About Garry Rogers

Garry Rogers Brief Bio

Dr. Garry Rogers served on the geography faculties of UCLA and Columbia University in New York. He lectured on Biogeography, Climatology, and Environmental Science to thousands of undergraduate and graduate students. After Columbia closed the Geography Department, he left classroom teaching and held positions with the U. S. Forest Service, U. S. Justice Department, and Academic Computing, Inc. In 2007, he was elected President of the nonprofit Agua Fria Open Space Alliance, Inc. (AFOSA) and began writing about plants and animals at Coldwater Farm on the Agua Fria River in central Arizona.

Dr. Rogers is an elected member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, and the Phoenix College Hall of Fame. He is active in other scholarly associations. Several of his wildlife books have received awards and his first novel received a Kirkus star and was chosen by Arizona librarians for the OneBookAZ program.

Since becoming President of AFOSA, Dr. Rogers has worked to develop and manage projects that meet the organization’s nature-conservation goals. He has published 23 books, hundreds of articles, and almost 3,000 posts on his blog.

Dr. Rogers and his wife have the privilege of living on the Coldwater Farm Conservation Easement in central Arizona. The Farm has large ponds, a rare perennial stream, and abundant wildlife.

Industrial civilization runs on a one-time inheritance. Fossil fuels represent millions of years of accumulated sunlight, compressed and concentrated by geological processes. We are burning in centuries what took eons to form.

This is the carbon pulse, an artificial monsoon that allowed extraordinary population growth and technological development. Under its influence, we built complexity far beyond what sustainable energy flows could support. We constructed global supply chains, sprawling cities, and fragile just-in-time systems on the assumption that the rain would never stop.

But pulses end. Monsoons cease.

Energy Return on Energy Invested tells the story. Early oil wells delivered 100 barrels for every barrel invested in extraction. Modern unconventional sources fall below 10 to 1. As easily accessible reserves deplete, the surplus enabling complex civilization shrinks.

Historian Joseph Tainter showed complex societies require continuous energy surplus to maintain. When that surplus declines, complexity becomes unsustainable. The system sheds expensive structures to survive.

Physics does not negotiate. The thermodynamic correction is not a policy choice. It is the universe balancing the books.

[Read the full essay here.]

[Read the series introduction and access all nine essays here.]

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