.
MONDAY, NOV 5, 2018: NOTE TO FILE
Protest Inecōlacy
As unsustainable denial
What denial? If I knew, I wouldn't be in denial. Is my not knowing sustainable? I don't know. If I protest denial, will it end?
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: DENIALISM, FROM THE WIRES, OPPOSE, REMEMBER, REMEMBER
Abstract: Self-education by listening to the what-is (and maybe some humans), being 'the only education there is' [Isaac Asimov], the greatest threat to education is the educational system. The educational system is "broken" as the third pillar of the educated mind, per Garrett Hardin's [1] literacy, [2] numeracy, [3] ecolacy, is largely non-existent. Ecolacy refers to systems science literacy, or to the endeavor/ability to think in systems, per Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems: A Primer. As inecolacy could have the outcome of human extinction, protesting may be considered.
TUCSON (A-P) — To boil it down, I'm claiming that if humans were to go extinct in the next five hundred years or so (and not from a nearby gamma ray burst, so self-inflicted), that the inecolate (systems science illiterate) educational system supporting industrial society, formal and informal, would have to be judged a failure; an utter failure of educators and those seeking to be educated by self-accredited educators. The implication is that the educational system needs to do more than serve the short-term self interests of the moneyed (the 99+%) and so is a failure even if humans don't go extinct secondary to their Anthropocene enthusiasm, but merely collapse complex society again as usual. Yes, there are candles in the dark, but far too few, and they are not running the show (global empire-building) as they cannot serve what is understood to be not remotely sustainable.
Formal and informal education in industrial society is anthropocentric and alienates learners and learned from other life on Earth (except as gardened/farmed or kept a pets/livestock or in zoos/parks to amuse) with its narrative of human supremacy, domination, exceptionalism and success. We are schooled to be ignorant of our ignorance. We are 'educated' (schooled) to separate feeling from intellect, our complex society from our biology, the practical from the theoretical, self from system..., to fragment instead of unify, to dissociate rather than interconnect, but above all to overemphasize and celebrate our short-term personal (egoic) success/consumption and careers spent in service of SYSTEM as unsustainable economy/social system (the monetary culture, empire-as-usual).
We fossil-fueled ones have been eMpowered to rule the world, this our solar system and all others for the taking in this our galaxy, first of many galaxies to rule as we will continue to grow and prosper, for ours is the kingdom and the glory, for ever and ever (because for 300 years we have grown and prospered). Praise be Lord Man, for a time. And then what?
Protest the Pace of Geobiophysical Planetary Destruction:
- Organize groups of activists (more than two, it's a primate thing as one protester is dismissed as a crank) to picket on public property near educational sites: i.e. schools, including private, public (K-12, College/University), parochial, religious schools (e.g. Jewish/Christian Religious/Sunday schools, Madrasas, Gurukulam), political (e.g. conservative, liberal, progressive, libertarian politicized campuses), Military, Charter, Magnet, Summer schools, or any organized place of education that tells children what to think (believe) or (for their own good of course) what they should think (believe) while claiming to be doing nothing of the sort. The alternative is to teach children how to think better (to not believe in belief) which involves universal doubt and inquiry that requires an ability to question everything—not in the end, but in the beginning, and provide them with language that enables them to think meaningfully (e.g. semantography). Thinking well excludes teaching children how to be better apologists for the preferred conclusions of their teachers, so "teaching" pretend critical thinking (e.g. Jesuits, most professors) is excluded. That the university system is "broken" (e.g. entrenched punditry) is evidenced by one's ability to get a PhD in astrology in India, or gender studies or autoethnography in the USA.
- Servants of the SYSTEM have only a self-accredited "right" to tell children what to think, which includes parents and grandparents. Minds are terrible things to waste regardless of their skin's melanin content. The failure of industrial society's educational subSYSTEMs to produce people who would rather know than believe (apart from an unintended few) is the enabler of society's pervasive denialism and inability to think in terms of real solutions to planetary problems which has extinction (which could include humans) as the outcome (the outcome IS the current species extinction rate of about 1,000 times the pre-Anthropocene norm, heading for 10,000 times higher by the end of twenty-first century). All humans that are expected to serve technoindustrial society, now global, are "educated," meanwhile "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed." What can you do? Protest (which includes voting with our feet).
