Blessed is a lion that a man eats,
because that lion will become human.
Cursed is a man that a lion eats,
because that lion will become human. (Gospel of Thomas 7)

The Gospel of Thomas, discovered at Nag Hammadi, doesn’t contain anything obviously vegetarian.  In saying 12 Jesus advises the disciples to follow “James the Just” after he is gone.  Saying 71 has Jesus saying, “I will destroy this house,” which reminds us of the gospel sayings about the temple being destroyed.  Both of these hint indirectly at vegetarianism.  James, the first leader of the church after Jesus, did not eat meat or drink wine, and in fact was raised a vegetarian.  The temple was the place where animal sacrifices were offered, therefore if Jesus was trying to destroy it, he may have been against animal sacrifices.  Besides these vague hints, though, Thomas doesn’t seem to say anything that could give comfort to vegetarians; certainly there isn’t anything along the lines of “thou shalt go vegan.”

However, in his book The Gospel of Thomas, translated and edited by Stevan Davies (Shambala Publications, 2002), Davies argues that vegetarianism can be found in the Gospel of Thomas.  He points to sayings 7, 11, 87, and 111.  His translation isn’t radically different from other translations; it’s his insightful analysis which really stands out.

When I first read saying 7 above (“Blessed is a lion that a man eats”), I have to say that I did not extract any particular vegetarian message at all.  It sounds like Jesus is telling us to go out into the jungle, hunt lions, kill them, and eat them — and the lion will benefit!  But if a lion (which, unlike a human, is a natural carnivore) chances to eat a man, well, too bad for the lion. Jesus seems to be promoting an extreme form of carnivorism.

Davies points to several passages in Thomas which put this saying in a new light.  First, if you eat things, the things you eat become alive.  Saying 11 contains this: “When you ate dead things, you made them alive.”  (This is repeated in saying 111.)  How do you make them alive?  Through digesting and metabolizing them.  Saying 87 says, “wretched is a body depending on a body.”  How does a body depend on a body?  If the body eats the other body.  Therefore, Davies concludes, Thomas is not saying that all bodies are wretched, only bodies which depend on other dead bodies (i. e., meat) for food.  These sayings contain a “vegetarian criticism of meat-eating,” and imply a “vegetarian perspective,” according to Davies (p. 10, 90).

We can now go back to saying 7.  Yes, literally considered, this implies that we are going in search of lions to eat.  But even if Jesus wanted to promote meat-eating, this saying wouldn’t make sense. No one, today or in ancient times, hunted lions for food.  This saying has to be symbolic.  I mean, after all, it is the Gospel of Thomas, which is announced as a book of “hidden sayings,” with some pretty obscure and mysterious sayings which sometimes resemble some of the koans of Zen Buddhism.

So if we consider saying 7 as symbolic, when Thomas talks about “the lion becomes man,” what does he mean?  This refers to the process of digestion; if you eat and digest something, what you digest then “becomes” you.

And what could the “lion” stand for?  Davies argues that it is a metaphor for ignorance, but I have another idea.  Most likely, it stands for the lion-like attributes within all of us. What are lion-like attributes?  They involve courage, conflict, battle, and domination.  Our lion-nature includes meat-eating, but it is more than that; it is the whole process of desiring domination which includes meat-eating as one of its consequences.

So what this saying means is: if you conquer, kill, and consume your lion-like attributes, then you becomes a higher being.  Infused with knowledge, your lion-like attributes are metabolized into a higher purpose.  You go forth into the world using your “aggressive” tendencies for good rather than for violence.  But if your lion-like attributes consume you, you give your lion-like attributes a terrible form.  You put your human attributes at the service of your lion-nature, which results in tremendous human intelligence turned towards wars of aggression, exploitation of the earth, and factory farms. In both cases, “the lion becomes man,” it’s just a question of who is digesting what.

I highly recommend Davies’ book.  Thomas is one of the oldest of the gospels; many have argued that it is older than the canonical gospels.  Thomas gives vegetarians looking for vegetarian sayings in the gospel some new insights into the spirituality of the early church which include the practice of ethical vegetarianism.

A beautiful creature

“The Story of Chickens — a Revolution” is an art project sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.  The stated purpose of the project is “to transform the contemporary view of chickens as merely ‘livestock’ to the beautiful and unique creatures they are, while promoting alternative and healthy processes of caring for them.”  So far, so good!  This is something I might actually be able to get behind.

The kicker, though, comes at the end: the chickens will be publicly slaughtered, and then fed to participants at a potluck.

Say what?  Slaughter is now considered “art”?

Here’s the basic problem that I have with this project.  Slaughter is not art. There is actually a social consensus, right now, that the slaughter of animals is something which is disgusting, even if it is totally necessary.  Funding this project breaks this social consensus.

As someone who regularly puts forward unpopular views himself, I’m a bit sensitive to free speech issues.  But here’s the problem: this project does not advocate putting slaughter into the public arena.  It actually puts slaughter into the public arena.

What is this about?

It is certainly objectionable that five beautiful creatures will be ritually slaughtered.  Just by itself, though, even vegans would probably not do much more than roll their eyes at this action.  Hundreds of chickens are slaughtered for food every second.  What is really objectionable here is that it is considered art. If it is art, it is beautiful, affirmative, and positive.

For anyone familiar with the “backyard livestock,” issue, the political context of the project should be obvious.  There is an energetic class of people who are promoting the keeping of livestock in backyards and even slaughtering it in backyards.  The basic idea is that industrial agriculture is not sustainable, but that backyard livestock agriculture is.  They actually think they are doing the vegans a favor: look, isn’t this better than factory farms?

From the facile responses coming from the sponsors, it appears that the issue of the effects of public violence have not entered the brains of the people approving this project.  Their responses are only at the level of talk about “freedom of speech” and “unpopular views have a right to be expressed.”  We are not talking about the effects of publicly advocating violence, but about the effects of legitimizing actual public violence.

The key issue here in the question of whether this is “art” is the question of what is public and what is private.  Slaughter is a fact of life, but even when necessary, it is also disgusting and repulsive.  These two facts, accepted by consensus, are basically what holds civilization together and keep us out of the Middle Ages.

The danger of this project is that it alters, without debate, our current social consensus that killing things is disgusting, even when necessary.  By making the slaughter public and endorsing it as “art,” slaughter enters the public space.  This isn’t talk about slaughter, discussions of slaughter, or depictions of slaughter, but slaughter itself.

