nature, yet it serves no obvious purpose. once a bird of paradise has evolved its incredibly gorgeous plumage, we can say that it is useful to attract mates. But doesn't it also attract predators, for we simultaneously say that camouflaged creatures like the chameleon survive by not being conspicuous. In other words, exact opposites are rationalized by the same logic. This is no logic at all. Non-beautiful creatures have survived for millions of years, so have gorgeous ones. The notion that this is random seems weak on the face of it.

I don't know who will bother to read all these points, which I have had to truncate. But if you think the answers are in safe hands among the ranks of evolutionary biologists, think again. No credible scientific theory has answered these dilemmas, and progress is being discouraged, I imagine, thanks to fundamentalist Christians. By hijacking the whole notion of intelligent design, they have tarred genuine scientific issues with the stain of religious prejudice.

In my next post I will offer a picture of how these questions might be answered.

For the next piece, Rescuing Intelligent Design — But From Whom?, which I found equally valuable, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/rescuing-intelligent-desi_b_6164.html

If you are an evolutionary junkie like me, you also might want to read some follow-up of critique and response. Scroll down on

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/searchG/?cx=partner-pub-3264687723376607%3Atlvacw-gkue&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=chopra+intelligent+design&sa.x=24&sa.y=9#1427
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This and That

COPERNICUS, DARWIN AND HUBBLE

October 7, 2008 admin

At this precarious time, with hardships ahead that will be serious if not cataclysmic, I want to make a case for opening our minds to what's beyond our ideation about who we are, wherein the problems arose. Given there is no quick fix we can employ to end the global financial crisis, I ask for some consideration of what indeed might blast away the dualistic thinking that led to this morass, where we are pitted against one another, struggling for everything from survival to prosperity. You know I have a familiarity with the crop circle oddity on Earth. Now I want to urge everyone to take an interest in it. What is occurring in crop fields all over the world could get us beyond where we are now.

Radical change would come instantly with the recognition that there is a non-human intelligence that's at least on a par with ours. In relation to that otherness, we would be one people, a humanity that could no longer hold sway as the aggressive dominator of the universe. This new perception of ourselves as but one part of a far greater whole would sweep through the civilized world. Try as hard as the entrenched forces might, to cling to what's in place, everyone would be drawn into a new basis for relating to everything.

Here's John Mack, speaking with clarity about the worldview that needs to give way:

I want to talk about the matter of a worldview and how it works. It has always been referred to as a paradigm and that has more of a scientific flavor. But I prefer to call it “worldview” because it refers to something bigger. A worldview is the way we organize reality. It is the way we believe things work. In a way it is like an instrument of navigation. Our worldview is what holds the human psyche together. What I came to realize with that Harvard Committee was that I was threatening the scientific medical worldview by which they were living. What has been the dominant worldview in our society could be called Newtonian/Cartesianism or anthropocentric humanism. It is a worldview that puts the human being at the top of the cosmic hierarchy of intelligence. The simplest term for this is scientific materialism. In this worldview, matter and energy form the primary reality and there is no larger intelligence in the cosmos. The principle method of study is objective reality, which separates the investigator from the matter that is being investigated.

I just stumbled across something related to our worldview that I'd written after the tsunami, in 2005, that killed almost 300,000 people:

Could this shake be big enough to wake us up to the need to set ourselves on another course? An examination of the fundamentals of how we think, based on who we perceive we are and what we think we are doing here, is a much needed conversation for the world to engage in. People eloquently express their outrage about what isn't working, but there isn't a common conversation about how else to run the world. The tsunami could be our spur to rethink everything. Its message is that it's one world — we need to engage with each other in one system. This would be more important than giving our attention to everything else that needs attending, because, without such an over-arching consideration, we will continue to generate problems that devastate us and be victimized by a lack of preparedness for what nature can impose.

That paragraph somehow had made its way onto a website with which I was unfamiliar. Intrigued by the site's URL,

http://greatnewstory.com, I found it to be a platform for thoughtful writing about our worldview.

This wonderful piece, from that Great New Story site, is a history lesson that describes major shifts in humanity's behavior thanks to Copernicus, Darwin and Hubble changing our ideas of how the universe works. That absolutely fits my line of thinking about how we make ideational leaps, where the next change of worldview could come from paying attention to the crop circles.