- Evidence for the claim of business-as-usual denialism may be legion, but one claim is sufficient: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." If the inability to understand [the implications of] the exponential function has human extinction as an outcome, then the educational SYSTEM (formal and informal) would be considered a failure if there were any humans left to so judge it. "We are playing a global endgame." The failure to educate, to produce humans with an ability to understand the exponential function, is a demonstrated fact. The consequences of this failure are not known and possible/likely consequences that don't feel good are denied (by those who would rather believe than know). Preventing industrial society's educators from hijacking young minds and perpetuating error, ignorance, and illusion may be a matter of survival, but who educates the educators? Who has all the answers?
Ecolacy is properly understood to be the first (most essential) pillar of an educated mind, followed by numeracy and literacy. It is entirely possible to graduate with highest honors from a university, e.g. Stanford or Oxford, and be utterly inecolate, semi-numerate, and nearly science illiterate.
ecolacy
/ikolə.si/ n. the quality or state of being ecolate.
ecolate
/iko.let/ adj. 1. systems science literate. 2. the endeavor to iterate towards understanding the dynamics of the world system through the macroscope of systems ecology to account for the complex interdependencies that underpin the natural environment and to consider the unintended consequences, short term and long-term, of changing the system by asking, "And then what?," so that we may come to have enough humans on the planet that really do understand it and can live with it properly.
n. a regional management unit: Earth has seven global ecolates with 30 sub-regions or sub-ecolates/sublates that contain thousands of watershed management units or home ecolates (abbr. homlates, e.g. "I live in the Chetco coastal homlate in West Northern America in an area that used to be called Oregon.")
Seven Ecolates and 30 Sublates
An apolitical management map of the planet
I was reading a hundred or so Eric Hoffer quotes. Many quotes are insightful, but then:
Says an early Anthopocene enthusiast: "One would like to see mankind spend the balance of the century in a total effort to clean up and groom the surface of the globe — wipe out the jungles, turn deserts and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whole land mass a fit habitation for Man. The globe should be our and not nature's home, and we no longer nature's guests." —Eric Hoffer 1967, nominee for title of 'Mr. Inecolate' of the Twentieth-century.
In 1967 a few would have differed, but very few. Even today, while fewer would enthusiastically and overtly agree, most would merely qualify their Anthropocene enthusiasm and sense of Self (and tribal identity): human supremacy and dominionism. And then what?
Notes on SYSTEM:
- Ecolate definition sources here.
- Self-education can start here: Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
- SYSTEM is short for socio-political-economic-educational-military-religious-legal-media-intelligentsia control system, aka WSS (world socioeconomic-political system) a subsystem of complex societies. Societies exceeding Dunbar's number (about 150) in population become complex societies that select for hierarchy and require/develop a SYSTEM, which is neither good nor bad apart from whether the SYSTEM works to balance Man's demands on Nature's resources (and elites on commoners) or not. Failure to manage human demands leads to failure of the biophysical life-support system that the persistence of humans on the planet depends on.
- Alt usage is 'System', but at the start of a sentence, misunderstanding is evoked, e.g. 'System scientists considered such knowledge [of the Indigenous] the quaint mythology of dying cultures.' What is meant is that most scientists serve the System and discount other ways of knowing. Using 'SYSTEM scientists consider...' is clearly other than what system scientists think. The article, 'The System that Drives Our World'. uses 'System' and tells a story of the modern world that is mostly matter of fact history with racist/political hate-group generalizations interjected. The Progressive Left seem to imagine they are not part of and servants of the SYSTEM, an example of modern storytelling among the well educated (schooled).
- There are ecolate scientists, but there are some generals (who have to think globally if they are, like Clark, NATO Supreme Allied Commander or are otherwise 'high up'), and 'systems journalists' (e.g. Nafeez Ahmed) who protest unsustainable denial. I'm guessing there are poets too, whose service may be essential, and we all need to self-organize to envision an alternative to BAU and empire-building-as-usual, then make it so.