This cannot help but desensitize the public to violence.  This isn’t just a vegetarian issue.  There are plenty of things which are disgusting, which actually have to be done, which we do not do in public.  I need my car repaired, but I don’t want an auto repair shop next door, and if someone undertakes to turn their front yard into an impromptu car shop, I have a right to object.  You may need to go to the bathroom, but I don’t want to have to see you do it in public, thank you very much.  This agreement on what is disgusting is a separate debate from what is good, bad, or indifferent in private.

Similar Debates in the Past

This of course raises a lot of questions about free speech, and the eternal question, “what is art?”  Don’t we have the right, sometimes, to do disgusting things as a form of advocacy?  Well, perhaps, but you need to think about this a bit more than the Spencer Museum has.

The issue is not whether slaughter is good, bad, or indifferent.  The question is whether slaughter itself should enter the public sphere, and this is why this otherwise obscure project has elicited such a visceral and negative response.  We’ve actually had these debates before, and to illustrate, here are some cases in point.  These cases are not all clear-cut, by the way; but they illustrate the terrain we are looking at.

1. What about bullfighting? Is bullfighting an art, is it culture?  Many years ago, as a teenager, I read Ernest Hemingway’s book Death in the Afternoon, which is basically a glorification of bullfighting.  If I recall correctly, Hemingway even made the point that the fate of the bull in a bull fight is hardly worse than its fate in a slaughterhouse and may in fact be better.  So don’t object to bullfighting, the implication was, just because of concern for the bull.

Hemingway’s book may be art.  But is bullfighting itself an art?  This was decades before I became a vegetarian. Hemingway’s prose was great, but I wasn’t convinced that I wanted to go to a bullfight, and in fact, the idea made me a bit uneasy.  Bullfighting was prohibited in Catalonia in Spain in 2010, and one slogan used by opponents of bullfighting has been “Torture is not Art, Torture is not Culture.”

2. Political protest may also become art.  In 1967, on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, someone created a sensation by threatening to burn a dog on campus to protest the Vietnam War.  The purpose was to make those aware of what happens to people when they are hit by napalm.  The dog, we were assured, was one who was going to be euthanized anyway.  This was decades before the days of animal liberation, but even then, there was predictable outrage, including from a number of anti-war radicals.

In the end, no dogs were killed during this protest.  The guy finally withdrew his threat.  As I recall, he then went on to become a regular columnist for the Vanderbilt Hustler.  He said something along the lines that he was just trying to shake people out of their intellectual lethargy, and that he never had any intention to burn a dog.

3. Sometimes art can be used to express viewpoints which we find repulsive.  “Triumph of the Will,” by Leni Riefenstahl, is a Nazi propaganda film which, nevertheless, is very well done.  (Actually, it was too long, and too many speeches; she could have made it more effective if she had cut 30 to 45 minutes out of it. Maybe it’s a good thing she didn’t.)

This is a more complicated case because no animals or humans were harmed in the making of “Triumph of the Will.”  In that respect, it’s actually not as bad as “The Story of Chickens.”  But the acceptance of these views by a sufficient number of Germans in politically important places, even though the Nazis never got a majority vote in a fair election, eventually killed millions of people.  This is another dimension that we also have to think about when considering art.

Glorifying Slaughter

If the Spencer Museum really thinks this project is “art,” then how about burning a dog to protest war?  How about staging a bullfight?  How about a showing of an edited-down version of “Triumph of the Will,” following by a community discussion of propaganda techniques and how today’s directors might be able to do a better job?  Even the Spencer Museum should be able to see that these projects, no matter how skillfully done, would have effects that go far beyond the mere free-speech value of permitting people to defend their point of view publicly.  The mere fact that something is disgusting doesn’t necessarily mean that it should always be prohibited in public.  But there is a dimension to this debate of which the Spencer Museum does not seem to have a glimmer.

Our social order depends on slaughter being disgusting.  We’re in luck, too — for the vast majority of non-psychopathic individuals, it is disgusting. You have to get used to killing. Being a slaughterhouse worker is one of the lowest paid and most dangerous occupations in America.  If slaughter becomes something desirable or attractive, something that anyone can do in their backyard, something beautiful to behold, then you unleash violent forces that no one will be able to control.

Many people find it repugnant to watch slaughter even when they believe it to be necessary.  It is a natural psychological defense mechanism; cruelty to animals is often a precursor to violence against humans.  If it wasn’t horrible, we’d get a lot more practice, and be a lot better at it.

There is also a fairly simple modification to this project which would alleviate its visceral and inflammatory nature.  Just slaughter the chickens in private.  I don’t want to see it, I don’t want it to enter the public sphere.  Even if they were slaughtered in private, this project would still serve to desensitize people to violence that is instinctively repulsive.  But at least it would decrease the chances that this whole so-called art project will end badly.

People exposed to violence, either as victims or as perpetrators, experience stress.  So will people exposed to things which are disgusting.  Too much stress, and society will explode.  That’s one reason we don’t have public executions, even though the killing itself is regarded, by society, as necessary and good.

Leo Tolstoy said, “as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields,” and there is a strong intuitive understanding of the nature of violence here.  Whatever needs to be done on a large scale, must first be perfected and practiced on a small scale.  Before Vietnam, most soldiers in American wars, even in battle, would often not fire directly at the enemy or not fire at all. Soldiers needed to be trained to shoot at targets that actually looked like humans.  Killing another human being, even an enemy, is instinctively repulsive. If we once become accustomed to a thing, we can do it on a large scale and repeatedly.

That is what “The Story of Chickens — a Revolution” is really doing.  It is an invasion of public space, and by practicing a small ritual violence against “beautiful creatures” now, is a rehearsal for much bigger violence later.

Our world does not need this kind of thing.  If you think that violence is necessary, if you think that we have to kill to eat, then fine.  Feel free to advocate your point of view, compose great art to defend it, and write volumes of poetry in its defense.  But let’s not pretend that slaughter is art.

In 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations had said that livestock contribute about 18% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) — which isn’t anything to be sneezed at.  But, actually, argue Goodland and Anhang, the real figure is even higher; at least 51% of all human-caused GHG emissions are due to livestock.  More than half of all GHGs due to livestock?  This totally changes the climate change debate.

UNESCO described this as “what may be a large-scale paradigm shift” in the whole subject of dealing with climate change.  The FAO has twice invited Robert Goodland to Europe to talk about their paper, and the article has started popping up on numerous university reading lists.  Even Sir Paul McCartney added a reference to this article in the production of a video for his web site.

