Right. I usually don’t bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we would do something about overpopulation if only we would recognize it. Which is absurd. What might we do about overpopulation here in the USA? Legislate a one-child policy? Set up an onerous set of bureaucratic protocols forcing citizens to apply for permission to reproduce? Direct the police to shoot all female babies? Use stimulus money to build crematoria outside of Nashville?

It’s certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We’re way beyond “carrying capacity.” Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity.

The cocoon of normality prevents us from appreciating how peculiar and special recent times have been in this country. We suppose, tautologically, that because things have always seemed the way they are, that they always have been the way they seem. The collective human imagination is a treacherous place.

I’m fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape — the fiasco of suburbia — to the way we feed ourselves — an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts — along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as “an offense in the sight of God” has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it — though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.

Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on “TV dinners,” motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their granddaddy’s day. Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. It’s hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.

And they were able to express themselves — as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well — in exuberant “taste cultures” of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the “playful” motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking — the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount — and I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.

A very close friend of mine calls them “the yeast people.” They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there’s more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.

What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to “policies” and “protocols.” The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing: a contest for the table scraps of the 20th century. We’ve barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we’ll see “the usual suspects” come into play: starvation, disease, violence. We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul.

It’s a sad and tragic process and, all lame metaphors aside, there are real human feelings at stake in our prospects for loss of every kind, but especially in the fate of people we love. The human race has known catastrophe before and come through it. There’s some credible opinion that “this time it’s different” but who really knows? We have our 2012 apocalypse movies. The people of the 14th century, savaged by the Black Death, had their woodcuts of dancing skeletons. Feudalism was wiped out in that earlier calamity but, whaddaya know, less than a century after that the Renaissance emerged in a wholly new culture of cities. Maybe we will emerge from our culture of free parking to a new society of living, by necessity, much more lightly on the planet and for a long time, perhaps long enough to allow the terrain to recover from all the free parking.

Regards,
James Howard Kunstler

November 17, 2009

Overpopulation in the USA and the Fate of the Yeast People was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Let’s face it. Most of us have never had to kill our own food or forage in the forest to find enough wood to heat our home for the night. What would that be like? Would we be prepared? I highly doubt it.

The battle for global resources has already begun — the borders are being drawn and the players are suiting up. The grim reality is that commodities are being gobbled up around the globe, and as Earth’s population surges past six billion, resources are being stretched to the limit.

Six Billion Reasons to Worry

Some scientists predict that the planet can sustain only 8 billion people; there simply are not enough natural resources to handle any more than that. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s a pretty good indicator that at 6 billion, we have worldwide clean water problems, pollution, strife, disease, etc. At 8 billion, there will likely be even more problems.

There are only two remedies for this situation: Mother Nature and human nature. Mother Nature has a way of regulating itself, regardless of what Al Gore says. The great plagues and pandemics throughout history have wiped out millions of people in the blink of an eye. It could well happen again. Many believe we are overdue for a pandemic, and SARS, AIDS and bird flu have all been candidates, but none has done the job yet.

As medical science has improved, many diseases that used to be fatal are now nonexistent. The planet is a victim of its own success. But if a pandemic or other natural catastrophe doesn’t come along, then man usually steps up to the plate. This is nothing new — it’s been going on since the beginning of time.

So Easy a Caveman Could Do It

The struggle for survival is human and animal nature. As resources become scarcer, the superior “animal” will seize the resources from the lesser species. It’s the law of natural selection, or survival of the fittest. In our modern world, the fittest are already taking from the least fit, and it’s just going to get worse.

According to Agence France-Presse:

At Belgium’s initiative, the U.N. Security Council on Monday turned the spotlight on the link between illegal extraction of natural resources and armed conflict in trouble spots around the world, particularly in Africa.

Opening a daylong debate on the issue, Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht said his goal was to generate awareness that “good management of natural resources is important not just for development, but also for peace and security.”

The struggle for control of natural resources such as diamond, oil, timber and other raw materials has been a key factor in civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ivory Coast, Sudan’s Darfur region and Angola.

Keeping up With the Chens

According to Wikipedia, the old saying, “keeping up with the Joneses,” is “a popular catchphrase in many parts of the English-speaking world. It refers to the desire to be seen as being as good as one’s neighbors or contemporaries using the comparative benchmarks of social caste or the accumulation of material goods. To fail to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ is perceived as demonstrating socioeconomic or cultural inferiority.”

In China, that problem is really starting to rear its head. According to BBC News,

In a report published in 2006, the World Bank estimated that 8% of the Chinese population — about 106 million people — lived on less than $1 a day. Most of those are in the countryside.

This does not mean that Chinese farmers are not benefiting from the economic boom — they are.

Last year, average rural incomes grew by more than 10%. The problem is that urban incomes are growing faster.

China’s government is doing what it can to keep the problem under control, but so far, it’s not working so well. The reality is that major “social problems…can arise if the income gap continues to widen,” and it will.

Survivor Earth

A growing population in a world with fewer resources is a race that only a few can win, and to do so everyone will have to play a real game of Survivor.

In the coming years, the countries that are strategically positioned to survive are the ones with the most resources and a growing army to protect them. Countries that come to mind are Russia, China and even Venezuela. In my estimation, the best targets are Africa, Canada and our very own Alaska.

Only time will tell if the U.S. would actually go into World War III to protect Ontario or Alaska.

One thing is for certain: Global conflict based on a fight for resources is a growing problem without any immediate solution. In the meantime, the investors who are able to see opportunities where others see only problems will make a good amount of money.

They’ll realize that commodities — everything from corn to cocoa to gasoline to gold — are in lower supply and higher demand. It’s as simple as that, at least for now.

Yours for resource profits,

Kevin Kerr

August 3, 2007

The Coming Resource War was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.