Folk Wandering

For those of you here to read a ten-part scenario about how the future of North America will likely unfold over the next century, fear not! We are half way through our look at the six big trends influencing the future. This week, I'm going to shine a light on a topic which has, unfortunately, become a dead horse that politicians continue to beat on, without grasping the wider implications nor the historical precedents. 

Mass migrations have happened repeatedly throughout human history. That's not a secret. Any number of factors can spark mass migration from natural disasters to man-made disasters to disease or economic depression. Spotty written records leave it unclear the exact causes of mass migration in the distant past. In the recent past, the 19th and 20th century, we've seen a number of mass migrations for all of the classic reasons. Obvious examples include the million and a half Irish who fled the Emerald Isle during the Potato Famine of the 1840s. Millions of Chinese fled the Qing Dynasty during the Tai Ping Rebellion of the 1850s and 60s. The mass migration of Italian populations in the late 19th and early 20th century is largely attributed to economic stagnation at home. These are by no means the only examples of mass migration in the 19th and 20th centuries. They were also lesser known but equally impactful migrations in the 19th century like the emigration of Germans from Europe to North America largely as a result of economic depressions of the 1840s and the revolutions of 1848, with a second wave 1870s in the wake of the formation of the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. In my own family history that my great great grandfather immigrated to the United States with that second group of Germans.

So how do we define a mass migration? The short, and unsatisfactory, answer is that it's depends. Some migrations while they may seem massive to the people who are being immigrated upon, are not necessarily considered that massive or disruptive in the homelands of the lands of origins of those people. For instance, my state of Oklahoma experienced a mass out-migration event. Amidst the impoverishment of the Great Depression, the land itself began to blow away. For a state with a population of small-holding farmers and sharecroppers, the Dust Bowl was an utter calamity. An estimated 400,000 people left the Sooner State, bound mostly for California and the Pacific Northwest. According to the 1930 census, the state had a population of 2.3 million people, meaning that in the first half of the 1930s, Oklahoma lost about 17% of its population, which is on par with the out-migration of Irish in the 18040s. At least we got jokes out of the mass-migration of Okies; Will Rogers quipped that as a result of the dust bowl, the average IQ of both Oklahoma and California increased.

Thanks to Will Rogers, the past had jokes...

But does the Okie diaspora qualify as a mass migration? In terms of percentage of population loss to Oklahoma, it appears so. But California at the time had a population of about 5.6 million, so the incoming Okies represented about 7% of the 1930 population. Furthermore, the Okies didn't cross any national borders, and while they were certainly visible and despised by the native California population, the Okies didn't represent a truly foreign culture, nor did they bring a distinct language or unfamiliar religion. 

But the Dust Bowl was nearly a century ago, so let's look at a more contemporary instance which, I think, will be quite relevant going forward. Today, the republic of Haiti has a population of about 11.5 million people. The Haitian diaspora is estimated at 3.5 million people, living across the Americas today. The majority of them live next door in the Dominican Republic, across the straits in Cuba, or in the United States. This means roughly 23% of all Haitians in the world do not live inside the borders of the Republic of Haiti. Once again it is worth noting that one region's loss is often another region's gain. Rumors started by Nazis aside, I think that is the case with the Haitian diaspora as well. Haitian Americans have contributed mightily to the cultural and economic vitality to the places they immigrate.

So do they count as a contemporary mass migration? In terms of population loss to their home country, I would say they do. And they crossed national borders in the process of migrating. They certainly check the ethnic, linguistic and cultural boxes that trigger collective freak-outs by the people in the lands to which they've immigrated. BUT, the estimated 850,000 Haitians currently residing in the US represent less than 1% of the native born population. 

The point of this is to try and drill down and get a feel for what constitutes a mass migration. Does it mean a loss of some significant percent of population from the immigrants homeland? Should a 15% population loss count? or should we go higher, say 25% ? Do the immigrants need to make up a similarly large portion of  population of the region where the immigrants end up? If so, what is that threshold? Does the mass migration need to fundamentally alter the cultural, linguistic or ethnic complexion of the destination? 