The latest bit of attention has been, amazingly, in perhaps the last place you’d expect it: the journal Animal Feed Science and Technology.  Their contribution was a response to an article written as a critique of the “Livestock and Climate Change” hypothesis.  It is very much worth reading both the original critique and the response by Goodland and Anhang to see how far the “Livestock and Climate Change” hypothesis has come.  Both articles are a bit technical but fairly short, and Goodland and Anhang have very helpfully structured their response to correspond section-by-section with the original article.

To cut to the chase, Goodland and Anhang have pretty much demolished the criticisms, and in the meantime shown some further problems with the original FAO report.  Our climate change crisis is not just a crisis about fossil fuels.  Climate change is being driven by the massive use of land on the planet’s surface to support livestock — nearly half of the world’s land area, even after including places like Siberia and the Sahara Desert.

While we should certainly worry about cars, trucks, and other burning of fossil fuels, the single most important thing we can do to fight climate change is to decrease consumption of animal products.  Goodland and Anhang suggest a modest 25% reduction in livestock products worldwide, pointing out that such actions could have a much greater effect — and much quicker, too — than trillions and trillions of dollars in alternative energy investments.

We can get an important clue as to what they are doing in the New Testament if we take a quick look at what their effect is and has been.  From the point of view of a meat-eater, these fish stories are very convenient.  Jesus ate fish, therefore eating meat must be all right.  The letters of Paul, which predate the gospels by decades, also explicitly reject ethical vegetarianism at several points.  “Eat whatever is sold in the meat-market without raising questions of conscience” (I Corinthians 10:25).

Whatever we say about the historical authenticity of these references to eating meat, it’s clear what the effect has been: it has been to make ethical vegetarianism a heresy.  You can be vegetarian for your health, if you want, but not for ethical reasons.  During the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in the middle ages, suspected heretics were given an animal to kill. If they refused, they were determined to be heretics.

1. Let’s start with the one case where Jesus actually eats fish, after his resurrection.  (There is a similar passage in John 21:4-13, but in John, Jesus only distributes the fish, he doesn’t eat it.)

And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do questions rise in your hearts?  See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.”  And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?”  They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.  (Luke 24:38-43, emphasis added)

Historically this passage is suspect right at the outset; the resurrection stories are the latest in the tradition and wildly contradictory to each other. This particular passage in Luke is especially suspect, because Jesus talks to his disciples and wants to convey that he is not a mere spirit (just as in the case of his appearance to “doubting Thomas”).

Anyone familiar with the history of early Christianity can immediately see the problem.  Some, such as the famous second-century heretic Marcion, had exactly the belief to which Jesus is “replying” — that Jesus never existed on a physical plane, but was just a spirit or ghost.  Most likely, this verse was penned as a specific response to Marcionism, which didn’t even become an issue until many decades after Jesus and the original disciples had all passed from the scene.  Jesus says he isn’t a spirit, and when the disciples still don’t believe, only then does he eat the fish, something a ghost could not do.  This passage can’t be taken seriously as real evidence about the historical Jesus.  It is likely written as a response to Marcion and those like him.

2. What about the feeding of the multitudes with bread and fish (Matthew 14:13- 21, 15:32-38 and parallels)?  There are many parallel versions of this basic story.  Not only is it in the Bible, it is mentioned several times by early church fathers.  Ireneaus twice states that Jesus fed the multitudes with bread alone (Against Heresies 2.22.3, 2.24.4).  Arnobius also describes this incident without mentioning fish (Against the Heathen 1.46) as does Eusebius (Proof of the Gospel 3.4).  Indeed, even Jesus himself, when referring back to this miracle (Matthew 16:9-10), mentions bread but doesn’t mention fish.

The bread is everywhere present, but the fish only sometimes.  This strongly suggests that the original tradition was about distribution of bread, not bread and fish.  In the case of Matthew 16:9-10, the insertion of fish becomes obvious, because the editors of Matthew changed the original story to include fish but forgot to change Jesus’ backward reference.

3. “Fish” was a well-known mystical symbol in early Christianity, because the Greek word for “fish” is transcribed “ichthys” or “ichthus,” which is an acronym (in Greek) for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”  Many early writers speak of fish in a clearly symbolic way, e. g. Tertullian On Baptism 1.  Because of this, it isn’t clear that the original “fish stories” were even intended to be literal accounts of actual events, but were allegories about the distribution of the sacred message.  Jesus wasn’t distributing physical fish, but rather himself and his message as spiritual food.

So what is the real origin of these fish stories?  Rather than fight this issue out on the terrain of historical criticism, I’d suggest that curious students look at the whole controversy about vegetarianism in the early church.  We are blessed in this respect: unlike the gospel accounts, where we have second-hand or third-hand stories warmed over and heavily edited, in the authentic letters of Paul we have first-hand accounts from one of the key participants in this dispute.  Romans 14, I Corinthians 8 – 10, and Galatians 2 all give accounts of a divisive dispute between Paul and the Jerusalem church (James, Peter, and John) over food.  This left Paul isolated from the rest of the church; “even Barnabas was carried away,” Paul ruefully admits.

We know that the leader of the early church, James the brother of Jesus, was not only a vegetarian, but was raised a vegetarian, and didn’t drink alcohol either (Hegesippus, quoted in Eusbius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.5-6).  It is clear from this and other evidence (discussed in depth in my book, The Lost Religion of Jesus) that there was a group of people in the early church who thought that eating meat was an issue of conscience, and that we should be vegetarians.  Otherwise, why would Paul feel the need to “refute” these views? When Paul stresses the need not to offend those who do not eat meat or drink wine (Romans 14:20-21), he is likely referring to James or people like him.

These passages in the New Testament were not just an impartial record of historical events; they were a belated effort to settle a divisive dispute in the early church by incorporating fish stories into the original gospel.  In this they were unfortunately rather successful, but as historical evidence it’s pretty transparent what their origin was.

Ethical vegetarianism as a “heresy” has survived in numerous forms, all the way from the Jewish Christian Ebionites, down to modern Christian thinkers such as Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (founders of Unity) and Ellen White (founder of the Seventh-day Adventists).  If you trace this “heresy” back to its origins, it becomes clear that it comes from Jesus himself, who was killed after entering the temple and disrupting the animal sacrifice business there.

UPDATE Jan. 26: Much too pessimistic!  Full conversion is more like February 1.  Past blogs are all there, although some links probably still don’t work.

