Borrowing From All Directions
“End of the Road” Acrylic on Fujicolor Print
You occasionally come across opinions in the trenches of the internet or from across the barbeque at a family gathering, an argument against the possibility of human-caused global warming ( or any human-caused negative impact to the planet for that matter ). The argument goes something like this: humanity is too small a force to have an impact on something as expansive and bountiful as the natural world. ‘We’re just insignificant humans, the earth is resilient, we’ll stop if it gets really bad’... etc. Zoom out and take a look at what got us here and it quickly becomes apparent that our situation is really pretty dire. We have left few corners of the biosphere untouched and we have blown our natural inheritance and even invented ways to borrow from the future. If our actions don’t fit the definition of ‘unsustainable’ then I don’t know what does.
Most of the remarkable upgrades that humanity has experienced over the last 150 years have come to us by way of a kind of trust fund that we inherited from the earth itself. The ‘currency’ in this fund is millions of years of accumulated solar energy, captured in the bodies of microscopic plants and animals and layered down into sediments that eventually became oil. A lamp burning kerosene refined from oil returns the same heat and light that originally came from the sun so many years before. The engine in your car creates little explosions of gasoline that are translated into forward motion - a trillion little bits of sunshine turning the wheels of your car.
It’s difficult to wrap our heads around just how much of an advantage this has afforded us - oil changed the course of human history and vastly improved life for billions. It has also had a devastating impact on the planet. The really astonishing part is that we have spent the majority of this trust fund in a little over a hundred year period. That’s like one spoiled rich kid going clubbing for a weekend and spending a multi-generational pool of wealth. Now we have an entire system of production and a standard of living that is completely based on a resource that is both finite and terrible for us.
We have had it easy like no other species at any other time in history. Take food production as an example. Fields are cleared, plowed, tilled, sprayed, and harvested all through the use of fossil fuels. The fertilizers and pesticides that are applied to our crops are all derivatives of oil. The trucks that transport the goods and often the refrigeration systems that keep them cool, all powered using tiny withdrawals from that same trust fund ensuring a smooth ride from Mexico to Vancouver for a 99c head of lettuce.
Our lives have been vastly improved by our spending spree with fossil fuels but it’s time to see it for what it was; a temporary boost, a level up and out of the mud but also a progress trap that has done colossal amounts of damage to the world. Our next collective moves on the chess board have to see us severing our relationship to these fuels and their extraction. Will fusion or hydrogen or solar fill in the gap? Maybe. But if they don’t we will have to do away with the expectation of a life made easy because we stumbled across what was essentially buried treasure.
McKittrick Oil field, 1909
The vast power afforded to us by oil has also permitted an unprecedented expansion of The Great Human Machine not just through time but through space. Our ability to collect resources and transform them into everything and anything is astounding. We have gone from basket weaving to making things like helicopters and VR headsets in the geological blink of an eye. Our reach - even out to other planets - has allowed us to explore, exploit, and deliver the spoils with incredible speed and efficiency. Chainsaws mounted on the ends of tractors penetrate the depths of the rain forest and our nets comb through the darkness of the once mysterious oceans for whatever remains. A garment can be roughly assembled in Bangladesh with cotton from the US and then sent on to China to be finished before being sent on to an H+M in Stockholm or Seattle. We have become gigantic. There are no longer corners of the map with ‘terra incognito’ or ‘here be monsters’ scrawled across them and much of that expansion has been made possible by oil. Our new extended arms reach out across the globe and draw everything back in to feed the machine which perpetuates the cycle.
We have taken millions of years of solar energy and used it to raise ourselves up and stretch ourselves across the globe - but even this wasn’t enough. Even winning the fuel lottery couldn’t satiate our appetites so we have moved on to create the monetary system and credit. The more literal currencies we have exchanged in the past such as gold or dollars were intended to be - in the same way oil is - repositories of energy, stores of value. A paper dollar or pound was essentially a promise to pay the person holding it with a corresponding amount of gold stored elsewhere. This system was gradually diluted and leveraged and finally decoupled from its relationship to more physical ( though still symbolic ) repositories of wealth.
Banks are now only required to actually hold a fraction of the money that is left in their trust and from that small reserve, money is created literally out of thin air. This seemingly infinite supply of credit is part of what has allowed our staggering expansion and just like oil there is good and bad contained within. What we forget is that the new money that is created is essentially debt to be repaid at some point in the future. John Maynard Keynes called this a ‘link to the future’ meaning that what we do with money is a signal of what we think is going to happen in the future. People feel ok about taking on a mortgage or credit card debt and entire economies borrow colossal sums of money in the belief that the future will be bountiful enough to accommodate these debts. What we are doing now in most developed economies is expanding the amount of money in circulation at a faster rate than the economy is expanding and we find ourselves in unexplored territory that pushes the limits of the models and theories. This becomes a gamble with consequences that we only got a taste of in the financial crisis of 2008.
This is where we find ourselves today: we have almost completely exhausted an energy trust fund that took millions of years to accumulate, used it to create a standard of living and a degree of industrial capabilities never seen before, while at the same time borrowing so heavily from the future that it will be probably impossible to ever catch up. We are coming up on our limits in terms of energy, ecology, and economy and the system we have created in the process couldn’t be a more definitive example of what it means to be ‘unsustainable’.
We have some serious heavy lifting to do if we want to re-balance our relationship with the natural world but as our history demonstrates, we are always innovating and finding new ways. We just have to make sure our next phase is about replenishing and restoring what we have inherited. If you are working towards those ends and need your story told, reach out and let’s see what we can do for you.
