Historians have often noted that the middle ages, while often "dark," witnessed a phenomenal increase in the population of northern Europe. This is often vaguely explained as the result of the "advance of learning," the influence of Arabic culture and science, the spread of commerce, an increase in urban living, (i.e., the result of population growth seen as the cause*).

More recently economic historians give greater attention to the improvements in agriculture, such as a refined plow and yoke design, resulting in the increase of human foodstuffs, thus enabling urbanization, cultural specialization, and the further development of various technologies, some good, some maybe not so good (e.g., gothic cathedrals, gunpowder).

Little attention, however, is given to the sources of energy that really enabled this spread of civilization from the sunny Mediterranean to the colder, grayer regions north of the Alps.

The deforestation of northern Europe certainly contributed to the building and heating of various medieval hovels and MacMansions, but the most significant discovery was a very clever invention of a means of capturing and storing solar energy, and converting it into "harness-able" work: Growing hay and feeding it to oxen and horses. Hay had the extra benefit of also keeping other protein-supplying animals such as cows, goats, and sheep alive over the winter - when fresh fodder was not available.

The cultivation, harvesting, drying and storing of grasses and other forage was virtually unknown in the Mediterranean regions of the Roman Empire, but it became one of the major agricultural activities in northern Europe by 1000 AD - and ever since in many parts of Asia and America.

Now this "medieval" technology for the coversion of biomass to energy may not seem to be a model of efficiency, but by comparison, the "modern" production of ethanol from human food grain carbohydrates is truly primitive.

And finally getting to my point: Most "alternative" energy sources (meaning "alternative" to fossil fuels -- which will only be around for a snippet of time in human history) share a fatal flaw with ethanol -- most of them are overly dependent upon sophisticated technology and require massive amounts of engineering input.

Simpler is better.

Horses are also beautiful.

And much better at converting cellulosic biomass to energy than all the science and engineering to come out of MIT.

Thanks to George Wald, Nobel Prize Winner, from whom I first heard these sensible ideas during a rambling guest "lecture" at my big-10 school during the late '60's/early 70's I think it just "popped" into his mind, but he really was a genial believer in real "horse" power - thought bicycles produced too much inorganic pollution - rejected the use of LSD as a means to extend consciousness, and stressed the added-value of horses in providing excellent fertilizer for the home garden (& challenged grad students to do research in the control of flies, disease, etc. associated with horses).

Now horse power may not be able to support a global population of 6.5 billion - but they are a sustainable source of energy (and companionship) - and they will be around in 300 years when humans will only know of the internal combustion machine by a few web sites specializing in that brief historical abberration -- the 20th and early 21st centuries.

*Much like the Scholastic disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas who uses as a proof of the goodness of God, that all major cities were located adjacent to large rivers. I'm sure George Bush would agree.

"Now this "medieval" technology for the coversion of biomass to energy may not seem to be a model of efficiency, but by comparison, the "modern" production of ethanol from human food grain carbohydrates is truly primitive."

I would be amused by your attempt to back this up with some facts. Let me try:

A bushel of corn can produce 2.8 gallons of corn. Enough to take a flex-fuel vehicle that weights more than a horse 100 miles in two hours, yes?

A horse does not need a full bushel to travel 100 miles, but a horse gets tired and does not travel as fast. In fact, it would be excessively cruel to the animal to ride it more than 28 miles a day for any sustained perod of time. So, what's worth more to you: Half a bushel of corn, or 3 days of your time?

Dear Madai,

Thank you for actually reading my post, I appreciate your response.

But with all due respect, I think you are missing the point.

Try slowing down - don't try to make everything equivalent. Lots of other things have to be considered:

#1 Horses do better on hay - with a couple handsfuls of oats (not corn) from time to time. Try putting hay in your flex-fuel vehicle - and then add the BTU cost of creating the vehicle in the first place as well as all the other inputs for the creation of whatever fuel you propose using.

#2 Why would I want to go 100 miles? What do you want to do once you get there? Maybe I just want to stay at home and plow and fertilize my garden. I don't think an E85 Prius would be useful for that purpose.

#3 In a post fossil-fuel era new energy supplies will be dependent upon the carrying capacity of the earth to produce them. You may, in fact have to have a horse to plow the field to plant the corn that will be turned into ethanol - and the cost of the ethanol may approach $50 per gallon.

#4 Perhaps the true proof of the goodness of God is the amiable nature of those gentle giants, the Percheron, the Shire, and the Houyhnhnm (Willie Nelson's favorite) which are not made for riding, but who are still tolerant of such inferior species as we.