UPDATE Jan. 30: everything is converted, all the links should be working.  If something is wrong, please bring it to my attention.

Photo: Bev Sykes

Doubtless you have already heard the latest news story, so thick with irony that it is its own satire. Paula Deen, the “queen of butter,” not only announces that she has Type 2 Diabetes, but — wait! there’s more! — announces that she has become a paid spokeswoman for pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. She’s even got a web site to promote her bad habits.

Since the irony will likely be lost on a lot of people, I’ll spell it out. This is a perfect example of the commoditization of food, medical care, and information. Things which make good commodities are not necessarily good for us. Paula Deen has now become a commodity, and can’t even see it. On the one hand the big corporations sell you the foods that give you diabetes, and on the other they’ll also sell you the drugs that will control your diabetes.

Money can sell bad food, bad information, and bad medical care. Good information, good food, and good medical care are not easily made into a commodity, because there aren’t that many ways to make a profit on it. You can write some books, I suppose, or maybe invest in broccoli futures, but that’s about it. But this is nothing compared to the money to be made by pharmaceutical companies, drugs, big agriculture, and high-powered medicine.  And in our society, guess which wins out?

We can only speculate as to why Paula Deen has sold herself out, but the obvious suspicion is that it has something to do with her bank account. The “diabetes-friendly” lasagne recipe she provides gets 2/3 of its calories from protein and fat, has 55 mg of cholesterol per serving, and features 4½ cups of cheese, 2 eggs, and a half pound of beef. It’s “diabetes-friendly” all right; I’ll bet her diabetes will flourish with it. The recipe and materials, we are told, have been reviewed by “Diabetes Care and Education” — evidently another organization bought out by the influence of corporate money, which now controls our political system, our medical care, our food, our information, and our entire lives.

A vegan diet can not only treat diabetes, but can actually reverse diabetes. Drugs can sometimes lower blood sugar, but at increased risk of heart attacks and bone fractures. When the American Diabetes Association diet was put head-to-head against a vegan diet in a clinical trial, the trial demonstrated that the vegan diet was clearly superior and actually reversed some cases of diabetes.

Get a grip, Paula. If Bill Clinton can do it, you can do it. Go vegan.

The Battle of Gettysburg (Currier and Ives)

Can we compare the abolitionists in the animal rights movement, who will settle for nothing less than the abolition of all animal exploitation, with the abolitionists in the anti-slavery movement of the 18th and 19th centuries?  Absolutely!  But I would draw a very different set of lessons from history than most other vegans of either the “abolitionist” or any other type.

James McWilliams, with great insight, takes this analogy seriously. He argues that the anti-slavery movement needed both compromisers and radicals. If the radicals had gotten their way in 1790, the U. S. might have split in two permanently long before the Civil War. But without the radicals in the 19th century to push the principle of abolition, slavery might never have been abolished at all.

He’s right, of course. We need both a radical wing and a moderate wing of advocates for animals. And more good news — we’ve already got them! However, there is something unsettling about the “dreaded comparison” between slavery and animal exploitation, when we look at what the end of slavery really meant for the country. I’m wondering if vegans are thinking about these as well?

1. The Civil War was immensely destructive. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed — the modern equivalent of millions of Americans killed, proportional to the population of the time. Realistically, no one wants this kind of event to usher in the age of veganism.

2. The Civil War was  not “about” slavery for the vast majority of those who participated in it. Let’s be clear: slavery was the key cause of the Civil War; without slavery, it wouldn’t have happened.  But abolitionists were a minority, and most Northerners were racists. They didn’t want slavery in the territories because the slaves were competition! The idea that the Civil War was “about” the morality of slavery is the pious invention of modern sensibilities. The abolition of slavery was always a secondary objective to the preservation of the Union. (Two good books to read on the subject: Gary Gallagher’s The Union War and David Goldfield’s America Aflame.)

3. The Civil War delayed the end of slavery. The conditions of former slaves in the South after the war was sometimes worse than under slavery, as they sunk to the lowest social rung in a war-torn region. The South as a whole was devastated by the war and ignored afterwards, and sunk into a deep economic depression that lasted for generations. It was not until 1920 that the economic conditions in the South reached the level of 1860. I am old enough to remember that the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote to former slaves, was a myth in much of the South until my own lifetime.

I read the lessons of the abolitionist movement very differently from most vegans who raise this issue. Most vegans think — the abolition of slavery was a success, so how can we emulate their strategy?  But I’m less concerned about how the various factions of the anti-slavery movement interacted with each other, than I am with the convulsive and violent events that (eventually) ended slavery. Instead of asking whether we should be reformers or abolitionists, we should be thinking about a different question — are there deeper issues in American society, are they coming to a crisis, and how does veganism fit into the context of these issues?

American history shows that we have long periods of relative social stability punctuated by briefer periods of violent and tumultuous change — the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. This is a bit of a simplification, because the “quiet” periods sometimes featured violent events like the war of 1812 and the Vietnam War. But there is a basic truth here. Even though the war of 1812 and the Vietnam War were quite serious, they never approached the level of the American Civil War or the Second World War in their impact. The Vietnam War did not lead to any lasting changes in American foreign policy; soon we were back at the business of minor undeclared wars like Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is during these periods of major crisis, like the American Civil War, that the most significant social changes occur. I would argue that we are now entering another crisis period, in fact that we have likely been in it for several years. The current crisis has nothing to do with independence from Britain, a house divided, or fascism in Europe and Asia. It has to do with the environment — climate change and resource depletion.

There is a debate within the environmental movement over the exact nature of this crisis. Alas, most vegans are not even aware of it, much less taking part in it. It doesn’t have to be this way. We could understand the current environmental crisis as a more general problem of the entire human relationship with animals and nature, a crisis which calls for a reshaping of our strategy, a crisis which requires that we focus on plant-based diets. Is anyone in the vegan community paying attention?

EcoMind: changing the way we think, to create the world we want. Frances Moore Lappé. New York: Nation Books, 2011.

In EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé sets out seven “thought traps” which she seeks to defeat and replace with better ways of thinking.  Earlier, I dealt with Thought Trap #1.

Lappé is an engaging, chatty writer with some considerable influence.  I agree with a lot of what she says in this book.  That’s why I’m giving her a hard time about the few points on which we do not agree.  Thought Trap #3 is a case in point.The Thought Trap Exposed

EcoMind Thought Trap #3 states (p. 61):

We’ve hit the limits of a finite earth. We’ve had it too good! We must “power down” and learn to live within the limits of a finite planet.