While a great many mass migrations involve some degree of suffering or disaster on the part of the migrant population, there are historical instances where a destination location actually encouraged emigration to their lands. Two historical examples of this latter phenomenon that immediately spring to mind are the invitation to Anglo settlers by the Mexican government to move to what would become the republic and then the state of Texas. Another is the migration of European Jews from across Western Europe to the kingdom of Poland at the invitation of various Polish monarchs, most notably Casimir III. And as with any honest examination of any human phenomenon, the results were mixed, to say the least. 

I do think both instances count as mass-migrations. While the record keeping wasn't great, modern estimates put the population of Texas in the early 1830s between 21,000-24,000, up significantly from the 4,000 or so in 1821 when Mexico achieved independence from Spain. Of this number, an estimated 17,000 were of white, Anglo, protestant stock from the United States. This movement certainly checks all the boxes, except that the population loss from the United States was not significant, and the immigration was largely encouraged by the Mexican government. Oops. 

At least the use of a musket as a club in close-
quarters combat is probably accurate...

The story of Jewish immigration to Poland during the Medieval Era is a bit hazier in terms of hard numbers. Medieval record keeping was both mixed in terms of quality, and many records that may have been reliable, simply haven't survived. Most estimates put the Medieval population between 1 and 1.25 million, with that population climbing to about 2 million by 1370 (the last year of Casimir III's reign). Estimates put the number of Jewish immigrant to Poland in the same time period between 80,000-100,000, with the Jewish population rising to some 200,000 by the end of the 17th century. However, these influxes came in waves, usually associated with expulsion from kingdoms in western Europe. By the time of the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, the Jewish population may have been as high as 30% in some areas, though at this point, they were no longer immigrants, and hadn't been for generations. Does this movement count as a mass migration? Probably, though because it enjoyed royal sanction, the friction faced by most recent arrivals simply wasn't as violent as faced by other immigrant groups at other times in history. 

I think what often springs to mind in the popular imagination, if anyone ever thinks of mass migration, is the notion that a large horde of people arriving at the gates of the kingdom. One only need look at the hysterical takes on right wing media about migrant caravans to see a modern iteration of the subliminal fear of the arrival of 'them'. Indeed, the rhetoric from the anti-immigrant crowd in the US often paints a specter of the new arrivals replacing the native inhabitants with a new culture. new language. new ideology and new political economy. I would guess most of us have heard claims of migrant street gangs turning sections of American cities into 'no go zones', the implication being those enclaves are just footholds for the new arrivals arrive, who plan to violently drive the native population off their land and into small enclaves. If this sounds like the arrival of Europeans to the New World, well, there's a reason the term 'projecting the shadow' exists. 

But there is a second type of mass migration that doesn't always involve wholesale population replacement. For instance, in the western Roman Empire the Germanic invasions of the late fourth and early fifth centuries often did not result in wholesale population replacement. Recent scholarship points to the notion that these migrating tribes were often fairly small, comprised mainly of a warrior class, their families, and probably a smattering of slaves and servants. In general these migrants invaded western Roman provinces to take military control of the regions, often to use as power bases in ongoing clashes with other Germanic tribes. Fairly often, they left Roman civil administration in place, probably for practical reasons. At any rate, 1000+ years later, the people of these countries still speak a largely Latin-derived language rather than a Germanic one. The case was different in England and Wales, because the Romano-Brittons fled with the legions back across the English Channel in 410. The population that remained promptly crashed without the support of the rest of the empire. As a result, most of England and Wales was largely depopulated by about 500 AD, except for the Celtic peoples living in far-wester Wales and Scotland. Those Romano-Brittons who remained were quickly conquered and absorbed into the Angle, Saxon and Jute tribes who arrived in large numbers starting in the sixth century. Not coincidentally modern English is a Germanic language, not a Romance one.

People expect mass migration to look like this....

So now that we maybe have some sense of what a mass migration is let's take stock of what a mass migration is not. While I think it should go without saying, this being the Internet I'm going to have to say it anyway; the current wave of immigration to the United States is not out of line with historical experience. I  write specifically about the United States, because I think the majority of people who read this will be from or live in the United States. According to the Census Bureau,  the foreign-born population of the United States in 2020 is 13.6%. Compare this to 1910, which was the highest period of immigration the foreign-born population, at 14.7% percent. This does put our current migration wave on par with prior experience, but it certainly does not lend much credibility to the argument that the United States is experiencing some kind of population replacement. On a very much related note, this round of immigration is largely peaceful, and is often done within a legal framework set out by the American government. It also involves the integration of said immigrants into the broader American population. Now I'm sure someone will say that the number of illegal immigrants in the country is much higher, that the illegal immigrants are going to out-populate the natives etc. etc. The fact is that even if that were true, and it's not, the current round of mass migration isn't particularly violent  matter the way many mass migrations have happened in the past. In fact I would go so far as to say that the indigenous people of North America would probably have appreciated European arrivals in the 16th 17th and 18th century if they had been anywhere near as industrious or peaceful as foreign arrivals to the United States are today.

