Magical Thinking and Renewables
The metaphor in the other half of Robert Jordan’s magic system.
[Letter #014]
[Author’s note: This is the second part of a discussion about the magic system in The Wheel of Time and how it can be seen as analogous to our modern energy system. Without context from the first letter, this might seem somewhat confusing. I suggest starting there, if you haven’t.]
Good morning, son.
Your grandmother is visiting in a few days, although I think you’ll end up calling her “Grandmom” like her other grandkids have. She’s very excited to meet you, but she’ll have to settle this time for simply hoping to catch one of your somersaults while touching your mother’s tummy. She’ll be bringing with her a carload of baby things: clothes, toys, a rocking chair — the hand-me-downs that weren’t previously destroyed by your first cousins during their recent infancies. It’ll be nice to have her for the weekend.
It was also Dr Seuss’s birthday a few days ago, and there was a sale on his books from a second-hand bookseller for $2.50 each. I couldn’t not get a pile of them for you. What’s a childhood without Oh, the Places You Will Go? I admit that I’ve had a nice copy of that one for many years, as I always really enjoyed it. It’s just so optimistic.
Speaking of books, however, I’ve been thinking that I need to return to the subject of Robert Jordan’s books in The Wheel of Time series. I gave you my reasoning last time I spoke about this story for why his magic system feels a lot like our current energy system. We humans today can do remarkable, amazing things with our technology, but everything relies on abundant, cheap, and dense energy that we get from fossil fuels. In Jordan’s story, the magic system is split into halves: saidin and saidar. The corrupting, dirty energy that I liken to fossil fuels is saidin. I said that I would get back to the subject of saidar eventually, and I think it’s time that we do just that.
So, last time, I spoke about how the half of the magic division called saidin caused those who used it to become very sick, eventually killing those near them and themselves from overuse of the energy. In the story, it’s possible to overuse the saidar half as well, but it’s tougher to do, and it usually won’t make you sick or kill you in the process. That half wasn’t corrupted by the “Dark One” and can be used freely by those with the talent. Where saidin is analogous to fossil fuels in our world, this cleaner energy has a real world counterpart also. It’s fashionable today to use the term “renewable energy,” and that’s indeed what I’m referring to, but I probably think about it differently than what proponents of the term would presume.
I’ll get back to that, but I want to talk a little more about the differences between the two halves of the energy. For the purposes of the story, it matters that the two halves are associated with the sexes of the channelers, but that’s not important for this discussion. I’m more interested in the other characteristics of this yin and yang balance. Saidin, for example, is channeled by a person taking control of it, forcing it to obey commands. If the channeler doesn’t maintain dominance of the energy flow, it could overwhelm him and may kill him outright. On the other hand, saidar is channeled by submitting to the “river” of energy, allowing it to wash over her as she guides it toward her intended effect.
We could write a Master’s thesis in gender studies about “women submitting” and “men dominating,” and if there hasn’t been one regarding this novel series, then I’d be surprised, but that’s not the point I’m looking to make. I’m certain that Jordan, who was pretty sensitive to gender issues, wrote it that way purely so that people would argue about it. Instead, I’m far more concerned with how these halves align with real world fossil fuels and “clean” energy sources, and I think the alignments say a lot more about how we view these sources and what they can do for us than just a face-value debate over gender roles.
When we use fossil fuels today, it requires a great deal of active events. Everything that falls into the category of fossil fuel energy is initially underground, so we have to mine or drill for it. Well, technically, it’s sunlight first, but after that part it’s underground. Whether it’s coal, oil, natural gas, or uranium, nature has deposited all of that stuff under the Earth’s surface (where, one might conclude, it should be). Once the fuel is acquired, we then burn it to release its stored energy, usually harnessing that energy by turning a turbine or something similar for electricity production or by pumping pistons in a combustion engine for mechanical energy. We channel that power through wires or some kinetic device to achieve whatever the goal.