What’s going on here?  We HAVE hit the limits of a finite earth.  We DO need to “power down” (an allusion to Richard Heinberg’s book Powerdown).  How is this a “thought trap”?  Inquiring minds want to know!

The biggest drawback of the “we’ve-hit-the-limits-of-a-finite-earth” idea is this: It frames the problem out there — in the fixed quantity that is the earth. Its limits are the problem. . . . But, more accurately and usefully, the limit we’ve hit is that of the disruption of nature we humans can cause without catastrophic consequences for life. (p. 63; emphasis in original)

What does this mean?  Lappé doesn’t spell it out exactly.  It sounds as if she means that if we transitioned rapidly to a renewable energy economy, and established social justice, that we would continue to have economic growth.  It wouldn’t be “business as usual,” but a green version of “business as usual” that incorporates social justice and sustainability.

Since she wants to change the way we measure progress from GDP (gross domestic product) to something like the GPI (genuine progress indicators), she has some wiggle room in defining what this means.  Does she mean that both GDP and GPI will increase — “green growth”?  Or does she mean that GDP will shrink, but GPI will increase?  (Like, we’ll have greater leisure time and solve climate change, which will more than compensate for fewer flat-screen TVs and SUVs?)

If it’s the second view (less GDP, but more genuine progress), then she is agreeing with Herman Daly and others arguing for “limits to growth,” and this is essentially a semantic dispute about how best to “pitch” ecological reform.  Alas, though, she seems to be leaning towards the first view.  She seems to be saying that with correct alignment and enough solar panels, shortages disappear, and we’ll have “green growth” and the best of both worlds.

Lappé wants to focus on the disruptive aspect of the human economy, rather than on shortages. Actually, both problems are real. We are disrupting the planet (through greenhouse gas emissions), but we also face resource shortages (peak oil).  We need to address both.

How About Renewables?

So why can’t we just go to a renewable energy economy, and forget about all this talk about shortages?  This is closely related to her problems with thought trap #1.

Here is what Lappé says about dealing with fossil fuels in the context of climate change:

Given all we now know, why, I often ponder, aren’t we in the midst of exciting national discussion about how quickly we can leave fossil fuel behind? One obstacle might be an unspoken notion that if we’re not doing something “we should be,” the reason has to be that it costs too much. . . . This “the-party’s-over” thought trap [an allusion to to the book by Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over] might reinforce these perhaps less-than-conscious assumptions, blocking us from realizing that cutting greenhouse gases can enrich many aspects of our lives. (p. 77)

Well, guess what! Even though cutting greenhouse gases could enrich our lives, there are several excellent reasons we aren’t in the middle of an exciting national discussion about how quickly we can leave fossil fuel behind. Let me spell them out for you!

1. Solar and wind provide electricity, which doesn’t help us at all with our oil problem. Yes, there are electric cars, but these are substantially more expensive, require huge infrastructure changes, and require metals (such as neodymium) which are themselves in short supply or which pose other problems.  Peak oil will wreck the economy before we even have a chance to make the transition.

2. Solar and wind are lower-quality energy resources than oil, coal, and gas. That is, they are “lower quality” in terms of energy return.  (In terms of the environment, though, they’re great, since they substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions.) The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) for solar and wind is less than what we’ve come to expect, and certainly less than historical oil wells and coal mines. Why should we be surprised? If solar and wind were a better deal, private enterprise would have dealt with the problem already.

3. At the present time solar and wind depend on fossil fuel energy.  They are fossil fuel extenders, not replacements.  There are no wind turbine plants, powered by wind power, with metals mined with electricity from wind power.  In fact, how we would get to an all-electric economy (including transportation and mining as two sectors totally powered by electricity) presents a lot of really challenging problems, and at best would require extremely expensive infrastructure costs.

4. Unlike coal and natural gas plants, solar and wind require up-front investment of energy. While a lot of the total energy costs of a coal plant are simply the ongoing cost of buying the coal, in the case of solar and wind almost the entire energy cost must come before a single kilowatt is generated.  This poses serious transition costs.

In rebuttal, Lappé cites a study (p. 78) saying that “the costs of transitioning to a low-carbon economy are not [economically] all that daunting.”  However, the problem is not the costs themselves, but the fact that most of them must be made in advance.   Moreover, the study Lappé mentions discusses the economic costs, whereas what we really need is energy investment. The government can print money, but the government can’t print oil, and it is oil that is in short supply.

5. While we are trying to sort all of this out, we will likely be facing declining supplies of oil because of peak oil, a subject which Lappé seems to be unfamiliar with and never mentions.  So just when the economy is hurting due to the decline in oil supplies, we’ll have to divert even more energy to the new renewable energy infrastructure.

So, no, renewables will not come to the rescue, at least not right away. It will be a very expensive proposition in conventional economic terms; it will move our economy to a somewhat lower level in physical terms, and will take decades to implement. In fact there are a number of technical challenges for which we don’t have the complete answers. We could speed up the implementation process, but only by dramatically increasing the temporary economic pain of the transition.

Climate Change Action Means a Revolution

I mention this not because I am opposed to renewables or to getting rid of fossil fuel use, by the way. I believe we need to do it anyway, in spite of the huge economic difficulties.  How comfortable are you with the extinction of all life on the planet?  Or should we allow the economy to gradually slide back to the economy of Middle Ages as we run out of oil, coal, and natural gas over the next century or two?  We just need to be honest about what specifically this is going to involve.  Even with everyone cooperating, how in practical terms could we make the transition away from fossil fuels?

I don’t think any single person really has the answer to this.  We’d have to completely restructure the economy.  My best guess is that it would go something like this.

The first step is to establish a sustainable scale for the economy — how big, physically, we could allow the economy to get.  This likely involves setting upper limits on coal, oil, and natural gas, which would progressively shrink.  The second step would be to establish a just distribution, so that the burden of this transition does not fall on the lower and middle classes.  We would need to have some sort of basic income guarantee so that everyone could be fed, housed, and clothed, with a steep progressive income or property tax.

This in itself would shrink the economy, which relies on fossil fuels, quite a bit.  Just a slight decline in oil supplies in the 1970′s created havoc in the economy. The failure of oil supplies to increase and the resulting rising oil prices during the runup to the 2008 financial crisis sent the entire global economy into a tailspin.