... but it just as often looks like this.

So now it's probably time to tackle the topic of mass migration over the next century. At this point it's probably useful to set out a few parameters for what the future mass migration might look like. Namely where will these people come from, will their arrival be as refugees or conquerors, the effect be on North America, in terms of political economy, culture, ethnography and identity?

The first question of where these people come from is a tricky one because it will depend on where disaster strikes first. It will also depend on who's asking the question. As I intend to lay out later and this is maybe something of a spoiler alert my guess is 100 years from now there will be at least some people in Canada writing books about the mass migration from the northern United States into Canada. Similarly, literate people east of the Mississippi in what is now the United States may write long window tracks about the arrival of Caribbean war bands I would imagine that describe in central Mexico might write similar tracks about the arrival of the violent people from the north. But to make the pattern as general as possible and follow the historical record as closely as possible, I think it's generally safe to say that mass migrations start in regions that are either impoverished or experiencing extreme stress. Migrants almost always move to perceived centers of safety or prosperity. Has alluded to earlier this will almost certainly look different in different regions of the country. Again spoiler alerts, as the south west of the United States in the northwest of Mexico are made largely uninhabitable by climate change, I think those populations will move north east and south depending on a variety of push and pull factors. To give an example, as the water supply electrical grids in Arizona fail, a person or family from Arizona that is Mormon might choose to immigrate only as far as Utah. Conversely, someone who speaks English and is tired of living in 120° temperatures without air conditioning and running water, would likely journey as far east as Ohio is far north as British Columbia. To continue in that vein, a large portion of Arizona's population is of Latino or Mexican origin. A Latin person may feel safer moving south to the central valley of Mexico. And how those people arrive there will say a lot about how they are received and about the future course of history.

This brings us to the second thorny topic of whether the arrival will be peaceful or violent. Human history is full of examples of both things being the case and at times both things being true. As referenced above, the arrival of Germanic war bands  in the Western Roman Empire, while it often was associated with war, disease and famine, was not an invasion of extermination. To a large degree, it was simply the replacement of a corrupt overbearing imperial administration with a lighter, leaner one. Over time, the Germanic conquerors ended up becoming the very people they conquered rather than the other way around. Of course I'd be remiss if I did not point out that the Native American experience in North America whether we're talking United States, Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean, was very much the experience of being conquered and assimilated or in some cases entirely exterminated and replaced. Either way I think it's safe to say that unless the migration of people is to regions where human beings do not already exist, the arrival of the mass migrants will be accompanied by either violence or assimilation. Once again it bears repeating that violence and assimilation don't always go one way. Sometimes it to the migrants themselves that are annihilated or assimilated. Other times the migrants do the conquering of the local populations, and in the third scenario the two groups end up living in some sort of coexistence and form a new identity of their own.

So in a general sense how might the mass migratory process play out in North America over the next hundred years? I won't spoil the ending entirely, but I do think it's safe to say that there will be two main types of mass migrants. On one hand, we will almost certainly see mass migration due to climate change. Sea level rise will drive coastal peoples inland, while desertification will drive people from dry areas to wetter areas. In the case of Canada, the thawing of the north will offer enticement for new peoples and peopling. On the other hand, a second group of migrants won't necessarily arrive wanting to just build a new life but will arrive wanting to conquer new territory. These motivations are not purely good, evil or any other sort of moral ambiguity. Using the Germanic migrations that I mentioned earlier, very often Germans and German mercenary's had been employed by the Roman administration for centuries before going into open revolt against the Roman authorities. So how many times the movement of these Germanic peoples across the border the Empire was driven by violent encounters with people further to the east notably the most obvious being the Slavs and the Huns? 

