The Collapse of Organisms, Ecosystems, Societies, and Civilizations
It is always primarily an energy issue.
In my studies of the journey of life on Earth and the human journey, the energy issue continually arose. Since our universe is nothing but energy, that makes sense. The enzyme was one of the earliest inventions of life, which speeds up chemical reactions up to billions of times faster. Chemical reactions are always about absorbing and releasing energy, and life’s chemical reactions are about using energy to either build itself or run itself, which are called anabolic and catabolic reactions. Without enzymes, life as we know it would not exist.
I have studied Nick Lane’s work for many years, and his latest book was very explicit: energy outranks everything else about life. Energy production at the mitochondrial level is the main reason why the cells of complex life live or die, and the electron transport chain that powers ATP production is all-important. Leaky electron transport chains lead to programmed cell death and aging. Animals with efficient electron transport chains in their mitochondria live far longer than those that don’t. That same dynamic of damaged mitochondria is what leads to human degenerative diseases, which is what kills most Westerners today (processed food, of poor energetic quality, is at the root of that).
Life and death have always revolved around the energy issue, from how organisms get it to how they use and preserve it to how running out of it means their demise, whether it means that another organism took it through grazing, predation, or parasitism, or poisoning of their energetic processes, or the inability to acquire enough energy.
Complex cells and complex life have many moving parts, which takes energy to create, maintain, and run. A warm-blooded mammal burns ten times the energy that a cold-blooded snake does, which is why a snake can live for years off of one good meal. The Cambrian Period marked the rise of complex ecosystems, and in the ocean, everything eats everything, and the evolutionary “arms race” between animals, with cyanobacteria at the base of that food chain (which is primarily an energy chain), has been waged ever since.
All mass extinctions in the eon of complex life have been about ecosystem collapses, as they ran out of energy for one reason or another – a lack of oxygen to power respiration, poisoning from volcanism, a bolide event that alternately burned Earth’s surface and blocked the sunlight, and so on. It always boiled down to a lack of sufficient energy to survive. Lane marveled at the complexity of a cell, with its many specialized components, and he performed a thought experiment of an observer that shrank to the subcellular level and could witness the activity in a cell, with the many comings and goings of molecules, as they are built, used, and destroyed in the bewildering complexity of life.
I have long written on the factors of the human journey, of energy, intelligence, and tools, which were inextricably intertwined. A complex cell, a complex organism, and a society can be seen as simply scaled versions of the same dynamics. In civilization, there were new levels of specialization and complexity, and just like with all life, energy was civilization’s lifeblood. Today, a modern city becomes uninhabitable in a few days if the energy flows stopped, such as food, electricity, and water (which is provided by the sunshine-driven hydrological cycle). All early civilizations collapsed as they ran out of energy. No civilization has ever had a sustainable energy source, as they depleted the forests, soils, and fossil fuels that sustained them. Joseph Tainter saw it as a reduction of return on investment in complexity, and he suggested that humanity would need a new energy source to stave off the collapse of industrial civilization. John Michael Greer calls the collapse process of civilization a “catabolic collapse,” which explicitly grounds it in life’s energetic processes.
I have been following the debates and controversies of societal collapses for the past generation. Global collapse by 2040 has been predicted since the 1970s, which all revolves around the energy issue, of course. This prediction of collapse naturally has the energy issue as the number one reason, as global society loses its resilience. Systems that lose their resilience, which is always primarily an energy concept, become ever more vulnerable to disruptive shocks, until the shock comes that collapses the system. We are tiptoeing along the edge of that abyss today, which is why I do what I do. Solve the energy issue once and for all, and the world will end as we know it, and nobody will miss it.
Wade, you wrote "Solve the energy issue once and for all, and the world will end as we know it, and nobody will miss it." This sounds as if the world as we know it now will end regardless of whether or not we can solve the energy issue between now and then. I certainly hope we can solve the energy crisis in time, or else that somehow the solution for the energy crisis appears and/or forces itself upon us in spite of our innate desire to keep doing what we have always done and refuse to do whatever is necessary for ourselves to survive this event. I personally would much rather have the solution forced upon me than never have the solution occur.