THE DEMOLITION OF RELIGIOUS MYTHOLOGY

John B. Brinsmead

September 2, 2008

Since the 16th century three great paradigm shifts have seriously called into question the religious traditions of the Christian West.

Whilst the scientific disciplines have been able to adapt to these paradigm shifts, the religious establishments have been thrown into disarray and insecurity, and especially because they have been shackled by their own claims to either ecclesiastical or Biblical infallibility.

THE FIRST GREAT PARADIGM SHIFT WAS THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

The heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus freed humanity from the mythic heavens of supernatural beings, be they gods or demons, and gave us the secular heavens governed by the laws of physics. No longer was the earth to be seen as Dante’s centre of the universe with heaven above and hell beneath. In the new cosmology, the sun did not rotate around the earth as the Church and the Bible implied, but the earth actually moved (contrary to what the Church and the Bible emphatically stated) around the sun.

The religious authorities of the 16th century clearly perceived that the heliocentric theory of the universe was a dire threat to their grand narrative of the world. The integrity of the Christian message was tied to a worldview that was part and parcel of that narrative. As one great churchman had put it, “There are four principle winds, four pillars that hold up the sky, and four corners of the universe; therefore it is only right there be four Gospels.”

Of all of the great ideas in history, this notion, set forth by Nicholas Copernicus in his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium, in 1543, was probably the most important, for its consequences were so far reaching. It set off a huge wave of controversy. At first it was just a ripple. But this ripple soon grew into a huge tidal wave of opposition to this heretical idea.

In order to appreciate why this idea was so vehemently opposed, one needs to understand the official cosmology of the church and its reasons for promoting this cosmology. This cosmology was largely derived from Dante's Divine Comedy, which itself was, ironically, derived partly from Muslim teachings…

Dante paints a vivid picture of the universe, with the Earth at its center, hell being located in the very center of the Earth, and heaven, above… This view of the universe was so congruent with Christian doctrine that it would not easily yield to a new view of the universe no matter how much evidence there may be in support of a new view. Ever since its publication, the cosmology of Dante's book had been an important part of the theology of the Church, both Catholic and Protestant. With mankind's position balanced precariously between heaven and hell, it painted a vivid picture and reinforced the basic belief system of the church. Morality, cosmology, and theology were completely intertwined.

At first the opposition came only from Protestant circles. one of the first to speak out against this new heresy was Martin Luther. He called Copernicus a fool, pointing out that the biblical story of Joshua clearly states that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the Earth. Other Protestants soon joined in. Calvin cited the opening verse of psalm 93-“The Earth is stabilized that it cannot be moved.” Church officials began to search the Bible with a fine tooth comb, looking for passages that “prove” Copernicus is wrong. Eventually the Catholic Church joined in the battle, banning Copernicus's book in the year 1610.

Copernicus's heliocentric theory was so violently opposed, not so much because it contradicted the Bible, which it does, but because it made nonsense out of the official theology of Christianity…

Here are the main objections to the heliocentric theory, as pointed out by the Pope himself. If Earth is just another planet, circling the sun with the other planets, how can the Earth be a place of iniquity and sin, with devils below and angels above? He said that Copernicus's theory makes a mockery of the ascension of Christ, because if the Earth is orbiting the sun, how could Christ have ascended up to heaven? If the stars are not the lights of heaven, but actually other suns, as the theory suggests, then God, in His infinite goodness, would have created inhabitants on them too. How could Christ have died for the sins of all of the inhabitants of these other planets? Many Copernicans believed that the universe was infinite. This was one of the worst heresies of all. If the universe is infinite, then where can the throne of God be located? No wonder the Pope said that the Copernican heresy is the greatest threat there has ever been to Christianity and should be wiped out at all costs.

The Church’s position was totally wrong, back to front, upside down and contrary to reality.

It took the Church a very long time to sense that it had lost its battle with the Copernican worldview. Yet even whilst finally admitting that Copernicus was right, it still tried to carry on with its mythic narrative of the universe as if nothing had happened to render it so much meaningless mumbo jumbo.

The Copernican Revolution was only the beginning of a far greater over-turning of the Church’s grand narrative of the world.