Everything about all of this is tightly controlled, because if it isn’t, it can be quite dangerous. Explosions, heavy machinery accidents, electrocution, all manner of things — and that’s without considering nuclear issues. It’s a lot of energy concentrated into small volumes, and that can accomplish a lot of benefit or a lot of damage. In just considering how Jordan describes the need to control this half of the power, fossil fuels feel very saidin to me.
On the other hand, saidar is everything else that nature provides. Energy from the sun is the primary driver of all of it, but there’s also wind power, water movement, gravity, and the rest of it. These power sources are much more passive in their function. A water mill spinning with the current of the stream is almost exactly how Jordan describes saidar channelers tapping into the energy flow. Solar energy falls upon the world constantly with fairly small variations in overall intensity, causing plants to shift their orientation. While the gravitational pull of the moon on the tides fluctuates daily, the pattern remains consistent, and entire ecosystems spring up around the differences in tidal levels. Geothermal energy comes from the heat underground, and that’s easily visible in hot springs and geysers, both clear demonstrations of energy in action. In effect, everything in motion in nature without active human use of fire is saidar.
As an aside, perhaps fire is saidin. I’ll have to think more about that.
Usually, harnessing the power of saidar is much more passive as well. A shower heated by saidin would require some form of electricity or burned gas for a heating element, often with pumped water and plumbing infrastructure. On the flip side, one heated by saidar would be something like a rainwater collection barrel that is heated via sunlight. Where saidin would have us burning bunker fuel to travel across the ocean in a cruise liner or battleship, saidar would use sails and the wind to push us in a galleon or sailboat.
I’m certain you see the pattern emerging from this comparison by now. Saidin is densely focused, constant, and requires high levels of control and often high heat. It performs on command and obeys orders. Saidar, conversely, is diffusely spread everywhere, intermittent, and will only allow passive harnessing as it continues doing whatever it intends. It performs only when the wind blows or the sun shines, and no amount of commanding will force the tide to recede. It operates on its own schedule and cannot be controlled.
That comparison right there is the answer to a question I posed in my other letter. As you recall, the cost of using saidin to power our world is that it’s toxic. It will destroy everything eventually — environment, animals, plants, humans, and just about everything else. The more that we use, the more damage we do. I posed the question, “Why can’t we just switch to the other power source?” This is why.
We didn’t build our world to operate on saidar. Yes, it’s as pure as spring rain — well, as pure as the idea of spring rain, I guess. But, we built the world to work on instant command, using wires and electronics that need constant reliability. Hospitals, for example, use some equipment that can’t handle even a microsecond of intermittency in electrical supply, much less go for hours or days while the wind doesn’t blow. We traded out the horse for a car and a train with internal combustion engines. We don’t wait for the sails to fill anymore before traveling to distant continents. When we flip the switch, we expect the result immediately.
We fancied ourselves as dominant over nature itself. We fire apes believed that we could have anything we wanted exactly when we wanted it. We terraformed parts of the planet, grew more crops than the land could naturally provide, flew in airships to the other side of the world, spoke with friends back in our hometown at the speed of light, and entertained ourselves constantly with our own personal jesters that fit in our pockets. We did this with fossil fuels, with saidin, and everything that we used to accomplish this was built by, and for use by, saidin.
I mentioned before that what I meant by “renewable energy” wasn’t quite what was meant by the popular definition. You’ll notice that so far I haven’t mentioned solar panels, wind-driven electric turbines, or something like, say, electric cars. There’s a very important reason that, by the time you read this, saidar will not have saved us all from the damage of saidin use. It’s because it doesn’t work that way, and we cannot force it to work that way.
It doesn’t take but a few seconds of looking around the internet to find a baker’s dozen of articles that demand that we harness the power of sunlight, wind, water, geothermal, or maybe even gravity and the tides. These folks like to advocate for something they call a “green transition.” In their minds, all it will take for us to stop using oil and other fossil fuels is to switch to (what they call) “renewable energy.” By this, they actually mean to exclusively derive our electricity from solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric dam generators, geothermal power plants, and possibly nuclear power plants, depending on which activist you ask.
