The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century: Essays on the Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament

This unique and much-needed compendium of essays, Bottlenecks of the 21st Century, addresses the big existential issues of our time from a holistic - “whole elephant” - perspective. Integrating well-established insights from a wide range of disciplines - evolution, ecology, physics, economics, anthropology, human behavior, and more - White and Hagens provide a “big picture” assessment of the enormity of the human enterprise and the progress traps in which Homo sapiens, “wise man”, finds himself. Now, as we currently endure the Covid-19 pandemic (an unanticipated but probably inevitable bottleneck constraint), the puzzle pieces are coming into sharp focus as emergent properties of our fatal flaw: our inherited inability to recognize long term threats and limits to growth - overpopulation, overconsumption, overshoot of Earth’s carrying capacity. White and Hagens are not fatalistic, but realistic and practical. They take us through our blind spots as the mindless, amoeba-like Superorganism passes through the downside of the Carbon Pulse, and suggest a Great Simplification for the future, an awakening both needed and possible on the part of Homo sapiens if we are to justify the “sapiens” descriptor. This remarkable book posits a potential path to a better, far smaller, human footprint.

After millennia of amassing scientific knowledge in specialized fields, Homo sapiens now need a synthesis view of their place in the cosmos that unites ecology, psychology, anthropology, economics, physics, and biology. Refreshingly realistic, secular and non-partisan, “Bottlenecks of the 21st Century accomplishes just this. From this book emerge principles and paradigms for a new way of living on planet earth that incorporates a deep-time ethic and a respect for all lifeforms. The ideas presented are not esoteric, many of the concepts are blindingly obvious once realized, but currently remain masked by our biological blindspots and powerful consensus trance. The beauty of this book is that it provides a framework from which to intelligently navigate through the coming bottlenecks of the 21st century. I highly encourage creative minds to study this synthesis, embody its principles, and collaborate together to steer our planet towards more desirable futures.

DJ White and NJ Hagens have released a new book. "The Bottlenecks Of The 21st Century - Essays On The Systems Synthesis Of The Human Predicament". Which encompasses the essential concepts that we need to be aware of in order to grasp a more coherent understanding of the modern world. Where we came from. And where we might more wisely choose to go. A thinker's book. Powerfully and yet, poetically presented. Fans of great literature will be drawn in by the prose. And be illuminated by the information. Quote "We'll extend this understanding back to the dawn of life on earth and forward to it's end, a direction that is inexorable, but with results that are never inevitable." Crisp type size on ultra bright paper with full margins that book lovers will appreciate wrap cutting edge content that is invaluable. Cheers to the next 300,000 years.

Nate Hagens and DJ White’s book is the kind of book I’d like to write someday, but covering other angles of society, energy, ecology, industry, transportation, and human nature.This and my future book, are printed only on acid free paper to preserve knowledge. I’ve written two books for scientific publisher Springer about why the electric grid can’t outlast fossil fuels. Making computer chips requires thousands of steps over several weeks -- any power outage and they all have to be tossed out. They are humans highest technical achievement and so likely to be the first to end. Yet so many books, magazines, and journals are found only online and can only be read with electrical devices that depend on microchips. Most of this knowledge will be gone by 2100 or before.This book was written for college students at the University of Minnesota. I’ve seen many iterations as Nate perfected his teachings over a decade. You couldn’t find a better book to give to anyone who is energy blind, but especially teenagers since this book might change what career they choose. The authors recommend young people follow their passion, but I think there are some pretty obvious careers and skills to pursue as we return to a world powered by muscle and wood as fossil fuels decline and the electric grid winks out.Much of the book is about human psychology, which is critical to understanding how the coming Great Simplification may play out. Here are some examples from the first 100 pages (altered, cut, paraphrased by me):The way things have been the last several hundred years is not the way they have been for the bulk of the human past, nor will be for the bulk of human future. You exist in a near-stroboscopic blip of time in which humanity is churning through millions of years of resources in a one-time pulse. This has ramifications both wonderful and terrible, and we should probably make ourselves aware of them if we are to make self-awareness actually good for anything.The information to be covered is existentially challenging, but the human condition has always faced existential challenges of one sort or another which required living humans to rise to them. But there’s a psychological adjustment to make that has to do with the tapestry of expectations and beliefs about the future we’ve soaked up from the cultural narratives we exist within.The long-term story of complex life is steered as much b catastrophe as by stability with ~99.9% of all species ever to live now extinct (or speciated).Mankind’s cleverness at opening new niches finally tapped the dead remains of fossil plants from earlier eras. This grew human biomass by an order of magnitude and granted a bolus of temporary energy wealth, which humans created the industrial society run the energy of these long dead organisms. This enabled us to take anything we wanted, which is now leading to mass extinctions.Why does something feel bad or good to us at all? It’s because the ancestors who “felt good” about doing things which happened to enhance their relative fitness at that time survived to pass on these tendencies and the behavioral rewards inherent in their particular brain structure. Sex feels great. Eating high-energy-content food feels great. Being a high-status tribal member feels great. Hating outgroups feels great. And killing large prey (and outgroup members during wartime) feels great. To some of us that is such an uncomfortable thing to hear it feels incorrect. Our ability to recognize the way our own brains function is limited because our conscious minds can access only the output results of the more-powerful brain regions which influence us, and not the processes they use to arrive at those results.The mindless evolution of life across the ages has created a world of incredible wonder and diversity. Our current economics consider this to have zero value, but in our mind se (most of us) realize otherwise. Swimming over a coral reef, walking in a rainforest with its sounds, hiking a desert, we are surrounded by other species that have survived until now.Then on page 99 my favorite part of the book – how candy and oil are similar. I used to trick-or-treat for three nights: beggars night, Halloween, and clean-up, so I loved this metaphor. Author DJ White sets it up by explaining that he was the oldest of four siblings and found more candy than the others by getting up first, and hiding his easter basket with candy from the other siblings baskets in the basement. Now a metaphor of candy and economics and oil:You can only eat what you find. My dog understands this, but the fact that hardly any large new oilfields are being discovered hasn’t filtered into the common wisdom. The filled Easter baskets have long since been emptied, but most Americans think the USA is now a net oil exporter. Not even close.You can only eat it once. Once you eat it, it’s gone. The sophistication of this parable has leapfrogged neoclassical economics, which believes that demand creates energy and that resources will always be found if the price is right. I literally seethed with demand during the lean months, but it didn’t make any candy appear. I had no money, so it didn’t matter that the stores had candy.Concentrations of energy are finite and unevenly distributed, and mostly found already. What is our oil doing underneath all those foreigners? There is such a thing as “abiotic oil”, but nobody has ever found enough to make it useful. DJ used to look for more candy in the yard after he ran out of the good stuff a week later, and compares his hunt to why oil companies are no longer actively looking for new oilfields. They know that what’s left is the equivalent of ant-covered jellybean remnants and rained-on marshmallow peeps. [a longer review will be at energyskeptic in August 2021]The rest of my review will be at energyskeptic