There’s a pretty good article in the April, 2010 Atlantic Magazine about US Army General Stanley McChrystal and the war in Afghanistan (“Man Versus Afghanistan” by Robert Kaplan). In this article, Kaplan talks about an ancient philosophical debate regarding the nature of world history. This big question is whether impersonal environmental forces and uncontrollable social dynamics determine the fate of nations and societies, or is there a “social will” developed by our great leaders that transcends the influence of “guns, germs and steel” (recalling the book with that name by Jared Diamond, which expounds the environmental-determinism viewpoint so as to debunk the alleged glories of Western Civilization; how politically correct!).

This is an interesting question, one that too few Americans think about. I took several history classes while in high school and college, and heard various historical discussions while studying for my masters in economics. And yet, I do not ever remember this question being framed out and dealt with.

However, being an eternal student dedicated to keeping my mind growing despite the many decades that have passed since I was at university, I have read up on the issue and can appreciate just how important it is. I don’t intend to settle on an answer right here; this is one of those questions that leave you in a better place even though you really can’t answer it once and for all (true philosophical questions are like that). But I would like to share some interesting thoughts on the subject that I came across recently while surfing the web.

There’s an interesting book about the past and the future by a Canadian professor named Thomas Homer-Dixon. The book is called “The Upside of Down”, and was published in early 2008 (unfortunately just a few quarters before the mortgage financial crisis later that year).

Professor Homer-Dixon focuses on where the world is today with regard to its critical economic and political systems, and where it might all be heading. Homer-Dixon is definitely a big-picture guy. And he’s definitely approaching things from the deterministic side of the aisle, getting down to the nitty-gritty of resources and crop yields and energy technology and water supply and political systems dynamics. He doesn’t spend much time weighing the nuances of communitarian leadership, democracy, socialism, human rights, feminist deconstruction, religious fundamentalism and other visionary ideals. The good professor is more interested in what nature and system gyrations are throwing at the human spirit.

According to Homer-Dixon, they are throwing quite a bit, and aren’t going to let up anytime soon. The overall impression that you get is summed up in the refrain from a Credence Clearwater Revival hit from the early 1970s: “There’s a bad moon on the rise” (yes, the line that was famously confused by many as “there’s a bathroom on the right”). At the core of the Homer-Dixon analysis is the concept of “EROI”, i.e energy return on investment.

This is another important concept that the average American needs to get up to speed with. It basically says that our energy sources, be they coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas, wind, solar, biofuel or whatever, require the use of energy up-front before they can be used to provide energy (be it heat, light, motion, radio waves, etc.) at a particular time and place. I.e., somebody has to use energy to find oil or coal or uranium or wind, then has to use more energy to extract or harness it, then build plants to prepare it, and then get the output energy to the right place (to be burned on-site, e.g. gasoline in a car engine, or burned and then transmitted by an electricity wire grid). Oh, and then clean up the mess; e.g., clean up the pollution and possible global warming from greenhouse gasses, or find a safe place to bury nuclear waste. Even solar panels create pollution when produced (and have to be replaced after a while), and wind turbines can disrupt wildlife ecologies and kill lots of birds.

So, when you add up all of the energy needed to get the right kind of energy at the right time and place, you start to wonder if it’s all worth it. That’s what EROI is about; theoretically, any EROI above 1-to-1 is a net gain for the world. However, in practice, you want something even higher. EROI is very hard to accurately calculate; it involves a lot of guess work, there is no standard method to do it. But various academic studies indicate that fossil fuels have a high EROI, sometimes above 10-to-1 (although they might not be fully accounting for the eventual costs from pollution and climate change). Nuclear energy is also up there, but again, there is much uncertainty about the eventual costs from clean-up or radioactive damage. Wind and solar sometimes get above the 5-to-1 ratio, but only in certain circumstances. They clearly are not as versatile as petroleum is (e.g., petroleum can be burned most anytime; but the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun isn’t always shining).

The scary thing is that some experts believe that our world’s energy supply has a steadily declining EROI, despite all of the new technologies being introduced. We’ve used up the best fossil fuel supplies on the planet, and now we’re scraping the barrel, hoping that improved technology will keep the EROI at the point where investors and governments will keep on providing financing for discovery and use. But at some point, as EROI falls, prices have to go up (well, they are already going up; we have already seen $100 per barrel oil, and soon will again). And at some point, high energy prices will really gum up the world economy. And that means real suffering at some point. I.e., more poor people, less nice things, less mobility, less fresh water, more disease, etc. People generally aren’t very happy when that is the general trend. They can get a bit unreasonable, and even start wars to fight over what economic resources remain to be had. Homer-Dixon points out that we’re already seeing this in Darfur/Sudan and Haiti. And the April Atlantic has a map-article on Yemen, showing that it will be next.