And these were all temporary reductions in fossil fuel use. Imagine what would this would do if there were a deliberate and permanent reduction in fossil fuel resources.  The impact of such a decline in energy use would not just be huge, it would be colossal. Huge amounts of debt (mostly private!) depend on an expanding economy, and a lot of it just wouldn’t be repaid.  Banks would fail, businesses would fail, unemployment would soar, and we would sink into an economic depression.

If we then planned to divert further huge amounts of the remaining energy supplies into building some sort of renewable infrastructure, it is highly doubtful that the “business as usual” economy would survive.  The faster we want the transition to be, the more painful the energy diversions would need to be.  Eventually, decades from now, the renewable infrastructure would supply enough energy so that it outweigh the energy invested, but in the meantime this would not be an easy or quick process.  Or, rather, it will be either easy or quick, but not both; and if it is not quick, declining oil supplies will wreck the economy.

When we finally did get to a fully renewable economy, it would likely be at a much lower physical level.  Doubtless, there will be some compensations in a low-energy society, perhaps greater leisure time.  Some people, such as Gail Tverberg, argue that a sustainable steady-state economy would be like the economy of 1750.  I doubt whether it’s quite that bad, but it almost certainly would be less than that enjoyed by the U. S. today.

I agree with Lappé that in many ways, both environmentally and socially, we will be better off. But we will be living in a world as different (or more different) from our present world, as our present world is from the world of the nineteenth century.  There will simply be no comparison.  People need to understand this.

We really have hit the limits of a finite planet. Lappé’s discussion contains many important insights, but we need to take it one step further to understand our needed course of action. 

Allan Savory and company

I also have a more minor issue with her discussion of grazing and carbon absorption.  In discussing her ideas about alignment, Lappé says that we do not simply need to decrease carbon emissions, we could also increase carbon absorption. This is a nice insight, and she is right that we certainly could increase carbon absorption through better land management. But then she cites cattle grazing as a possible helpful environmental activity. She uncritically swallows Allan Savory’s holistic resource management idea of grazing to argue that cattle can actually play a positive role in carbon absorption.

Grazing, historically, has been extremely destructive environmentally.  Overgrazing has turned many parts of the world into desert.  It may be that properly maintained pasture is a carbon sink, though this point is unclear. But there is no debate that forests are a huge carbon sink, and forests are what we really need. In many parts of the globe grazing land left untended would naturally return to forest; forests were leveled to create the pasture land in the first place.  To the extent that forests regrow, grazing land will be reduced.  So the first problem is that while pasture land might, just might be a carbon sink, forests definitely are a huge sink.  We should, therefore, let grazing land revert to forest land as much as possible, and that means greatly restricting grazing, not expanding it.

In the second place, Lappé is evidently completely innocent of the fact that Allan Savory is a highly controversial figure, even among grazing advocates, and many people have plausibly questioned his statements. Savory proves that if you include enough references to “holistic,” that you can convince some environmentalists somewhere that you are on to something. Lynn Jacobs (Waste of the West), George Wuerthner, and Jeff Burgess have cited abundant research refuting many of Savory’s claims.

Thirdly, this analysis completely ignores the problem of methane emissions. Methane emissions from grazing cattle actually make grazing a worse alternative than factory farming in terms of climate change effects. Emitting methane is something natural for cattle; it is only when cows are placed in the unnatural situation of a feedlot that they are brought to market so rapidly that they never have a chance to emit as much methane as their pasture-fed cousins.

Finally, the yield of grazing is abysmal. Grazing cattle has one virtue only; it is efficient with regard to human resources. But per acre of agricultural land, the caloric or protein returns on grazing land are far less than that even of feedlot beef.

We should certainly be eager to find innovative uses for land that will improve our ecological balance, but we should not be taken in by these vague and unsupported assurances that cattle grazing is somehow better for the environment. Anyone could declare any wasteful practice to be “holistic,” it seems, and attract some sort of uncritical audience among environmentalists.

P. S.

I agree with much of what is in the rest of the book.  She is perfectly right on Thought Trap 2 (“out of control shopping is the problem”), 4 (“Humans are selfish”), 5 (“humans naturally hate rules”), 6 (“we are so disconnected from nature that it’s hopeless”), and 7 (“it’s hopeless!”). In each case, the trap really is a trap. The human condition is a social product, not something inherent either in our nature or out of our control.

EcoMind: changing the way we think, to create the world we want. Frances Moore Lappé. New York: Nation Books, 2011.

In EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé (most notably of Diet for a Small Planet fame, written in 1971) sets out seven “thought traps” which she seeks to defeat and replace with better ways of thinking. In this essay I am going to deal just with the first of these thought traps, and probably the most important, concerning the “growth” issue.

She expresses the first thought trap as follows:

“Endless growth is destroying our beautiful planet, so we must shift to no-growth economies.”

Well, this statement looks like it’s true!  So what’s the problem?  How is it a trap?

Lappé’s book is an example of polemics, the practice of attacking opposing views (as opposed to advancing your own views). Polemics is a dangerous business. Sometimes, it immortalizes the view that you attack (as in Tertullian’s work Against Marcion, because all of Marcion’s original writings have now disappeared). My favorite polemic title of all time is Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism — an Infantile Disorder. You don’t even have to know what “left-wing” communism is to smile at this title.

The problem with polemics is that a lot of people will not even have read the authors or the views which you are attacking. For the benefit of these people, you have to carefully set out not only your own views but those of your opponents.  Ideally, it becomes a kind of Socratic dialogue, as we see the interplay of opposing ideas and gain insights into both sides.  But as we will see, Lappé hasn’t set out her opponents’ view very well.  Even worse, she has set out her own views in a confusing way that doesn’t address the issue she is supposedly confronting.

But here is what I find amazing about this chapter.  Her reasons are interesting, and as I go through the chapter, I agree with almost everything! She’s even a vegetarian!  Her points are not only right but important as well. But the one point she misses, she has so totally missed, that it totally discolors the whole conversation. The point she has missed is the one that she sets out to refute.

She first raises a valid point; “no growth” is going to be a hard sell. But then she says that the problem is deeper than that “no growth” isn’t sexy enough (p. 20). It has several shortcomings. I am going to go into some length to explain her point of view to make clear where the confusion lies. Keep in mind, by the way, that I actually agree with virtually all of the positive points she makes.

1. Growth and abundance.

“[This view of growth] leaves unchallenged the prevailing assumption that what defines today’s economy is in fact ‘growth’ — ever-expanding abundance. . . . It blinds us to the reality that what we’ve been doing actually generates much more waste and scarcity than abundance — for many now and for many more in the future” (p. 20).

