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Tainter’s magnificent study “The Collapse of Complex Societies” seemed far from my main enquiries during all this mulling I have been doing, about the way my own research can tie in with the major issues before us today. But now, one of scientists who has written on the Limits to Growth, Ugo Bardi, has co-authored a study that re-analysed the various scenarios, including Tainter’s, about civilizational collapse. He and his colleagues have concluded that Tainter’s model is the most plausible – the costs of maintaining an expanding empire escalate until the whole financial, and then the political and economic institutional heart of the empire falls.
“…The models studied here are not supposed to describe specific cases of the collapse of human societies, rather, they are thought of as a simplified playground to examine the effect of some parameters on the trajectory of complex systems intended as dissipative structures based on finite or slowly renewable resources. The models are based on a simple concept: that of the trophic chain. If we assume that the natural resources available are non-renewable, as they are in the case of mineral resources (e.g. gold and silver for the Roman Empire and fossil fuels for the modern global empire), the disappearance of the trophic structures exploiting the resources is unavoidable – unless new resources can be found. The same is true for those resources which are slow to renew in comparison to the rate of exploitation. The models tell us how the dissipation of the natural resources goes by the progressive filling and emptying of the stocks at lower thermodynamic potential – every step implying a loss of exploitable potential energy which disappears in the form of pollution, e.g. low temperature heat. ….This phenomenon generates “bell-shaped” curves for the filling/emptying of the stocks. These curves can also take the “Seneca shape” when the decline is faster than the growth. As this phenomenon goes on, the stocks interact with each other. The time delay in the filling/emptying of the stocks generates a trajectory where stocks move in the phase space along a hysteresis curve. The system continuously evolves in an irreversible manner and it can never return to an earlier condition, unless the resources are assumed to be renewable and, in this case, the system circles around an attractor in phase-space. In other words, simply reducing the size of the “Bureaucracy” stock will not return the system to a condition in which it was during the growing cycle, an observation which seems to correspond to the current situation.Overall, as long as a society exploits resources in a condition of unbridled feedback, as it happens when it tries to maximize yields, then the overexploitation collapse is unavoidable even though the resources are theoretically renewable. Only an intelligent control able to plan for the future can avoid this destiny. Such a control was not modelled in the present study, but the records of history tell us that it is rarely – if ever – utilized in human societies in history…” https://www.scribd.com/document/391436603/Toward-a-General-Theory-of-Societal-Collapse-A-Biophysical-Examination-of-Tainter-s-Model-of-the-Diminishing-Returns-of-Complexity-Bardi-2018?fbclid=IwAR1_-3KH2aImRHHh-y3TSWRE5JRElDTwpfF5v7JdNAHtWLDvsyKZQ1rKvRI#download
Conclusion: it is when any community loses control of their commons, and negative trophic cascades begin, that the feedback into a tragedy of the commons, begins. At this point in the history of humanity, the degree of inequality has never been greater. A handful of billionaires has more wealth and property than three or four billions of people on the planet. They seem to act as though this gives them, or the giant corporations that enrich them, more power over the use of the commons, than any local community. I think that this signals loss of control, on the part of the global community, of the commons of this world, and that this is how the collapse the civilization, at the centre of the exploitative economy, begins.
On Sun, May 7, 2023 at 11:59 AM Helga Vierich <hvie...@gmail.com> wrote:In the last few days I have been reading accounts of the meeting of Elders gathering festival, and this account is from a Bushman elder who attended:
“On the morning of my travel to Panama, some hours before boarding the plane, I went for my daily walk close to our reservation. I was walking slowly as usual, and after passing some bushes, my eyes met those of an adult female lion, just sitting by the bushes, looking at me. I paused for a moment, nodded my head respectfully, and went on my way. We the San have had a timeless mutual understanding and ancient agreement with the predators of Southern Africa to never harm each other…
“We have no private property, and the land belongs to every human, animal and plant which live on it. Conflict hardly ever arises within our society, due to the original spirit living in everyone, who are educated in the ways of sharing, giving, of peace, and love. The world is sick, and we can help to heal it with the message that we bring: love each other, love the Earth, love life, and treat all with respect.”
Can we try this, please?
On Sun, May 7, 2023 at 11:37 AM Thorsten Daubenfeld <thorsten....@hs-fresenius.de> wrote:Dear Anastassia,
Thanks for this thought-provoking idea! I guess it is difficult to quantify the Seneca effect. But somewhat between 5 – 20 per cent of the whole life time of the system (whatever “life time” means in this context) sounds quite plausible.