THE SECOND GREAT PARADIGM SHIFT WAS DARWIN'S 19TH CENTURY BIOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

Wallace and Darwin clearly demonstrated that life forms such as plants, animals and humans did not suddenly appear on the earth in response to some creation fiat. Creation was not something that happened as recently as 4004 B.C. according to the grand narrative of the Christian religion. Creation was now to be seen as a process that has been going on for billions of years and as something that will continue into the future.

The priestly author of Genesis 1 dreamt that creation was finished by the seventh day. This writer, of course, was totally oblivious of the space/time realities of a modern scientific cosmology. We now know that if the expanding activity of our universe were to cease, the universe would collapse into the Big Crunch.

The Darwinian Revolution calls into question the age-old dogmas of the Fall of man from an original perfection, original sin, a literal Garden of Eden, the origin of death in the sin of Adam and the grand narrative of Fall and Redemption that Milton outlined so well in his Paradise Lost.

According to this very old religious narrative, death originated in the sin of man at the dawn of history. It is a monstrous dogma because it makes man ultimately responsible for death and everything else that goes wrong on the planet. The Biological Revolution presents an entirely different worldview wherein great carnivores like saber tooth tigers and dinosaurs roamed the earth long before humans were around. The complimentary science of geology found evidence of catastrophic upheavals and mass extinctions of life forms taking place long before humans had arrived on the scene.

The old narrative about the origin of death in the Fall of man has been exposed as a nonsense myth that is no better than the myth of the little three-story universe of the pre-Copernican age. Just think for a moment what the 16th century divines were alleging. The earth is more than a million times smaller than the sun, yet it was supposed to generate sufficient gravity to cause the sun to orbit the earth.

The old creation myth is up-side-down, back-to-front and nothing like reality.

“Perhaps the greatest gift Darwin gave to humanity was the opportunity to see in all of life an ongoing, intelligent, creative drama. Rather than thinking of a form of life as having been put on Earth in a fixed form at the beginning of time, we now see each form of life arising out of the Great Adventure.” Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story,
p. 138

THE THIRD GREAT PARADIGM SHIFT WAS THE UNIVERSE OF THE BIG BANG

Prior to Einstein and Hubble, our Milky Way Galaxy was thought to comprise the entire “steady state” universe. We now know that our Milky Way Galaxy is just one of billions of other galaxies all containing billions of stars like our own sun. So far from being an enormous entity at the centre of the universe, planet Earth has receded into being an almost infinitely small speck of star dust in one tiny little solar system within the Milky Way Galaxy. Further, there is no longer a “steady state” universe as formerly supposed, but one that is still rapidly expanding as the galaxies are driven apart by dark energy by at least the speed of light. These time/space realities indicate that our universe began with the Big Bang around 15 billion years ago.

The implications of these three paradigm shifts for theology are breathtaking. What a mind-blowing view of creation is now revealed compared to that little three-storied universe of the divines who relied upon the worldview of the Bible! What do the time/space realities of a post-Hubble universe do to the old theology that is based on a primitive worldview?

Gone forever is this puny three-tiered universe of heaven above, hell below and humans in the middle, and wondering which way they will go.

Gone forever is the power of the old myths peddled by the Church and derived from a primitive worldview.

Copernicus and Galileo banished the mythical heavens of gods and demons and gave us secular heavens governed by the laws of physics. We now know that there are no laws operating out there/up there that are not operating down here, and there is no God up there that is not down here.

Gone forever are the ideas of a literal Fall of man, original sin and mankind being the originators of death. The Biological Revolution sweeps away the mythic nonsense of pre-Enlightenment humans. Called into question are such doctrines as a bodily resurrection and ascension to heaven, eschatology and ideas of a Second Advent. This is the time to let the fresh breeze of reality sweep away the mythic cobwebs from modern minds.

What is the wisdom of basing an entire theological edifice on an Adam who never existed and a literal Fall into original sin that didn’t happen? Trotting out these old theological premises now is like bringing out the old mumbo jumbo used to fob off the challenge of Copernicus.

As we stand astonished before these three paradigm shifts that have swept away the myths of centuries, what remains of value is the life and teachings of the real historical Jesus. None of his teachings, however, appear in any of the Creeds of the Church. Those Creeds are concerned only with a mythical world and the mythical dogma about a mythical person.