She cites resource waste, energy waste, water waste, food waste as examples of things to which this view makes us blind.

“Let’s call it what it is: a system that in fact stymies growth and even quickens diminution and death” (p. 22).

2. Markets and waste.

She then asks where this waste and destruction comes from. It comes from the way we have designed markets.

“Evidence suggests a basic design flaw in our peculiar version of a market. . . . we’ve turned this useful tool into a formula for disaster — a market that ends up producing waste and destruction because it is largely driven by one-rule: Pursue what brings the most immediate and highest return to existing wealth holders” (p. 23).

3. Consequences of flawed market economics.

This flawed market has several consequences:

(a) It responds to market signals, but not to nature’s signals due to “externalities” such as public health impacts of coal.

(b) It concentrates wealth in the hands of a few.

(c) This wealth concentration in turn disrupts the political process by allowing the wealthy first to dominate public conversation about the economy, and thence to gain control of the economy.

4. Positive solutions needed.

“So here we are,” concludes , “and calls for ‘no-growth’ clearly can’t save us” (p. 29). We need a positive set of answers to substitute for the “no-growth” economy, namely, “economies that register and respond to nature’s laws in a democracy accountable to the citizens” (p. 30). To that end she suggests keeping wealth dispersed through fairer taxes, low interest rates, stronger labor unions, breaking up monopolies, and access to education and health care.

She gives some examples of companies and groups that epitomize her insights, including a carpet company, a nonpesticide movement in India, the “local first” movement, and Costa Rica.

5. Alternatives needed to GDP.

Finally, we need to rethink the idea of gross domestic product (GDP), and instead measure the economy through such things as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which goes further than mere measures of financial wealth.

These are, I think it is fair to say, her points against this “thought trap.” What do we make of it?

Even though, as I’m reading the chapter, I agree with almost everything she says, she has distorted the basic issue so fundamentally that I must take exception.  It may be hopeless to try to explain it to her readers (or to her), but here are my concerns.

1. Anyone who has actually bothered to read Herman Daly will immediately recognize that Lappé has incorporated many of Daly’s insights. In fact, virtually everything she says was said by Daly years or decades before she wrote EcoMind. Take, for example Daly’s textbook from 2004 (co-authored with Joshua Farley), Ecological Economics.  Daly also says that today’s economy is producing waste and inefficiencies; that the market is fundamentally flawed; that it concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, and generates abundant externalities; that we need to revise the tax structure in a progressive way, and most conspicuously that we need an alternative to GDP for measuring wealth.

Lappé has really been totally unfair to Daly and to the entire school of ecological economics, with which (quite honestly) I do not think she is that familiar. But we can see that her first point (above) is completely refuted. If, as Lappé claims, framing this as a “growth versus no-growth” problem means that we miss all of these issues which Lappé discusses, how does she explain the fact that Daly not only is aware of them, but has actually has done considerably more than Lappé to promote them?

2. This leads to the next problem, her pervasive use of the “straw man” argument. Herman Daly is quite clear what he means by growth: he means an increase in the physical “throughput,” the flow of raw materials and energy through the economy. It has nothing to do with genuine progress, human happiness, or anything else. In fact, that is precisely a point which Daly not only makes repeatedly, but which is also central to his whole writing. Beyond a certain point, increasing flow of raw materials through the economy actually reduces human happiness and progress.

Therefore, I question how much Lappé has studied Herman Daly, or any of the other ecological economists. She doesn’t seem to be aware of what Herman Daly’s position is on economic growth.

3. O. K., let’s look at the question of growth itself. Lappé dodges the question of growth by defining it in a different way than either Herman Daly or the Limits to Growth study (which she also attacks) ever did. Growth is “ever-expanding abundance” (p. 20). She then completely dodges the question of whether growth is good, by saying that our economy is, in this definition, not growing in the first place! Therefore, talking about growth (“abundance”) being good or bad is misleading, since it isn’t a characteristic of the economy in the first place.

But neither Daly or the Limits to Growth study define growth as abundance. Abundance is a value concept. It implies that certain things are good (health, leisure time, plenty of cookies, etc.) and other things are bad (disease, war, insufficient cookies, etc.). To define growth in this way (what Daly calls “development”) is to set up measurements that we certainly should set up, but which currently are not incorporated into our way of measuring things in the economy. This is a point on which Lappé and Daly agree, by the way, which makes sorting all of this out even more confusing. It seems that Lappé is aware of this agreement, but still insists on arbitrarily defining growth in a way that denies the problem in the first place.

4. Properly phrased, the issue of growth is a narrower, objective question: is the amount of physical throughput in our economy a problem, and what, if anything, should we do about it? By “throughput” I mean the total, physical quantity of raw materials and energy from low-entropy natural resources (e. g. copper mines, oil wells, croplands) through the economy and back to high-entropy sinks (the atmosphere, oceans, landfills). See Ecological Economics, p. 440. Climate change (too many greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere) and peak oil (not enough oil to sustain our economy) are both examples of limits to growth in the sense of limits on throughput.

And here’s the answer. YES! In fact, not only is this a problem, IT IS THE MOST CRITICAL PROBLEM FACING THE PLANET RIGHT NOW, even more critical than the blatant inequality and lack of democracy that both Lappé and Daly thoroughly agree on.

If our atmosphere could endlessly absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases without ill effect, we wouldn’t have a problem with climate change. Or if there was plenty of oil in the ground, we wouldn’t have to worry about high oil prices or “peak oil.”

Even if we could wave some magic wands and make unwanted climate change go away, and produce unlimited oil supplies from the earth, I’d argue that a number of things should be changed in our economy. We shouldn’t have the corporations in charge of our political process, for example, and we might run into shortages of other things (like arable land). BUT the combination of climate change and peak oil could literally wipe out the human species and all life on earth. Runaway global warming is one of the issues James Hansen raises in his important book, Storms of My Grandchildren. It’s the difference between “humanity has some problems” and “humanity is wiped out, along with all life on earth.” THAT’S the point that Lappé is missing.  The scale of the economy (how big it is, physically) is the issue you have to face before you face any other.

5. And here’s the clincher. Lappé never once mentions the issue of “peak oil.” In fact, while she does to her credit talk about climate change, she never mentions it in this chapter. To talk about the issue of “limits to growth” and not to talk about these two issues (the prime cases of “limits to growth”!) is such a critical omission that we are forced to ask if she even understands the question at all.