It's not hard at all to see how United States government policy is driving a similar pattern in Central America. Thanks in part to the war on drugs, combined with over a century of general meddling in the affairs of Central American countries by the US government, many of these places now more closely resemble failed states than anything resembling a functional country. One might make exceptions for Costa Rica and Panama, mostly because Costa Rica was never directly interfered with by the United States, and as Panama set up as a exclusive economic zone by the United States government. But for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras, the experience has pretty much entirely been interference and overthrow of local governments by the north. This has already created migratory pressures which sent hundreds of thousands of Central Americans north through Mexico to the United States where they claim asylum. These migrants are then given little to no access to the mainstream of American economic and cultural life, very often falling in with criminal elements and then deported back to Central America with their only reliable means of survival being continued dependence on criminal elements. By elements, I mean drug cartels and affiliated street gangs. Could these groups form the nucleus of future warbands? Yes, they absolutely could. My guess is that as the central governing authority of the United States and Mexico principally continues to fail, it will become more and more attractive to cartels to not only operate criminal enterprises that exclusively control some region that they may wish to move into the business of "legitimate government". Using the historical example, the cartels may very well be the Germanic warbands of fourth and fifth century Western Europe. 

This doesn't even include interventions after 1945.
But I'm sure constantly destabilizing every country south of us for a century and a half will have no negative repercussions!

This is a long roundabout way of saying I expect the population of North America to shift drastically over the next century, and to continue shifting in the centuries to come. People will move from south to north, and from lowland to highland. While it is difficult to estimate how many will move in any given year, I would expect the large movements to happen in times of extreme stress, and yes, I think the current world order, such as it is, is under extreme stress. As a result, I would expect the foreign-born population of the United States to jump from 13% to around 20% by, let's say, the 2040 census. A million new arrivals a year would have that effect, and with global instability being what it is, I don't think that's a far-fetched scenario. I would expect the foreign-born population of Canada to increase from 23% today to as high as 30% by the same 2040 benchmark. Mexico is the outlier of the three big nations of North America, with only 1% of the population being foreign-born, though, amusingly, some 2/3s of this number are from the United States. I do expect that number to rise dramatically as government authority fails in Central American countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. If 10% of the population of Central America takes flight in the face of organized violence and climate disruptions, that would push some 5 million people north into Mexico, pushing their foreign-born population to roughly 4% of the population by 2040.

I expect another round of extreme stress and re-arraigning of the social order to follow the current one in about 80 years. it will probably kick off around the end of the hundred year scenario I'm building, and will result in another wave of mass migration. But we will get to that in due time. 

While it goes a it beyond the scope of the scenario, I think in the middle to long term, let's say 500-1,000 years, it's likely English will become a fragmented language, with new languages evolving from it across North America. The same phenomenon will happen to Spanish. Both languages are spoken widely enough and with enough local variation to form language families in the far future. If we could sit down with a scholar 1,000 years from now, maybe in the highlands of central Mexico or somewhere around the Great Lakes, and if that scholar had access to abundant written materials, you and that scholar could piece together a history of a continent in which peoples wandered from areas of distress and violence to areas of perceived stability and prosperity. I think two specific groups would stand out as being, if not the most notorious, then certainly the most well-known of the migrant groups: the Caribmoun and the Pueblo Darien. These groups would probably get the blame for toppling the Second US Republic and the Revolutionary Government of Mexico, but more on that later...

Next week, we will take a closer look at a topic that doesn't get the attention it deserves, because talking about it would mean making the ultra-rich ultra-uncomfortable. And we can't have that can we? Or can we? Check back next week to find out!

Not Your Regularly Scheduled Program

Due to a family medical issue (no cause for alarm, everything's fine), and final rough-drafting of the book I've been working on with Dr. Ryan Mattson, Inequality by Design: How a Rigged Economy Fractures America and What We Can Do About It, I haven't had time to put together a presentable blog post in my History of the Future series. 

But that's burying the lede a bit, isn't it? 

The lede. Not buried.

You read that right; Ryan and I wrapped up the working draft of a book set to be published by Upriver Press in spring of 2025! We still have a ways to go, with the line edits, proofreading and typesetting still ahead of us, but the book really has rounded into shape nicely. As the publication date gets firmed up, I will start posting about the book, and the topics it covers.