Clearly, what can’t survive are the following mythical ideas:

1. The mythical Second Adam. If the first Adam is mythic, so is the second one.

2. The pre-existence of Jesus. Jesus was not a space man. He didn’t live eternally in a heavenly world, nor was he born supernaturally on this planet in a way that defies the laws of genetics and DNA. The virgin birth stories (whether from Greek mythology or Christian mythology) are as mythical as the old cosmological order of gods in the sky and demons below us.

3. Jesus’s physical body did not rise from the grave and ascend into heaven. Physical objects don’t fly off into outer space. Even if his ascending physical body moved with the speed of light, he would not have moved far in two thousand years within a universe where some of nearest stars are millions of light years away.

4. His death was not required to undo Adam’s Fall and to open some mythical Pearly Gates in the sky.

5. Gone are all eschatological speculations about Millenniums, Raptures and a Second Coming. This latter is a doctrine of horrendous genocidal brutality. It teaches that at the Second Advent, all those living on the earth except for the elect believers will be delivered to destruction and everlasting punishment. No Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot inaugurated a mass extermination on this scale of all creatures living upon the earth. Billions of men, women and little children are all supposed to perish together at this glorious Second Advent. Such views rise out of incorrect ideas of the Earth’s beginnings. If the notions of the beginnings are so obviously wrong, the notions about the conclusions to history will also be wrong.

6. Claims that Jesus is God or the second person of the Divine Trinity are also mythic imaginations that have more to do with old pagan myths than the Church has been prepared to admit. In any case, these are myths that belong to an outmoded cosmology.

Surviving the three great paradigm shifts associated with the breakthroughs of Copernicus, Darwin and Hubble is the real Jesus of history. Here is a flesh and blood Jesus with human parents, 46 chromosomes, normal cellular DNA and real brothers and sisters. This real Jesus of Nazareth, like the great prophets of the Old Testament before him, dared to teach the scandalous idea that being truly human (concerned about compassion and justice for all) was all-important whilst being religious had no importance at all. He brought to his very religious and myth-dominated culture a new vision of unconditional love, forgiveness and justice that would embrace the whole human family without discrimination on account of creed, social standing or race. Unlike the Church that followed on after him, he freed rather than enslaved people to religious dogma and myths.

Web Published – August 2008

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World Press

Jesus and Peak Oil

September 6, 2008 admin

Rex Weyler has vision. (Look at the last thing of his I posted — trust me you wont be sorry even if you just take a fast peek:

http://theconversation.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=199&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0.)

This piece here on peak oil isn't a woe-is-me, although all the categories where we are threatened are front and center:

Our massive growth economies were built with cheap oil. Poorly planned development left behind disappearing forests, toxic lakes, soil erosion, species loss, foul air, dead rivers, drying aquifers, and creeping deserts.

But what Rex presents embraces all of that in a bigger picture of how it would be if we intelligently deal, in systematic ways, with what our oil situation calls for:

Human society can change. Witness the historic changes to establish democracies, end slavery, secure civil and womens rights, or eradicate polio and AIDS. Humanity can harness its resources to change destructive habits and improve living conditions. The crisis of peak oil provides an opportunity strengthen the two pillars that nourish real quality of life: local community and wild nature.

Rex is quite a guy. He was one of the founders of Greenpeace, and, surprise surprise, his newest book is The Jesus Sayings: A Quest for His Authentic Sayings.

In The Jesus Sayings, I raise two more questions, presuming that we might approach some understanding of Jesus’ authentic message.

How did that message get confused or misrepresented?

What relevance does that message offer us in the twenty-first century?

To answer these questions, I’ve examined the research of scholars such as Crossan and Reed, Robert J. Miller, Elaine Pagels, Burton Mack, Bart Ehrman, Karen King, Margaret Starbird, Nicholas Wright, Robert Funk, Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar, and the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion’s Jesus Project. These scholars attempt to answer the questions raised by Reimarus: What can we reasonably say about the historical Jesus, and what did this person teach?

Our modern ecological crisis appears as a crisis of spirit, failing to see the miracle in which we live. Our destruction of the earth follows hording over sharing, private ego over common sense, dominance over humility, and addictive consumption over simple pleasures. Human civilization looked for paradise in all the wrong places, in power, wealth, in myriad heavens. We have failed to worship

— to ascribe worth to — the one thing that sustains us: the living earth. A new reformation in religion and spirituality will recognize the inherent value of the earth itself, life itself, other beings for their own sake, not for private glory.

