SUNDAY, AUG 29, 2021: NOTE TO FILE

Ruben Nelson

Thinking Outside the Box

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS:MODERN TECHNO-INDUSTRIAL CULTURE, FROM THE WIRES, WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY

Abstract: Ruben Nelson is old school, like H.G. Wells, and so can yet envision the need for a new world order and what it will need to look like to persist. He thereby becomes a person of interest.

COOS BAY (A-P) — Ruben Nelson caught on earlier than most in the 1970s to being a product of and serving a dysfunctional society that was not remotely sustainable, i.e. one that selected for its own demise (and of everyone in it). But he is no doomer dilettante. He endeavors to envision brave new worlds that may yet be. Consider his 1980 second edition of his 1976 book, The Illusions of Urban Man.

"For me, the most deep-seated illusion of our culture is that basically we know what we are doing; that refinement rather than transformation is called for; that ours is not and need not be a time of profound personal and social transformation.... So for us, much of our push from the industrial era has to do with our discovery of the horrendous human and environmental cost of the way we now live. The price is too high for so little satisfaction."

We fail to seek prescriptions for our continued evolution, prescriptions that involve standing down from our hubris heights, facing our unknowing, our need for transformation from a condition of pathology to "a time of profound personal and social transformation...."

And consider his 2021 thought crumbs to follow through the forest:

There is no chance that any national government is willing to even hint that we face a future in which the dominant work will be managing the chaotic decline of our Modern Techno-Industrial form of civilization.  And, there is no chance that any national population is ready and willing to hear it.  That, for good and ill, is where we are in 2021.  If that message is to be given we must create the receptor capacity in those who are willing to skate on this very thin ice....

Nothing I said [above] suggests that we should not clean up, suit up and show up every day [but it does suggest one's enthusiasm will be limited or non-existent].

What I said, although in different words, is that we are up against not just the vested interests of our Modern Techno-Industrial [MTI] form of civilization, but our very MTI cultures themselves.  Our MTI cultures [there is now one global monetary MTI culture of which all others are subcultures of with the exception of a few 'uncontacted' indigenous cultures fighting illegal MTI logging encroachment] are the “box” from which we need to escape.  We have to learn to know, imagine, think and act outside of the “box” of our own Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) form of civilization.  This means that we are up against ourselves, in so far as we have been formed by and have learned to succeed in a MTI culture [to suit up and show up every day].  This means that as Pogo Possum put it, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” [Better: I have met the enemy and he is I.] This means that we cannot win by using what we see to be the best of MTI cultures against what we see to be the worst of MTI cultures.  Any version of our MTI grasp on reality will lead us to death.  It is this that has not been digested by most researchers and practitioners today.  We suffer from the illusion that if we only do it “right” [e.g. we get the UN SDGs right] we can keep our MTI game going.  Sorry, we can’t.  Full Stop. [emph added]

Our 1st Enlightenment science can tell us that we are in deep, deep trouble.  This much we know.  Sadly, it is not reflexive enough to also tell us that in all humility, it cannot tell us how to get out of the mess of complex living messes we are in.  That figuring out how to get through this mess of messes takes a person who have transcended, to at least some noticeable degree,  their own Modernity.  Those who still trust and rely on MTI science and technology, which is almost everyone of us, still place our hope in some form of the story that “the best of our MTI cultures is OK.  It’s only the bad elements we have to struggle with.”

Sadly, this story is not profound enough to enable us... to stumble into life.

When [one writes or] you say that you want to “persuade people (to) think outside the box”, is this what you have in mind?  If not, I fear you are offering a false hope.

A new and more powerful story is slowly emerging – one which recognizes the deep cultural dimensions of our situation.  Bill Rees, the guy who conceived the notion of the “Ecological Footprint” is on the right trail.  He is asking, “Will Modernity be the Death of us?”  His answer is “most likely, although it is not yet certain.”  If you Google “William Rees civilization” you will find some of his recent articles and a video exploring the question I noted above. I am surprised that in an article on the ecological overshoot, [he is not referenced]....