Like true happiness, the new post fossil-fuel era will require a change of consciousness.

You might want to read the article in the July Scientific American on no-till farming. It could be that you would want to teach your horse to punch a string of drillholes instead. Or maybe you could down-scale to a trained woodpecker.

Everything Willie Nelson says sounds like that - or was that your point?

I would guess, if pressed, that man's first use of the horse was as a meal. He probably made use of the skin too, as clothing and shelter. When he figured out how to use the horse for other purposes, it was probably without establishing a really close relationship since the saddles, draft gear and such have always been made of leather.

1. Horses have inputs too. They must be trained and cared for year round. a horse-based farm might be able to top out at 160 acres, fossil fuel mechanized farmms can go well over 2000 acres. Machines can plant faster. Somehow I don't think the farm industry is ready to go back to horseplay.

2. Don't you have any family living more than 100 miles away? I make long trips more than 4 times a year.

3. I do not believe the price for a gallon of fuel will exceed the hourly minimum wage. Horses will mostly be for enjoyment, not economic superiority of any kind. I also don't think ethanol will be the fuel of choice going forward. Algal oils I think, will be the main biomass source, meanwhile, coal can be converted to oil at prices competitive today. The process is coal gasification and fischer-tropsch synthesis.

4. I hope for your sake keeping a horse shall prove to affordable. I don't think you will profit from your horse, in fact you might find the expenses significant, especially considering how well you must want to treat them :)

Knute,

My own hunch is that what you depict is, in fact, in store for humanity... and our heroic task will be to manage the decline. And I would guess that earth's carrying capacity for us is about where it was before population soared... around 300 million.

Some may think, how horrible; you're preaching doom-and-gloom, but I'd remind them that there were quite vital civilizations in existence back then.

@Phil,

Willie Nelson has great wit, and is unrecognized as a renaissance man. What I was thinking of was his sympathy for the horse, especially as represented by Johnathan Swift, and his agreement with the view of humans as Yahoos.

But now you make me think now of L. Tolstoy as well - and the story he wrote about a noble horse, who even in death provides for both man and the natural world (his skin is turned into boot leather - and his flesh nourishes some young wolf cubs) whereas the master is a selfish, drunken, whoremaster, nasty yahoo beast, and burden to the earth.

The story is a kind of Sermon on the Mount - in a minor key. I read it in German translation years ago - but as I think of it, it has meant more to me than The Death of Ivan Illyich - I wish I could find it again, I think the title is Kholstomer or Strider.

If only we humans could be as useful to our own - and to other species. Unfortunately we usually believe God has told us only to exploit them.

Ah yes, an equine "change in consciousness." Why would anyone need to travel over 100 miles? We can get the pony express to deliver vaccines and medicines around the globe. Same goes for food. If there's a food shortage somewhere, bam, our hyperefficient horses will distribute it to the effected region faster than a semi. There where no famines before the industrial era, right?

Dear jwschmidt,

I'm sure you are a very decent fellow, and probably quite intelligent. And I'm sorry I didn't make my point bluntly enough to get it across:

I suggest reading through some of the other comments that have been posted on this general topic. Some of us understand that, in the not too distant future, there will be little if any agricultural surplus - or even vaccines (both being a luxury of cheap energy) - and, of course, no inexpensive means for their distribution.

Yes, this means that many of the hungry will starve, and the sick will die of disease. Cheap energy has inflated human populations by about 90%, and the return to the normal carrying capacity of the earth will not be pretty.

If your descendents or mine are among the lucky few to still be here, they will probably be part of an extended family working together, engaged in subsistence farming. The really lucky ones will have a horse, and maybe a cow and some chickens. This need not be a dreary prospect: The Amish live this way today and have very happy, rich and rewarding lives - and their communities will probably endure well beyond most of the major cities on the earth today.

So far as alternative energy sources: Sorry, there is no silver bullet. Petroleum was an accidental, one-shot bonanza, and other fossil fuels, like coal will just be around, polluting the world, for just a tiny bit longer. Yes, back-yard scientists will tinker around with solar, algae, nuclear, etc., but without the excess capital provided by really cheap energy (oil), there will be no way to adequately fund the necessary infrastructure for their establishment or viability.

In this new world, you are correct, there will be little need to travel 100 miles, and, yes, disease and famine will, unfortunately, be a way of life. (I won't dwell here on the other probably catastrophes of social dislocation, war, climate change, etc. -- after all, we must remain positive.)