So, with that as background, see if you aren't nodding yes to this vision Rex is presenting here. And, if you'd like to create a community along the lines he proposes, please invite me to be in it:

Peak Oil drastically changes global economy

By Rex Weyler

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.

World oil production increased for 150 years until the spring of 2005, when world crude oil production reached about 74.3 million barrels per day (mb/d), and total liquid fuels, including tar sands, liquefied gas, and biofuels reached about 85 mb/d. In spite of the efforts since, and tales of “trillions of barrels” of oil in undiscovered fields, liquid fuel production has remained at about 85.5 mb/d for three years, the longest sustained plateau in modern petroleum history. Discoveries of new fields peaked 40 years ago.

Meanwhile economies everywhere want to grow, so demand for oil soars worldwide. The gap between this surging demand and flat or declining production will drive price increases and shortages. That’s peak oil.

Peak experience

Peak oil is not a theory, but rather a simple observation of a common natural occurrence. Peak oil is only one symptom of an exponentially growing population, with exponentially growing demands, reaching worldwide limits of all resources.

“Peak oil has long been a reality for the oil industry,” says Anita M Burke, former Shell International senior advisor on Climate Change and Sustainability. “To believe anything else belies the facts of science.” In 2007, Dr James Schlesinger, former US Defense and Energy Secretary stated flatly, “If you talk to industry leaders, they concede … we are facing a decline in liquid fuels. The battle is over. The peakists have won.”

Global warming, caused primarily by forest destruction and the burning of fossil fuels, now aggravates natural limits and the human turmoil that these limits provoke. one might think that peak oil will solve global warming because less oil means less carbon emissions. Sadly, this is not so because humanity took the best, cheapest, and easiest oil first, leaving dirty, acidic, expensive oil in marginal reserves that require vast amounts of energy to recover. In the 1930s, 100 barrels of oil cost about 1 barrel in equivalent energy to extract. That ratio is now about 20:1 and sinking fast. The Canadian tar sands produce barely 1:1 net energy. By the time someone burns tar sands oil in his or her vehicle, the industry has burned nearly an equal amount retrieving it.

When we account for the net energy left after production, and population growth, we discover that the world peak for net-oil per-capita occurred three decades ago, in 1979. Many oil suppliers

– Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and others – recognizing the limits of the resource, are now keeping more of their oil for domestic use, and saving it for future growth. Regardless of energy alternatives – ethanol, nuclear, solar, wind, tidal – humanity will never again enjoy the current consumption rates of cheap, convenient fuels. This fact changes everything.

We witness the impact in the increasing scarcity and cost of food and other critical resources that rely on oil. Most trucking firms now add a fuel surcharge to hedge against fuel price increases. As fuel prices soar, airlines cancel flights or simply close down. In many cities, police add a gas charge to traffic tickets because police departments have already spent their annual fuel budget on high-priced gasoline.

The post-peak oil era will require new human development patterns and strategies that cope with limits to growth. Humanity has no new continents to exploit or planets to occupy. Frantic industrial nations may drill in the Arctic and dig into dirty tar sands, but none of this will increase or even match the past abundance of cheap liquid fuel that we have already squandered. Nevertheless, the actual moment that world oil production peaks is less relevant than our preparation for the impact.

Relocalization

Well-financed voices promoting global industrialization claim our economies can grow “forever,” or “for the foreseeable future,” but these voices cry out against the evidence before our eyes. Our massive growth economies were built with cheap oil. Poorly planned development left behind disappearing forests, toxic lakes, soil erosion, species loss, foul air, dead rivers, drying aquifers, and creeping deserts.

The dream of a globalized world marketplace linked by airplanes and trucks will not endure. Monolithic superstores that rely on liquid fuels to ship cheap goods around the world will become the relics of the cheap oil era. These massive chain stores also undermine the local enterprise that communities will need to survive.

“The current solutions being bantered about are inadequate to the conditions we are faced with,” says Anita Burke, after decades inside the oil industry. “We must embrace adaptation strategies that immediately create whole new ways of being in relationship to each other and the planet. Buy local, get off of hydrocarbons in every aspect of your life, gather in community, and espouse only love – your grandchildren’s lives depend on it.”