To put it briefly, we're writing about how economic inequality in the United States is much worse that one might think at first glance. Don't run away screaming though! While the subject of the book can get a bit depressing, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And no, the light is not an oncoming train. I'm a firm believer in lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness, so we offer both diagnosis of the problem rooted in macroeconomics, and offer potential solutions for both people and policymakers.

When the History of the Future posts starts up again next week, we will go on a walk. Or more specifically, a wandering. A folk wandering, with the millions who, in the near future, will have to pack up everything and move to higher ground.

Hmm... Maybe not THAT light in the darkness....
Our book does come with a Lord of the Rings reference or two, though!

An Empty Continent

    Today's subject will cover an unpleasant topic: extinction! That’s right, we’re going to talk about the elimination of entire species from the global ecosystem. More specifically, I intend to address the impact of human pollution beyond dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because in tandem with the impacts of human climate change, there's also the impact of people using the natural world as a dumping ground for everything that is inconvenient or sometimes outright dangerous to human life. This includes all varieties of pollution from sewage, untreated runoff from agriculture, plastics trash gyres in the oceans, the micro plastics that are now show up in rainwater all over the world. And to be clear and unfortunately honest, no additional natural parks or marine reserves will get humanity out of from under our own boot-heel. 

    Once again let us get an obvious caveat out of the way; human beings have always impacted the natural environment. In fact, it's likely that since modern humans evolved approximately 400,000 years ago, no place where humans lived has been a pristine natural ecosystem since. To use a local example, the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve, in my home state of Oklahoma, explicitly seeks to restore grasslands of the central plains to the way the ecosystem functioned after the arrival of Native Americans. 

We've been doing this quite a while.

    If you really want to interrogate the idea of the ’natural world’, in the Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy, author Cixin Liu debates the idea wether nature itself can even be ‘natural’. In the book Death's End, one character runs computer simulation looking at what would happen on Earth if natural life never existed. The simulation found that such a simulation cannot produce a conclusion, because simply by existing, the natural world influences even the basic laws of physics. This is a lot to wrap your head around, so I'll simply leave a link to the story and you can read it for yourself. The whole trilogy (Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End) is fantastic, and really pushes one to think about big ideas from a whole variety of perspectives. The trilogy takes place over millions of years, but focuses on the next four hundred or so.

    This blog is focused on just the next hundred right now, so let’s get back to the task at hand. The problem today isn’t that people impact the natural world. The problem is a messy trifecta of scale, pace and the feedback loop from climate change. 

    Taking these issues in order, we should first look at the scale of the problem; human beings currently dump billions of tons of CO2 into the giant areal sewer we collectivity refer to as ‘the sky’, along with millions of tons of other problematic particles and molecules from NOX, mercury sulfates, to VOCs and micro-plastics which, as mentioned earlier, can now be found in rainwater all over the world. All these molecules make their way into the water cycle. And we haven’t even gotten to the mountains of trash we dump directly into the oceans, as well as the massive amounts of waste runoff from agricultural operations, which very often includes huge amounts of pesticides and fungicides, was well as fertilizers and animal waste. All of which flows back, eventually, to us humans. 

^Carcinogens not shown

    Not only are these pollutants building up in the world’s ecosystems, the rate of the pollution buildup can only accelerate, because the economic model we operate demands perpetual growth. With limitless growth, comes limitless pollution. There is of course another factor at play beyond the rapacious growth of capital intensive industries and the byproducts that they produce. A great many people outside of the industrial world want to join in the prosperity that is modern industrial civilization. From the outside looking in, modern (industrial) life, with its easy access to clean-ish water, sanitation, cheap food, and a smorgasbord of fashionable consumer goods, looks like an endless party. And for those in the ‘developing world’ wanting to attend, that party will end sometime over the next 150 years. For a great many of them, they will never get let in the door. I don't want to use ecological consciousness as a rhetorical tool with which to bludgeon the poor peoples of the world into accepting shorter lifespans, unhealthy environments and material poverty. The fact that there are things to life other than material prosperity, isn’t much of a consolation to someone living in a shanty town in a tropical metropolis.