The problem? Every single one of those items uses saidin, fossil fuels, toxic energy. Every one. We cannot build any “renewable” energy device without fossil fuels.
Actually, what they really want is what saidin offers: instant, intense, controlled energy. That’s what our tech needs in order to operate the way that we expect. That’s why every iteration of “green energy” devices today is actually just an attempt to force saidar into functioning the way that saidin functions normally. As I said before, you can’t force saidar to do anything. Attempting to do so is futile at best and disastrous at worst.
If you haven’t thumbed through Ozzie Zehner’s Green Illusions yet, it’s on my shelf, and it’s worth looking at. His work agrees with some of the other literature I have on the subject and concludes that “renewables” are anything but. Solar panels, for example, require a great deal of energy to produce, and we don’t produce them with energy from water mills or sunshine. We use oil and coal. I actually really like Nate Hagens term for them, “rebuildables,” as they certainly don’t renew themselves. A solar panel might last for twenty years before it needs to be replaced, and it’s going to require more fossil fuels at that time as well.
Solar panels, in the form that we need them to be to function in our system, are built with plastic, steel, glass, silicon, and a great many electrical circuits of copper and other metals. These things don’t grow on trees. They all require high-heat processes to manufacture. These processes must be tightly controlled, otherwise the construction will be ruined and the device will be scrapped. That means that we can’t rely on the intermittency of the wind, for example. At the very least, we’d need batteries, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
Also, the purity of the materials needed in solar panel construction must be tremendously high in order to get even decent efficiency of energy production. This requires treatment with harsh, toxic chemicals that have to be disposed of somehow once spent. Windmills aren’t much better, actually. They require literal tons of copper, steel, and concrete, along with heavy costs in silver and rare earth elements like yttrium, terbium, and neodymium. Also, after you build these devices, you can’t recycle them into anything else. They’re just landfill fodder, which is the definition of unsustainable.
Incidentally, there was the argument that the cost of “renewables” would come down according to economies of scale. The more we made, the cheaper they would cost, the thinking went. Of course, what wasn’t considered was that the pollution cost of each individual device remained constant (or even increased), no matter how many of them we produced. So, once the super-cheap renewables were being produced en masse in China and elsewhere, the vast toxic waste needed to go somewhere.
Part of the promised reduction in cost comes from an expectation of the reduced expenses associated with waste processes, but recycling all of that toxicity never comes cheap. When capitalism demands more profits, the ecosystem will pay the difference. The solution was to just dump anywhere they could manage: rivers, the ocean, landfills, or even behind playgrounds. As you can imagine, if it burns human skin on contact and kills plants instantly, it’s not exactly something you want to be dumping everywhere. Remember my letter on externalities.
So, what would it mean to transition to saidar? What would an actual “green transition” look like?
It’s hard to say for sure. I’ve heard it claimed that it’s possible to run a human society entirely on renewable forms of energy — just not ours. That seems pretty accurate to me. Nearly everything about civilization is focused to some degree on control. I’m sure that comes from the human fear of death, and that’s a result of our evolved big brains allowing us to even consider what “death” even means. There’s probably another letter in there about the Garden of Eden being a metaphor for pre-civilization human existence. Maybe I’ll expand on that someday. Sorry for the digression.
If we actually relied solely on saidar though, I think human existence would look to us to be at least pre-Industrial. Although, I’m not sure if it would resemble the 16th through 18th centuries, since that age relied heavily on colonialism, slavery, genocide, and land destruction. That’s a tremendous amount of non-renewable exploitation. The Middle Ages were mostly just a break between big imperial eras though, at least in “Western civilization,” as the Classic age was again about colonies and slavery. The civilizations in other parts of the world had their own rigid hierarchies and domination systems, so I think the idea holds there as well.