Communities addicted to cheap oil, especially suburban environments without public transport, will become untenable. Regions that still build highways for cars are simply designing their own demise. Smart communities will design light, convenient public transport to run efficiently on the most locally available energy source.

The post-peak oil era will require that we re-establish local manufacturing and food production, and refurbish economies that have been gutted by globalization. Smart urban designers are now planning for the end of cheap energy, global warming, and the human migration that these changes will set in motion. Smart neighbourhood and regional planners are preparing communities for the inevitable transition from escalating consumption to conserver societies, built on a human scale and linked to social services and the natural cycles that sustain them..Building communities in nature

I recently walked through an abandoned industrial section of Vancouver, where I live. The empty, poorly designed, decaying buildings seemed depressing, but I noticed how much actual green space flourished with wild plants. Squatters with gardening skills, I kept thinking, could make a life for themselves here.

Human society can change. Witness the historic changes to establish democracies, end slavery, secure civil and women’s rights, or eradicate polio and AIDS. Humanity can harness its resources to change destructive habits and improve living conditions. The crisis of peak oil provides an opportunity strengthen the two pillars that nourish real quality of life: local community and wild nature.

Relocalize: The end of cheap oil means less products arriving from around the world and less jobs making junk to sell elsewhere. Globalization is literally running out of gas. As fuel prices soar, communities will have to supply more food, water, and vital resources locally. If you are thinking of earning a degree in international finance, it might be smart to take some permaculture courses as well.

Preserve farmland: Wise communities will preserve agricultural land, support farmers, provide local food for local consumption, compost all organic waste including sewage, build soils, apply efficient water use, move toward vegetable diets, and restore and replenish water resources. Rather than building suburbs and highways on farmland, smart communities will design small residential neighbourhoods on the least-arable land, integrated with the life-giving farmland and natural bounty that supports a healthy society.

Change the pattern of community: The entire distribution of public activity, public space, and housing must adapt to less fuel and resource consumption. Past planning in the cheap-oil era created public dysfunction, decaying city cores, foul air, and squandered energy. We do not have generations to correct these mistakes

– the time we have to act is now best measured in months, not decades. We now face the choice of responding gracefully and wisely or reacting later in chaos.

Productive urban green spaces: Cities face huge challenges and require green space, not only for play and peace of mind, but for food. Suburbs and urban neighbourhoods must be redesigned to transform lawns and streets into productive green zones linked by public transport. Planting trees anywhere reduces global warming. Cities such as Bogotá, Columbia, and San Luis Obispo, California, have shown that degraded cities can revitalize community and economic life with programs that increase green space.

Public transport: Basing development and land-use patterns on the private automobile may be the worst design decision in human history. The automobile is responsible for resource depletion, global warming, degraded farmland, alienated neighbourhoods, aesthetic eyesores, time wasted in traffic, and an epidemic of transport death and injury. Light rail public transport is clean, energy efficient, safe, community-building, and allows travelers to be productive rather than stressed. Smart cities will implement public transit, encourage bicycle use, and create neighbourhoods that encourage walking for most services and family needs.

100% recycling: Nature recycles everything. There is no “away” in nature where garbage and waste is thrown. Human communities must mimic the 100% recycling of nature, eliminate designed obsolescence, and turn garbage landfills into recycling centres. Sewage is natural compost that can be converted to productive soil, as demonstrated in Sweden, India, and Mongolia.

Preserve wilderness: Smart ecological planning not only nurtures people but also preserves wilderness habitat for species diversity. In regions where indigenous people still live on the land, wilderness also preserves cultural diversity and knowledge of local food, medicines and resources.

Modern consumer cities

– made possible by the age of cheap fuels, designed for cash profits, or not designed at all – alienated people from each other and from their organic roots. When we gaze upon degraded cement landscapes and the lost souls of inner city children taking refuge in gangs and drugs, we see the cost of broken communities. The end of cheap fuels may help us reclaim an authentic quality of life, not purchased with more stuff but with relationship: our affiliation with each other and with nature.

Rex Weyler is author, journalist, ecologist and long-time Greenpeace trouble-maker.

Courtesy:

www.greenpeace.org.uk

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