Recently I have been on a four-day hiking trip, completing another 80 km (~50 mile) stretch of the 1171 km National Blue Trail running across my tiny country. This gave me plenty of time to tune into and ponder on the many podcasts I downloaded previously, but never had the time to listen to. One of them was a pretty long one, but it was definitely worth the time; every single minute of it. Out of the many concepts and ideas thrown out there the one that really captured my imagination was the distinction between regenerative and degenerative technologies. While this might sound abstract and theoretical at first hearing, nothing could be further from the truth. As you will see, this dichotomy explains a lot about our past, present, and yes, our future too.
Without further ado, let’s start with degeneration, as known as the decline or deterioration of things. Needless to say, everything we build or make degenerates over time. Paint peels off, rust starts to develop. Abrasion eats away machine parts. Break pads, batteries, bearings etc. all need to be replaced from time to time. Water enters concrete structures, and rusting rebars throw off large chunks of cement. Without constant maintenance and repair both buildings and machines become unusable then dangerous, until they finally break down and collapse.
Compare this to regeneration: the renewal, regrowth, or restoration of body parts. Notice the difference, how even the definition itself refers to ‘body parts’ — not machine parts. Everything in nature is in constant recycling: either growing and living, or decomposing. Nothing is exempt or goes to waste, and everything has its place and its role to play. Not like our ‘sacred’ technologies: in essence, everything we build or make is dead, lifeless and thus unable to regenerate, or at least be part of the natural cycle of things. We kill living beings, or dig up lifeless dirt, and turn them into objects; things which we try to separate from natural processes as much as possible. And not only that.
Growing food has become a destructive process itself, as opposed to remaining part of a natural cycle of nutrients and energy. Instead, we appropriate the land, kill all her inhabitants, dig up and “disinfect” the soil… Only to grow commercial crops unable to survive without us constantly killing their competitors (“weeds”) and predators (“bugs”). In Nature these “pests” seek to remove and outcompete the sick and unviable life forms, such as our over-cultivated plants. But we won’t let that be. We are working against natural processes in the name of progress; literally waging war on Nature. The same goes for mines “producing” all the minerals and metal ores: we destroy a forest, tear up the land, take what’s underneath and leave nothing but a toxic pond and a good deal of emissions behind. We take, and never give back, let alone leave anything in place. We think that this planet was created for us, and us alone. For us every other creature is a nuisance, standing in the way of increasing prosperity for humans.
Life, with all its emergence, complexity, and inherent unpredictability simply does not compute for our “modern” mechanistic world view. It is dangerous, messy and untamed; something with which we can’t seem to be able to work or cooperate. Hence the strong urge to control it. And in order to do that, we can’t help but destroy it: so it stops growing and regenerating all over the place. Ever wondered why “indoor farming” and lab grown meat has became so sexy these days…? Purple lights in a lab-like environment… Stainless steel, glass tubes and LEDs everywhere… No weeds growing in their disorderly way... No mud and excrement covering the walls and floors either. So, why bother with creating healthy ecosystems, cultivating viable plant combinations contributing to each other’s growth, when one can just control every parameter in a lab to the microgram level?
The wee little problem with this modern thinking of ours — well before we get to the point of overshoot and its many symptom predicaments — is that the things we use to achieve our goals cannot be regenerated locally. Neither be sourced, nor recycled. Everything depends on long distance transport, and a ceaseless supply of new materials. Not only we do not return anything but hazardous waste to Nature, but we also need a constant feed of new resources. Inputs, like metals, lumber, natural gas, minerals — you name it — must be obtained, and be fed 24/7 into a six continent supply chain, lest degeneration takes over and the whole system starts to crumble.
The constant degeneration of all our sacred high-tech objects, however, is a boon for business. It means replacement. It means more sales. More profit. More GDP. More money, which then can be spent on buying even more dead (and rapidly degrading) stuff. We have built a delicate Robe-Goldberg machine eating the planet alive, churning out a steady stream of profit and dead matter day in, day out. And we call this progress, a “forward movement towards a destination”… to where exactly? A dead and desolate planet?