The post-industrial world will come to resemble the pre-industrial world more and more. Horse and wind-power (think Holland with its windmills and sailing ships) may be better models for a sustainable future than anyone wants to think. Yes, some of what humans have learned about science and engineering will play to our advantage. I believe that gradually mankind will make quite elegant adaptations to the laws of thermodynamics, but the 22nd century is likely to look more like the 15th than the 21st.

Studying the past may be very useful to our future.

Perhaps also we should adopt the attitude of Jacobowski (in Franz Werfel's play, Jacobowski und der Oberst) who, when Hitler's troops were occupying Vienna and that all Jews were being rounded up, was told:

"Die Lage is ernst, aber nicht hoffnungslos!" (The situation is serious, but not hopeless). Jacobowski replied: "Besser gesagt, die Lage is hoffnungslos, aber nicht ernst." (Better said, the situation is hopeless, but not serious.)

It all depends upon how long a view you take.

Happy 4th!

Well ok, you just seemed a bit coy about the apocalypse, and I'm aware that quite a few peak-oil believers are of the mind that that would be a sort of good thing for the world. As long as you aren't of that mindset...

But you're wrong about alt-energy. You write: "Yes, back-yard scientists will tinker around with solar, algae, nuclear, etc., but without the excess capital provided by really cheap energy (oil), there will be no way to adequately fund the necessary infrastructure for their establishment or viability."

Firstly, I don't know any "backyard" scientists toying with these things. I'm more aware about the large (primarily oil) companies that have invested R+D, manufacturing, and infrastructure into alternatives. Of course there is no "magic bullet" to replace oil - anyone who knows anything about this will agree that alternative sources need to be implemented altogether. Few things are becoming more efficient by the year than solar power, true (not corn) ethanol is only being withheld due to lobbying by farm interests, and Shell and Mobil are both very interested in developing Algae oil.

Alternative energy can absolutely provide for the majority of our increasing energy needs, especially as we supplement it with greater efficiency. And as for implementing all that infrastructure, oil is not going to dissapear tommorow. It will just be expensive. Recession? Sure. But there is a lot of profit to be made from an alt-energy boom, if the government can get its head straight about investing wisely in it.

You might want to ponder your own profession Rev. In some, well all locations actually, belonging to the wrong religion was grounds for burning, torture, banishing, stoning, etc.

And in fact you do preach doom and gloom constantly.

I like your argument. You seem to understand the laws of thermodynamics, which is a rare thing these days. It is perhaps because of that lack that so many people utterly fail to understand exactly what fossil fuel is.

There are really only a few sources of energy available on Earth. We have the energy stored in molecular bonds, which we may access through fission (a messy, dangerous process, but useful). We have geothermal heat provided by our good planet (Scandinavian nations are busy exploring that). We have the natural motion of wind and water that can be harnessed by various means. Then we have the big one; the sun. An enormous gravity-powered fusion reactor that has provided life on Earth with heat and light since we were a proverbial fly in the primordial soup.

Fossil fuel is the concentrated essence of hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis. Light, converted to biomass, stored in great deposits under the ground like a wine cellar filled with easy energy. We’ve been very lucky to have it, but the overall energy delta, while positive, is smaller than most people think once extraction and refinement are factored in. In any event, we won’t have it for much longer. Even the rosiest estimates have us running out in less than a century, which really isn’t very long as civilizations go. What then? We need to start thinking about that. It will take time and energy to develop and implement alternatives. If we don’t start now, we might not make it. Biofuel is a neat thought, but the laws of thermodynamics are the word of God, and every alternative so far from HHO to biodiesel has had an overwhelmingly negative energy delta. This presents something of a problem, seeing how a large part of our civilization is based on moving stuff around. You need energy to do that and energy has to come from somewhere. And as the late, great Heinlein observed, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Speaking of lunch, why is it that we feel the need to base every meal around a large slab of dead animal? Raising animals for human consumption requires an exponentially greater commitment of resources in terms of arable land and sunlight converted to plant matter. Wouldn’t it be better to reclassify meat as a delicacy and devote that land to growing vegetable proteins? That would feed far more people with a much smaller infrastructure. I have a feeling these calculations will be more important in the years to come, as our magical energy juice runs out.

Isn’t it great how the universe provides equilibrium? The Tao thrives on balance, after all. :-)

Why would soemone want to go 100 miles? Perhaps to get a better job? Perhaps his ability to move around is what prevents him from being tied to a particular area and to a predetermined place in its political structure? Or maybe just to get the hell out of a fetid city? You know I was reminded of my reaction to the old canard that late-19th century immigrants thought that American streets were paved with gold. I said, "I bet they'd spent enough time around horses to know what the streets were paved with."