The big problem, if this does happen, is that so much of the world, the developed world anyway, has had it so good for so many years. When people are used to poverty, when they’ve never had it better, they tend to endure a lot of deprivation quite peacefully. But when they’ve had a taste of the good life and then start seeing it slip away . . . well, look out.

One of the best historical examples of this, of course, is the Roman Empire. So, not surprisingly, Homer-Dixon focuses on the energy situation of the western empire from the first through fifth century. The Roman Empire did not have gasoline or electricity; they got almost all of their work and power from slaves and animals. And slaves and animals, in turn, got their energy from crops grown on farms (supplemented by animals hunted in the woodlands). So it was the farmland and woodlands that fueled the Roman Empire. Homer-Dixon cites some past studies indicating that this arrangement had an EROI of over 1, maybe up around 3. For a while, anyway. As the population of the Empire rose in the second and third centuries, the farmers pushed their crop production to the max. Unfortunately, they did not stop to consider long-term effects.

So, by 300 AD or so, the farms weren’t as productive as they once were, and many of the forests were suffering after being stripped. And the Roman leadership just wasn’t able anymore to conquer new lands for crop growing. So, food got more expensive, and eventually more scarce.

The Empire responded, starting with Diocletian and Constantine, to institute more complex, inter-dependent arrangements between government, military and the business sector. These arrangements stemmed the decay for a hundred years or so.

But after 400, it was clear that the western Empire’s prosperity was coming to an end; the increasingly complex government and economic networks turned out to have weak points that eventually failed, starting a cascade of collapse. The many people who had it so good for so long started getting antsy. There was more bickering and fighting amidst the leadership, speeding up this collapse. Instead of trying to find a fair arrangement where everyone shares the burden while long-term solutions could be sought, there was more and more fighting for control of dwindling resources. And so, by 500 AD, the western Empire was on the way out; the Legions could no longer stop the barbarian tribes (most of the remaining Legions were staffed by barbarians), trade plummeted, transport networks collapsed, plagues increased, banditry was rampant, cities became uninhabitable, and the Dark Ages were starting. Life became simple and short once again. Was this all because of declining EROI and a fragile, overly complex political and economic system?

Well, no. Perhaps good leadership could have kept the populace from panicking, and could have promoted a long-term plan for “rational, shared sacrifice”, so as to buy time for new technologies and governing structures to emerge. Unfortunately, that’s a rather hard trick for human beings, such as they are. Both then and now. As the financial panic of late 2008 showed, people with much to lose are still unlikely to sit tight when serious threats emerge. Other than a few saints, most people in such circumstances do all they can to cut their losses and pay little attention to the ‘good of the whole’. And that’s not good.

So, an EROI analysis seems to get a purchase on the end of the western Empire and the coming of the Dark Ages in Europe. But what about Byzantium, the eastern half of the Empire, which survived until the mid 1400s? Were they also a victim of fragile complexity and declining EROI? The eastern Empire went down more gradually than Rome did, being eaten away over several centuries by Muslim Arab and Turkish forces. Perhaps food energy was not the problem in the more temperate climates of Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. Even if crop yields were declining, there were various alternative sources of protein in those places, e.g. fish from the near-by Mediterranean and Black Seas. Ship building and sea-faring technologies developed quite a bit after 500.

But, as far as social system complexity goes, Byzantium was certainly up there. Even today we use the term “Byzantine” to describe overly complex situations. And the religions that were at the core of the conflict were a contrast in complexity. Byzantine Christianity had its Trinitarian theology developed by a series of ecumenical councils, and its many levels of deacons and priests and bishops and metropolitans and monks and abbots and abbesses. Islam seemed a bit simpler, both in theology and in structure.

And sometimes simpler can be smarter. In the final chapters of Edward Gibbon’s classic “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, the Turk attackers of Constantinople were actually using early versions of gunpowder canons. The Byzantines mostly stuck with old-time warring skills inherited from the Roman Legions. So, system complexity and fragility probably does enter into the collapse of the east. BUT, a leadership factor also enters, i.e. the willingness of one side more than the other to innovate.

As such, perhaps there is a hole in the energy shortage / system complexity determinism that Homer-Dixon seemingly espouses. In fact, another book by Homer-Dixon hints at this – i.e., “The Ingenuity Gap” published in 2002.

In this book, the professor laments the lack of timely solutions for our world’s increasingly serious technological problems, and makes a case that the system as a whole is getting away from its human masters. But he also maintains faith that if our leaders heed his call, we might still rein in the beast. It’s not too late yet – if we can assert some historical will, and break the chains of determinism.