Look, another high speed rail! Progress!
Look, a new wind farm! Progress!
Look, solar panels! Progress!
Isn’t it fantastic?
No it’s not. Where an average citizen sees a high speed rail, I see trees cut down and mountains crushed to pieces to lay the foundation for the tracks, and to obtain the ores to make metals from. I see cement kilns, iron foundries, copper mines and refineries. I see coal and natural gas burned in not so distant power plants to move the trains. “Renewables” just come on top. They do not replace anything, just add to the hot mess we’ve created.
Is a solar panel any better in this regard than whatever else we’ve built so far? We dig up lifeless rocks (quartz) and mix it with carbon so that it can remove the oxygen from quartz in an arc furnace at 1500–2000°C (and release it as CO2 in the process). The remaining silicon is then further purified and doped with Germanium and other rare metals. Out of this pure metallic silicon large mono-crystals can be pulled then in a wafer fab, by using yet another megawatt of electricity.
Sure, we can argue, much less CO2 is released during this procedure, than say by burning coal in a power plant to generate electricity throughout the entire lifetime of a solar panel. However, none of the steps described above could be completed without using fossil fuels, or without stopping the destruction. Diesel is needed to drive trucks delivering quartz from a mine. Coal or natural gas is used in large quantities as a source of carbon in smelters, and as a way of generating the stable high current electricity powering those arc furnaces. Something, intermittent renewables cannot provide. (By the way the same goes for the glass and aluminum parts, too.) Sure, you can run an assembly plant on “renewable” electricity: gluing and soldering silicon wafers into panels and screwing on the aluminum frame, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Without fossil fuels, and the massively destructive process called mining, there would be nothing to assemble there.
Solar panels manufactured by solar panels in a regenerative way is thus not even a myth. It’s like a pink fluffy unicorn dancing on rainbows.
I would love to believe that solar panels are “good”, or at least part of a “solution”. (To what…?) But I can’t. Whenever I see one, I see a huge slab of dead, inorganic matter sitting on a roof. And while it’s busy converting sunshine into electricity, it is also busy degrading and decomposing itself. Thermal cycling, damp heat, humidity freeze, UV exposure are all taking their part in turning a “useful” product into hazardous waste, leaching Arsenic into the groundwater if disposed of carelessly. As long as we have fossil fuels to drive trucks around and collect these dead panels, we might be able to recycle some of those. But even the best recycling process is only about 90% effective — anything above that would require a disproportionate amount of energy and chemical inputs to run. Thus in under a mere 7 cycles we would lose half of the material, and in 15 rounds 98% — that is to say: practically all of it. Relying on recycling alone would provide us with a rather steep slope leading us back to a low-tech life. Thus, in order to fight degeneration, and the resulting running out of raw materials, the only option remaining to maintain modernity is to take more from Nature.
Once liquid fuels, and especially diesel, become net energy negative though (taking more energy to produce than what it returns to society), we will be less and less able to maintain and replace everything, everywhere. We tend to forget how hard we rely on liquid fuels, and how little we have when it comes to replacing those. Wind and solar only produce electricity, but suck really hard when it comes to powering long distance transport or synthesizing liquid fuels. (The latter wastes 70–90% of the energy generated in the process, making it even less viable in energetic terms than drilling ever deeper for hydrocarbons). Contrast this with the exponential growth in infrastructure during the past 70 years. Something, which in turn has brought with it a similarly exponential increase in demand for dead material and energy inputs when it comes to maintenance and replacement of worn out parts, dams, bridges, electric grid components. So, what gives?
Now imagine the alternative, a termite mound. A regenerative object built from saliva, feces and clay. In other words: locally available, biodegradable, organic, renewable resources. No high heat, no high currents, no minerals sourced from another continent needed. Could we, human termites, build something like that? I mean we used to know how to do that… In fact two centuries ago this was not even a question. In my tiny little country, for example, our grand-grand parents used to live in adobe houses built from clay. The outer walls were made water repellent by a mixture of cow milk and ash. The inner walls and floors were covered with a fine mixture made from clay and cow dung (and no, it didn’t smell). The house had a thatched roof, harvested from a nearby reed. All locally sourced, organic, renewable materials.