Could it be that the last time humans were actually living sustainably on Earth was in the paleolithic? Was it back before we clear cut forests to till up fields and plant crops? There have indeed been a multitude of indigenous societies around the world who have managed sustainable living since then, but I think that many “civilized” humans would consider those peoples to be “stone age” anyway. We’re so damned arrogant, aren’t we?
At issue, however, is something I’ve said before: if something is unsustainable then, by definition, it will eventually no longer be sustained. Saidin is inherently destructive, and it’s also finite. It is therefore unsustainable. That means that living sustainably on this planet perpetually will require the predominant, if not sole, use of saidar as an energy source. It will mean living within the cycles and boundaries of nature. It will mean pulling energy from the sunlight, either directly or by making use of other lifeforms that do so directly.
I’m not saying that technology needs to be completely trashed. Certainly, technology can be something as simple as a spear made from a pointy stick. Pointy Stick Tech(™) served us pretty well for thousands of years, and it still makes for an excellent way to pick up trash from the roadside. I’m just saying that we need to find ways to live perpetually within the boundaries of what the planet can sustain. We’re such clever apes. I’m sure we’re up to the task.
What we can not do is continue on the path we have now. We can’t continue to concentrate more and more of us within cities, a practice that demands more of the land than it can sustain, requiring importation of resources and exportation of waste. We can’t continue to draw down the finite supply of minerals and fossil fuels in the Earth’s crust, as doing so is toxic to us and other life, and it will eventually run out anyway. We can’t, to keep within the theme, continue to build civilization on the use of saidin. We also can’t force saidar to function as if it were saidin. That ends up just being saidin with extra steps, which is to say that we’re just using more fossil fuels to fool ourselves into thinking that “renewables” are somehow making the situation better.
There may be a place for saidin in human existence, but it can’t be used for our current way of life. There may be a way to balance its use with saidar, and that’s absolutely the only way that it ever could be sustainable. Saidar, clean renewable energy, cannot be forced into doing what saidin does. Saidin, concentrated polluting energy, cannot do what saidar does. If we hope to continue as a species, we have to find the balance and stay there.
The future will not be one of Dyson sphere solar arrays, continent-spanning windmill networks, and fusion reactors powering the entire planet. It will not be electric cars zipping humans around a neon and chrome landscape. It will not feature sterile production of lab-grown food or concentrations of energy so vast, yet controlled, that we experiment with teleportation and time travel. We will never see the imagined techno-utopia of science fiction, as disappointing as that may be. With my sincerest apologies to Octavia Butler, we aren’t leaving this planet to fly among the stars, even if I did really appreciate her innovation of Earthseed.
At this point in our journey, we need to find some acceptance of what is currently possible, and certainly what is inevitable. We are going to come back into balance, whether we like it or not. Nature forces balance on a long enough timeline. Successful species grow large, but they overshoot their resources and come back into balance. True success in the long-run is balance. Humans have been extremely successful as a species, in the former sense. We’re now in the transition to becoming successful in the latter. I have to believe that some of us will survive it.
I don’t think we can ever fully go back to the paleolithic, even if we wanted to. I think Pandora’s box, sitting on the floor wide open, guarantees that. Even if we evolve toward something similar, it will still be different just due to what we’ve learned and what we’ve done to the world. We’ll find a balance somewhere though — that’s guaranteed. Might take a few centuries or more, and I’m sure the weather won’t be kind as we transition to it, but it’ll happen eventually.
Every other organism that we’ve ever known to exist uses saidar as an energy source, one way or another. Humans used to, a long, long time ago. Getting back to something closer to that is how we’ll find our balance.
Son, I love you very much. You’re going to be part of a cohort that will make up the early days of this transition journey, something that has never happened to anyone before. I hope that I’ll be around for a large part of your life and that I’ll be able to help with advice and guidance. Meanwhile, try to find your own balance, however that looks for you.
I look forward to us spending some time with The Cat in the Hat and Horton Hears a Who. We’re going to be good buddies, you and me.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