    This estimate, that fossil-fueled industrial civilization has about 150 or so years left, roughly mirrors the 150 years it has existed. Prior to 1870 or so, industrialization was limited to the East Coast of North America, and a corner of Northwest Europe, from the midlands of England, down to Lyon, France, then back up to roughly Hamburg, Germany. These little slivers of humanity lived on barely 5% of the world’s landmass, and constituted maybe 5% of the population. And in five to seven generations, depending on how you count, the industrial way of living spread to every major city and decent-sized population around the world. I would estimate the percentages of land and people engaged in industrial economic activity has reversed, with only 5% of land and people NOT engaged in some step in the industrial food web.

    And this scale of change is reflected in the natural world as well. This recent study found that roughly like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. That leaves 4-5% for every other form of mammalian life. While the scale of impact by agriculture is slightly better, about 37% of Earth’s surface is used for agriculture, that figure jumps to 50% when you count only ‘habitable’ land. Yes, the Sahara desert is huge, but no people want to live or farm there. On the high seas, which make up 70% of the Earth’s surface, 40% is considered effected by human activity, with much of that activity concentrated in shallow areas where marine life is most abundant. As it is on land, so it is on the seas; no one wants to live in the desert.

Except camels. They don't mind living 
in the desert.

    Compounding the scale and pace of human pollution are the impacts from climate change, which compounds other forms of pollution. As the climate destabilizes, ecosystems must shift to accommodate a hotter planet. But the problem is twofold; first, the rate of change is so much faster than natural ecosystems can handle without devastating species loss. If we could say the current warming will to happen over the next thousand years or so, then many ecosystems might (emphasis on might), be able to move north or up on their own. The natural world has done this before, after all. 

    Second, the impacts of climate change will likely force human beings to double down on the mistakes of industrial civilization. The reason is core to the predicament in which industrial civilization finds itself; almost all humans alive to today, with very few exceptions, serve the industrial machine in one way or another.. This is true from elites who operate the systems of finance all the way down to the janitors and scavengers and trash collectors who work at what might be considered the very bottom of the economic pyramid. For example, consider the ship breakers in India whose job is, as it sounds, to break up old ships for salvage. Even groups like the Amish, who live as far outside the modern system as possible, still use modern power tools (they just can’t own them) and earn incomes outside their local communities.

    Everyone’s material livelihood depends on the maintenance of industrial civilization, and as of right now industrial civilization has only one operating imperative; the conversion of raw materials into sellable products, many of which constitute one time use products which humans immediately throw away. To some extent this is avoidable, and my family and I make a point to avoid single-serving products, but in other cases, avoidance would mean going without. Who hasn’t bought a product that DIDN’T come packaged in single-use plastic? In a morbid bit of irony, even when we find a bio-degradable form of single-use plastic, customers can reject the arguably better product because it’s too noisy to open. I wish I was joking, but this actually happened with Sun Chips.

I wish this story was some lame satire...

     But someone makes money off those plastics, and the companies whose products go into those plastics make money off of selling those products. Thus the cycle perpetuates itself. This is all a roundabout way of saying that as climate change pushes industrial civilization with compounding problems such as disasters, crop failures, famines and desertification, combined with rising sea levels and increased soil erosion from a more active water cycle, humanity will have very little choice but to double down on the existing model of operating a fossil-fueled economy.

    This all paints very bleak picture, and indeed in some sense the future is bleak, but there is, I suppose, one minor silver lining. We're talking about impacts that will only last a few thousand years. That's not much consolation to anyone reading this, or i anyone multiple generations in the future, but it is a silver lining. How is it a silver lining? Thanks to radiative adaptation, new life forms will evolve to fill the gaps and niches of the ecosystems left behind by the extinction of a great many species that exist today. Ecologists posited on and off since at least the 1990s. and probably earlier. that humanity is pushing the natural ecosystems of the planet towards a sixth great extension. This is almost certainly in progress, but it doesn't have to end up with a full-blown extinction event.

    Humanity could choose to make different choices. We could reduce, reuse and recycle. Indeed, here in the US, we almost took that path in the 1970s. While I did mock National Parks and Marine Reserves earlier, such efforts are worth making. I believe nature is worth conserving for its own sake, but there's also a self interested reason for conservation. A great number of pharmaceutical products derive directly from the natural biodiversity of our planet. A poster child for this would be the horseshoe crab. The blood harvested from the horseshoe crab is key to many (human) life-saving drugs. If we wipe out the natural habitat of the horseshoe crab, it’s not an all clear that modern pharmacology could replace the compounds produced for us for free by this amazing crustacean.