Yes, it wasn’t nearly as comfortable, warm and clean as a modern house made from manufactured materials. I don’t want to romanticize the past either. Maintaining such a house was hard work. No wonder most people moved to brick and mortar houses as soon as the energy surplus needed to build such homes became available. Moving back to such regenerative structures, where the inhabitants must devote their time and their physical activity to maintain them, will not come as a choice. People will cling onto their comforts as long as possible, and rather reuse and repurpose old building materials to maintain their (increasingly decrepit) homes, than to switch back to such a “primitive” structure as an adobe home. However, as surplus energy from fossil fuels wanes, moving back to an organic, regenerative life will become a necessity. There are quite many people experimenting with that already. I guess we all have a lot to learn from them.
None of our current governance systems, be it capitalism or communism point in that direction though. Both encourages more exploitation, and more war — on each other, and on Nature as well. You can hope for a green electric future as much as you want, but it will have nothing to do with stopping the destruction. With or without fossil fuels the ecosystem around us is collapsing. Extinction rates are thousand times higher than what used to be the background rate a century ago. Forests are being increasingly replaced with grazing lands and plantations. Fish stocks are depleting, and the oceans develop ever larger dead zones devoid of life. Topsoil erosion (thanks to intensive farming methods) is accelerating, while deep underground water tables deplete — leaving nothing but an arid wasteland behind.
From Nature’s perspective the short history of technological progress was a rapid and accelerating rush towards death and destruction.
Some of the most fervid advocates of the civic religion of progress may say at this point: “Then who gives a flying F, if this planet dies? We will move on to colonize Mars!” — an already dead planet with almost no atmosphere, no soil, no living organisms, and freezing temperatures all throughout the year. Cross my name out on that list, please. I’d rather be poor, but having the luxury of living nearby a forest, than to be forced to live my life in a space suit in a lifeless wasteland.
No matter what kind of social contract we put around it, technocracy — the belief that everything is knowable and controllable by an elite cabal of experts — was the logical endpoint to this pillage of the planet. This is how the age of reason in each declining civilization has always ended. It’s no different this time either. The ruling elite has slowly become a death cult, worshiping lifeless objects (green tech) and mired in magical thinking. Framing everything in terms of GDP growth and CO2 emissions, this reductionist ruling caste has remained unable to grasp the complexity of the system it presides over, and thus at a loss when it comes to grasping that the direction we as a civilization is headed could only end in a loud crash.
As strange as it may sound, I can only hope that we will not find any viable replacement for fossil fuels. Based on our track record, should we able to pull that trick, and with the help of AI we would only accelerate the destruction of this planet. Actually, the invention of an unlimited energy source would be the fastest way to our extinction. Not that this “danger” persists, mind you: fusion and the rest will remain a pipe dream without mining and diesel. With the gradual, then ever accelerating failure of our fossil fuel system, humanity will be forced to return to live an increasingly simpler life, relinquishing many of the “great” infrastructure projects of the 20th and early 21st century: like the electric grid, or importing manufactured goods from all around the globe. And yes, that means abandoning AI too — an artificial thing unable to survive a second without electricity or a steady stream of electronic components.
There will be no other way than to first reuse and repurpose what we have on hand, then to reinvent locally available regenerative technologies. No one will be bothering with recycling solar panels or making new ones in the shed. Rather, we will be using solar heat as a means to cook food (solar ovens) or to make hot water. Yes, the future will be low tech. Yes, it will mean hard work, and less comfort. Yes it will involve a massive reduction in our numbers. But for those who come out on the other side, life will be also more fulfilling, as well as ecologically sound and sustainable, in the true sense of the word.
Until next time,
B
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