I will add one final point. Let’s suppose that we get Daly and Lappé at the table together and ask them to agree on terminology here. Let’s suppose further that they both agree that the best way to measure true “abundance” (Lappé) or “development” (Daly) is through some measure like the GPI or ISEW (“Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare,” see Ecological Economics, p. 233-236). We could then ask the question, are there limits to how big “abundance” could get?

Even when defined in this way, and even if we made Daly and Lappé co-dictators of the world, I think there are limits to abundance. In fact, we may have so exhausted the planet that we have already passed limits to abundance as well. This is because of the huge increase in population due largely to the Green Revolution and cheap fossil fuels. Now that fossil fuels are becoming scarce, it is not clear that we will be able to sustain our current system of agriculture at all. David Pimentel has plausibly argued that this maximum human population is about 2 billion, less than 1/3 of the current 7 billion.

Even if things aren’t quite this bad, and we could have “true abundance” with 8 billion humans, it is clear that there are limits to how much abundance the human race can create on this planet, no matter how it is measured.

I wish that writers of such intelligence and skill as Frances Moore Lappé would use their considerable skills to make this issue clearer, rather than trivializing it. The points she raises are almost all correct, but the central point of her chapter — that concern about endless growth is a “thought trap” — is just flat out wrong. In fact, endless growth is precisely the most critical problem which the human race faces.

Colorado mountains

Can we have both economic progress and save the environment?Yes, we can have a sustainable economy and keep people employed, feed the hungry, and keep everyone warm during the winter. But the country as a whole will be poorer — a lot poorer — and it is a mistake to underestimate the costs. This may sound like some Republican argument, but it is the truth, and the country needs to face it, and the equally important truth that we have to make these painful changes anyway.

This is a pretty tough topic, addressed in the Autumn 2011 issue of the Colorado Environmental Coalition newsletter, page 4, in an interesting article by Randy Moorman entitled “It’s the Economy and the Environment, Stupid!” While I agree with the basic pro-environment direction of the article, I feel it is a huge mistake not to acknowledge the tremendous social, political, and economic costs.

The economy is part of the environment — not vice versa. As such, the economy is subject to basic environmental limits. We have reached the limits to growth in the economy already. All fossil fuels are depleting, and oil especially — peak oil is here. All fossil fuels are furthering catastrophic climate change which could literally end all life on the planet. We also face a number of other limits as well, such as declining mineral availability, unsustainable soil erosion, and water scarcity, in case you have run out of things to worry about. In the meantime, here are a number of quick sobering facts to keep in mind:

1. Alternative energy has a lower energy return. There is alternative energy, like wind and solar, but it is going to give us a lower energy return on energy invested (EROEI) than is oil and coal, and storage issues will likely reduce EROEI (and increase cost) somewhat further. It can be done, and it should be done: but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. It’s going to be more expensive, and we will face a declining standard of living. Nuclear is also problematic, but once you see the problems with solar and wind, you will see that nuclear energy may not be quite as stupid as we previously thought.

2. We have a liquid fuels crisis more than an energy crisis. Our alternatives (even if we include nuclear) only produce electricity. Electricity is nice but won’t help that part of the economy that depends on liquid fuels, which is huge — cars and trucks, for example. Long story short, the switch from a liquid fuels transportation system to an electric transportation system will be quite problematic and expensive. Because of battery issues, most likely we’ll have electric trains but electric cars and trucks will never be widespread. Try to put that in your State of the Union message and imagine how it’s going to go over, and you have a good start on imagining the kinds of problems we’ll have.

3. The energy transition will be very expensive. Not only do we face “limits to growth,” but investing in the new energy transition is going to cost a huge amount of money and energy. We’ll not only need wind turbines, solar panels, etc., but also the infrastructure for an electric transportation system. Ultimately, we’ll also need an electric way to mine minerals. All of this will cost money and energy. You’ll see an even further depressed economy because just at the time when oil supplies are declining (peak oil), energy that could have been spent on consumer goods will be invested in infrastructure instead.

Tom Murphy summarizes the advantages of fossil fuels: “Fossil fuels are cheap and reliable and are their own storage and allow transportation by car, truck, ship, airplane, and fit seamlessly into our current infrastructure.”

4. The financial system will collapse if it can’t grow, and it can’t. We have trillions of dollars in debt in the United States, which has dramatically escalated in the past decade, and attention Republicans: most of this is private debt, not government debt.  How will it be repaid?  This debt has been taken out with the expectation of “business as usual,” namely the resumption of economic growth.  If energy gets more expensive (as it must), then everything will get more expensive, people will cut back on spending, and then we’ll see a downward spiral of economic collapse, as almost happened in 2008.  Businesses will cut back jobs, people will stop spending, loans won’t be repaid, banks will fail, leading to further business cutbacks and the spiral will continue.  The 2008 experience will be repeated, and this time we may not emerge from the economic hole we’re in.

Look at previous energy transitions — in the U. S., from wood to coal took over a century, and from coal to oil took many decades. And in these cases, the new fuel was more advantageous economically; but going from oil to solar or wind is going to a less advantageous form of economic energy, even though it’s obviously much better for the environment.

The narrow question of whether we can all have jobs or income during this energy descent — which was Moorman’s original question — is one which, I believe, we can answer positively. Yes, we can, but it will require completely thinking our economic system. This is not something we will be able to get to incrementally, step by step. It requires a revolution that no one in Congress is even talking about.

We would need to redress the huge economic inequality within and between nations; we will need the cooperation of the poor to make this energy descent work. Otherwise, you’ll have a revolution of the unpleasant variety which will attempt to resurrect economic growth — which will turn out to be impossible, thus furthering increased unrest, and so forth in a downward spiral. We would need thereafter to place limits on the use of natural resources, letting the market allocate what we would then produce on the basis of what is ecologically sustainable and feasible.  We would need to radically restructure our approach to money and debt.

It is wrong to say that “our environment . . . is an integral part of our economy.” That’s backwards! It is our economy — the wealth we produce, the things we trade, the jobs we have — which is an integral part of the environment. That is the whole problem with conventional economics; there is no recognition that when the environment stops, the economy will stop with it.

So I agree with the implied conclusions of Randy Moorman’s article that we should encourage the switch to a more sustainable economy. But it is a serious mistake to downplay the costs. If we want to avoid social and political collapse, we need to plan a transition to a lower standard of living that keeps everyone fed and warm during the winter, and we need to be honest about the huge economic, social, and political costs which this will involve. Let’s face it, gang — the party’s over.