Quick analogies running through my mind from history and economy:
Rise and fall of the British Empire (about 1580 – 2000), the “fall” (decolonization) took about 50 years, so about 10% of the whole “life time”
- Nazi Germany lasted from 1933-1945, the final downfall started about 1942 (battle of El Alamein, Stalingrad, US enters the war,…), which makes up for 25% of the whole “life time”
- The German airline Air Berlin lasted from 1978-2017, the time between 2013-2017 being the “collapse time”, so about 10% of the whole life time
- The German chemical industry giant Hoechst AG lasted from 1863-2000 (roughly), the downfall lasted only about 5 years, less than 5% of the overall life time
However, we should ask what “collapse of life” means in our context. In all the above examples (and after the fall of the Roman Empire) there were other complex adaptive systems rising from the ashes of the larger and more complex system, spurring new development.
So it is maybe not life itself that is about to collapse, but rather the more complex life with larger animals, leaving the scene for more simpler forms of life on our planet that will take over? And if life itself is collapsing – who else will take over?
Maybe the authors on this website were right when they talked about the fact that we are nearly “half way through” the time of (large) animals and plants on this planet: https://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0301/15earthclock/
So where does this leave us?
In the end, we are going to die. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of holobiont science (to modify a famous quote by W. Churchill).
Looking forward to your thoughts about all this, fellow holobionts!
Cheers,
Thorsten
Von: theproudh...@googlegroups.com <theproudh...@googlegroups.com> Im Auftrag von Anastassia Makarieva
Gesendet: Sonntag, 7. Mai 2023 19:12
Betreff: Re: [Holobionts] Trophic RewildingWhile it cannot be questioned that certain animals play important functions in the ecosystem, on a bigger scale the role of large animals appears unclear. The main argument against their efficiency is their small surface-to-volume ratio, which indicates that they are primarily concerned (in the biophysical sense) about maintaining their own internal milieu and simply cannot spend any significant resources on the regulation of the external environment. Unlike the smallest organisms, bacteria and fungi, with their huge surface-to-volume ratios.
In this context, I recently thought of the following analogy. In his Seneca Effect: why growth is slow but collapse is rapid, Ugo considered as the Mother of all collapses, the decline of Rome. This decline took about 200-300 years or about one fourth -- one fifth of the total existence of the considered system/process (Rome) (approx. one thousand years).
Now if we look at life, the first multicellular animals seem to have appeared several hundred million years ago, which is approximately the same proportion (about one fifth) of total life's existence. Was it really the beginning of life's collapse? (which is not a linear process of course, with many ups and downs on a finer temporal scale?)
Just thoughts.
Anastassia
вт, 4 апр. 2023 г. в 20:17, Ugo Bardi <prudent...@gmail.com>:
You may have already seen this paper just appeared on "Nature."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01631-6.epdf
It is an assessment of the role of the trophic chains on climate. It has been described as a "landmark paper" and under several respects it is. It is part of a general movement for rewilding, and there is even a "Global Rewilding Alliance at
https://globalrewilding.earth/
Overall, the concept is good and welcome, because it provides an alternative to the multiple bizarre ideas that have been proposed as "solutions" for the climate change problem, including cutting Northern Forests to increase Earth's albedo.
On the other hand, it is still a subject in its infancy. The authors haven't realized that there is not just carbon sequestration at play in this game, and they miss the dynamic effects of forests on the hydrological cycle (the kind of effects studied by Gorshkov and Makarieva). But I think that it could be possible to merge these concept in a single one. In both case, the idea is to restore the ecosystem to its maximum trophic potential.
A deeper problem lies in understanding why exactly trophic chains have the effects claimed in the paper. If they do. Among other things, the "Trophic Rewilding" idea is criticized by Anastassia Makarieva who maintains that large animals damage the ecosystem, whereas the proponents say it is the opposite. Complicated story -- I confess that I am a little lost in it. What I can see is that these trophic chains are holobionts in the sense that they operate on the win-win principle; every element of the chain benefits from the other elements.
In any case there is something deep, here, which I don't think has been explained in the details -- at least as far as I know. The higher complexity of long and networked trophic chain must be appearing in form of decreasing entropy of the system in terms of the Kullback-Leiber divergence, that is the difference in entropy between networked and less-networked systems. I think it is related to Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, but Tononi's ideas are expressed in terms of discrete states, whereas holobionts work in terms of continuous energy levels. It is a complicated story, but maybe someone in the list knows more than me in this field?
--*******************************Ugo BardiOnward, Fellow Holobionts!https://theproudholobionts.blogspot.com
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