Dirty hippies, being right about something!

    I do want to take a paragraph to dispel any notion you may have that discussion of mass extinction is synonymous with the end of humanity. The Chicxulub impact, which wiped out the dinosaurs except for the avian branch that gave us delicious chickens. Modern mammals arose to fill the many of the ecological gaps left by the now extinct land dinosaurs, eventually giving rise to the great apes, and, after millions of year, anatomically modern humans. So while it was a defining event in the natural history of our planet, it was nowhere near as devastating as the Permian Extinction, which resulted in the extinction of roughly 57% of all biological families on the planet. It’s ironic that the Permian extinction was responsible for a significant amount of the fossil fuel reserves that human beings are now using to push the planet towards a sixth extinction. All that weird irony aside the point is that extinction level event does not have to be in a complete ecological collapse. A few human beings would survive an extinction level event on par with the Jurrasic extinction. Humanity would most certainly not survive an event like the Permian Extinction. 

    Speaking of dying, one of the impacts of all of this pollution ending up in our natural ecosystems and water cycles is that the rates of cancer will almost certainly skyrocket for hundreds of years. While living creatures have always had to contend with malignant tumors, the degree to which cancer has become a cause of death around the world is truly out of line with previous human experience. While written historical records are incomplete, and the archaeological record can only shed so much light on the subject, in the preindustrial context most human beings died of infectious diseases in the first few years of life. A great many died of malnutrition and famine. War, that third horsemen of the apocalypse came in a distant third. And cancer itself was, we would guess, a rare problem reserved only for people who lived an extraordinarily long life by pre-industrial standards. Granted, “extraordinarily long life” by pre-industrial standards would have meant living into one’s forties, but the point remains. Today cancer is in the top five, along with heart disease, accidents, lack of health insurance, and respiratory illnesses as a top-five killer of Americans. I would imagine that by the turn of this century, cancer will be the leading cause of death across all age brackets. 

    This predicament is best exemplified by the weed killer Roundup. Because genetic modification focused on creating plants which can survive a hefty does of the stuff, Roundup is becoming inseparable from modern agriculture. Any farmer who does not want their fields overrun by weeds must apply multiple rounds of Roundup to keep down the undesirable plants. As a result, glyphosate, the cancer-causing chemical which also makes Roundup such a potent weed killer, persists in soils for weeks to months after use. In one study, 36% of 154 tested municipal water supplies in the Midwest showed detectable amounts of glyphosate. While the detectable level is not officially considered harmful to humans, I would take that as a small consolation. And as weeds develop resistance to glyphosate, every year farmers must spray more of it just to keep the 8 billion fed. Once again we can see how the modern farming, like many aspects of industrial civilization is caught in a bind. Human beings need the calories from corn and soy, the two crops on which Roundup is primarily used for, but natural methods of weed control, while viable, are not nearly as profitable nor efficient as spraying Roundup ready crops, to keep a hungry world well fed. I suppose the one upside, is that even if weeds become completely Roundup resistant, one can always go out and pull weeds by hand. And that will require a much larger agricultural workforce. 

    To avoid setting too dark of a tone for this post I would like to circle back to the notion that the natural world isn't natural or at least the natural world always seeks to find some new form of ecological balance. Yes in the centuries of head to pollution and ecological devastation that humans are visiting upon the natural world of North America and by extension upon our selves will be devastating. Great number of species will go extinct a great number of ecosystems will collapse and will never return and the world that human beings would have it in for instance 1000 years will be an ecologically impoverished landscape. What do I mean by this well for instance the recent study found that something like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. The natural world is already tragically impoverished and I don't see any reason to think that the current trajectory will not make it even more so. Also it's worth noting that as equal ecosystems encounter disequilibriums there are often massive almost tidal wave like events where a disruptive or what we might deem invasive species will invade and ravage an ecosystem but then also experience a die-back of its own as it overshoots what the ecosystem to naturally carry. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached. Unfortunately for the natural world and for the humans dependent on it, that will involve a great deal of unpleasantness before the new equilibrium takes hold. 

    So what might an ecologically impoverish North America look like in 100 years? I think two of the best, most instructive examples, are the islands of Iceland and Rapa Nui. 

They didn't just pillage and burn Saxon towns,
they enjoyed a quiet life on the farm too!