- All the functionality that hu-man brains possess likely evolved by ten thousand years ago. Neanderthals had bigger brains than hu-mans, but they weren't "intelligent" enough to paint the walls of their caves or invent the bow and arrow to consume more fauna or even the atlati to enable them to preside over megafauna extinctions everywhere but Africa like hu-mans did who became the last hominin standing, perhaps by intent. All hu-mans, prior to six thousand years ago, were illiterate. What modern anthropocene enthusiasts celebrate (mere eloquence, technology, literacy, consumption, production, conquest, empire-building, genocide and ecocide that serves the short-termism of one's SYSTEM), are late [pathological] developments. If virtually all attributes hu-mans think of as "human intelligence" or "theory of mind" were lacking in Neanderthals, Denisovans, and all ancestors prior to monument-building/empire-building denizens of "civilization," (i.e. complex societies large enough to make ruins) then perhaps whenever you encounter the phrase "human intelligence" you should read "hu-man cognitive-behavioral pathology" instead. If hu-mans go extinct in the near future (5-50-500 years), then if there is intelligent life in the universe, if there are entities able to understand the last ten thousand years of the hu-man trajectory, how could any conceive of the concept "intelligent" as being attributable to inecolate hu-mans?
- Our failure to understand the exponential function is evidenced by Al Bartlett having tried to explain and explore the implications of the "simple arithmetic" by giving 1,742 public lectures, from 1969 to 2013, on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy: Sustainability 101."
- "For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity's grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large...." — Edward O. Wilson, Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life 2016
- "People would rather believe than know." — E.O. Wilson
- "I have played many roles sometimes with the majority, but more often attempting to shock the scientific establishment into a better view." — Howard T. Odum
- "Nature has all the answers, so what is your question?" — H.T. Odum
- Whenever an Anthropocene enthusiast, the 99%, opens their mouth to prattle about solutions—past, present, future, then add: Meanwhile, "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed" —David Suzuki 2016
- No prior complex society has managed to live "sustainably" as evidenced by their passing. One possible exception are the Tairona of Colombia.
- Wake up hu-mans.
Original graphic from Ecocosm Dynamics, with one future envisioned
as cooperation among all humans (not nation-states) to replace economic globalization
with an acceptable (to Gaia), sustainable global socioeconomic-political system [i.e. a naturocracy].
Make a sign:
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Some claims may be true, but too true for most people and merely provoke them to want to kill the messenger (or ignore, ridicule, marginalize, obfuscate, deny, and if necessary to vilify, demonize, imprison, then kill in roughly that order). Alternative is to suggest that an individual's education may have failed them, and that they (and other humans) are not the center of the universe.
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Imagine seven people with signs protesting on a university campus near you. Imagine you consider joining them. What message would be on your sign?
One more iteration: Electromagnetic emissions and reflections from Earth reach Ozyton, only 328 light-years away. Instruments detect signals beginning with the Great Acceleration in 1950. Other instruments soon focus on gathering all information possible, including images of the planet's changing surface which had been continuously observed for the past 679 thousand earth years. All information up to the last non-reflected bits were captured, enough that a likely story of what had happened emerged and was modeled. Some details, such as why humans loved Lucy, were indeterminate, but information intended to be non-fiction educational offerings told a coherent tale when matched to observable surface changes. When an Ozyton encounters words like "human intelligence" is it conceivable that their concept of "intelligent" could be applied?
When humans used the word, Ozytons might translate it as "clever ape." Our concept of intelligence, applied exclusively to modern humans as Anthropocene enthusiasts who differ "in kind" from all other organisms, would be viewed by the Ozytons as "cognitive-behavioral pathology," as how could it not? That humans were "educated" to serve the SYSTEM would be obvious, but how could the Ozyton concept of "educated" be applied? Any complex society that had been around for hundreds of thousands of years would be systems science literate if it possessed advanced technology. Otherwise, it too would have succumbed to short-termism to build ruins.
One iteration leads to another: Unknown to us, exobiologists on Ozyton have been remotely observing Gaia for 679k earth years. They are 328 light-years away so there is some delay in the flow of information. Professor Zyr, speaking to students at the wisdom grove, notes, "so while Klaatu went to deal with the infestation, she was too late. We looked back over the data stream to see what happened. It seems some apes started ambulating upright, which freed their prehensile forelimbs to carry resources to a base camp and make tools. A gender-based division of labor arose with some gathering most of the group's food energy near the camp while the more mobile ones foraged afar mostly for the higher energy mobile food sources. The stone-knappers prospered, eventual tapped into a planetary larder of fossil fuels and for a brief time even traveled off planet, suggesting some form of intelligence, but they seem to have wholly lacked the hallmark of true intelligence. This may seem impossible, but they lacked foresight intelligence. So of course they destroyed themselves. The Great Simplification was such that there is not time enough for life on Gaia to evolve enough for there to be another mass extinction event caused by another such lifeform nor to produce truly intelligent beings. It is a pity. The corvids were showing promise. There had been hope that soon we would be less alone."