    Iceland is a decent-sized volcanic island located between Scotland and Greenland in the North Atlantic. The first known human inhabitants, the Norse, arrived sometime in the eighth century. Based on fossil and very limited written records, the island was covered by fairly lush forests. The Norse loved keeping cattle and eating beef  (who doesn’t?) so they immediately began clearing the trees for pasture land. What the Norse did not take into account was that unlike their native Scandinavia, Iceland had very thin soils. So as they imported cattle and plows and began to practice European-style agriculture in an ecosystem that was not fit to support it, they quickly destroyed most of the topsoil of the island. The largely barren, rocky ice-covered landscape we know today did not look like it did 1,300 years ago.

    The island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island and located about 1,300 miles west of Chile in the South Pacific, suffered a similar fate. When the Polynesians arrived on Easter island approximately 1,000 years ago, they two found an island covered in trees and home to a rich marine ecosystem. And for a number of centuries they managed to live in some degree of symbiosis with the natural world. But as almost always happens, this story does not have a happy ending for the natural ecosystem of Easter island. Eventually, all the trees were cut down and in their place there was very little other than thick-stemmed grass to hold down the topsoil. But the Polynesians couldn’t eat the grasses needed to hold onto the topsoil, sot the Easter Islanders had to become very good at dry rock gardening agriculture and became even more dependent on the sea to provide them with food. By the time Europeans visited Easter island, their written records mention that Easter islanders operated canoes made of reads grasses bound together with twine, while their ancestors likely arrived piloting sturdy, large, and most importantly, wooden canoes made from trees. in the case of Rapa Nui, the worst ecological devastation took place after the arrival of Europeans. Diseases, against which the the Polynesians had no immunity, ravaged their population. In the name of ‘economic development’, the 19th century Chilean government decided that it would be a good idea to start raising sheep on Easter island. But that's a story for another time.

Seriously. Chile brought sheep here. On Purpose.

    Both the Polynesians and the Norse adapted to a more ecologically impoverished reality. Depending on how one looks at the situation, one could even argue that both peoples thrived in the face of adversity. In these two examples, I think we can glimpse the future of North America. Barring some cataclysm, the human population will survive and indeed in some places will thrive. But over the near term, they will do so on a continent with a devastated ecosystem, a host of tropical diseases and staggeringly high rates of cancer. These factors will combine with plummeting birth rates and mass migration-drive conflict, to put the human population into a steep nosedive. 

As of writing this post, the population of North America sits at 618 million people, and will grow to a projected 709 million by 2100. At this point, most projections assume the population stagnates, with the figure for 2125 being roughly the same, about 700 million people. These models rely on two variables: expected birth rates and life expectancy, and, most importantly, assume the future will look like the past. As countries urbanize and industrialize, birth rates drop, but life expectancy increases, so overall populations still grow. But as we’ve discussed over the past few posts, the future will likely not look like the past at all. Or, more accurately, the future will look like the past, only the direction of all trends, including population, will go into reverse. A modest -0.4% annual population decline gives us a 2125 population of 405 million, with populations in each sub-region coming in at 254 million for the US and Canada, 121 million for Mexico and Central America, and 29 million for the Caribbean.

While the numbers seem stark, a 0.4% increase in the death rate would only see annual deaths in the United States increase from about 3.28 million annually, to just over 3.29 million deaths annually. And this population decline rate relies solely on a slight uptick in annual deaths. I didn’t even touch expected birth rates. 

But brith and death rates do not remain static. Humans, like every other population of animals, respond to their environment. I expect the human population in North America hit a low point between 300 and 400 years from today, at between 5 to 10% of the current population, or between 31 and 62 million. Once again, it wouldn’t take a cataclysm to reach that number. If population decline accelerated from -0.4% to -0.8% annually, we would bottom out at 67 million in 2375 and 34 million by 2450. The biodiversity of the continent will be similarly impoverished, with huge tracts of land either barren desert or tropical wetlands with ecosystems dominated by the most opportunistic, aggressive forms of life. 

Just replace the column with a McDonalds sign.

    Next week, we will take a walk, as the impacts of climate change, ecosystem chaos, de-industrialization and resource scarcity push more and more people from their homes greater and greater numbers. Check back next Friday as we go on a folk-wandering.