To me it is heartbreaking, but not puzzling, that we who are MTI peoples and cultures do not yet understand that the root source of our troubles is our own formation as MTI peoples and the MTI cultures which have shaped us, and which in turn we shape and extend.  It is heartbreaking because it means that we know enough to figure out that we are in grievous trouble, but not enough to figure out how to respond appropriately.  In short, we will not get the future we seek.  We cannot bring ourselves to get serious about doing the one thing we need to do.  We need to respond by committing ourselves to transcend our MTI formation and cultures.  Tragically, and completely understandably, all our organized responses are framed, conceived and carried out with and within an MTI imagination of the world.  This is understandable because in order to succeed in our MTI cultures we are required to be logical, rational and empirical.  We are not required to be reflexive, let alone meta-reflexive.  (In fact, being such can get you in trouble.)  But… reflexivity is required if we are to transcend our formation.  We are like flies in a Wittgensteinian fly bottle, evolved enough to be able to get ourselves into a death trap, but not evolved enough to guide our own evolution as persons, whole cultures and a form of civilization.

 

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It appears to me that we who are MTI persons and cultures need sound responses to these questions, "Why is it that we who live in MTI cultures are bound and determined to only seek "solutions" which do not deflect us from pursuing the extension and improvement of our MTI cultures?" "Why does BAU lurk under every "radical" proposal for "transitions" and "transformations"?" "Why, especially, in light of the fact that many scholars and practitioners understand the ton of evidence that implies that BAU is a non-starter, assuming our objective is a truly sustainable and relatively sane society?"

I am dissatisfied with the answers now offered or implied to these questions.

It seems to me that too many of our conversations assume that most individuals suffer from some kind of "sound information" and/or "intelligence" deficit; that if we provide facts, argue for rationality and logic, and offer better education that, in time, enough folks will be convinced and they will change, and then we will be saved.

I do not find this strategy the least bit convincing, not only because it does not work, but because it mis-reads who we are as persons and what life as a person is like in a living culture with lots of sub-cultures.

Put simply, most folks in any given culture never entertain the thought that they are products of their culture all the way down; that even their objections to their culture, should there be any, are the kind of objections that a person formed by their culture would have; that the same is the case with their aspirations for the future.

My sense is that human beings are cultural animals to the core of our being; that no belief system that tells us we are not, e.g. the MTI belief system, can change this fact. All the MTI belief system does is blind us to the insights we actually need to make some progress. One major source of our troubles is that MTI cultures confuse critical mindedness with reflexivity. We value the former and tell ourselves that therefore we possess the latter capacity. Well, we don't. These are two quite different predispositions. If reflexivity and even meta-reflexivity are required for us to escape the Wittgensteinian fly bottle we are in, a view I defend, then even if we perfect the critical-mindedness which our MTI cultures tell us is so critically important, we will not succeed because we will not be able to understand the nature of the conundrum we face. Our responses will always be "beside the point."

The implication is that, if we are to make serious progress, we who are MTI need to develop far better and more coherent understandings of the interpenetration of consciousness, culture and the Earth. Only so will we see that the deep work of the 21st Century is not to improve and extend MTI cultures and share them with the "poor". Rather, for the first time in human history, it is learn to unlearn our own formation, inside and out, as we out-grow and leave behind our MTI selves, aspirations, cultures, habits, routines, and even its science. New versions of all of these await us if we can come to see that as of today MTI cultures are trapped inside of MTI ways of knowing, imagining, thinking and doing. Sadly, this work is not yet on our agendas.

Or so it seems to me.

 

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I agree with complexity theorists that on a rugged landscape, which is surely our situation, we should try all of the strategies for which we have the energy.  This means that other strategies should also be conceived and enacted.

One would be to focus on finding the analogue of the Koch brothers.  Without serious funding little will likely happen to get at the systems and mind/heart sets [Xin] of our MTI cultures at the scale we need.  Among other things there is a trillion dollar global advertising industry with a vested interest to ensure our voices are not heard above the din. [Our MTI schooling system is a greater vested interest. There are some 22 thousand colleges and universities teaching conventional economic thinking. They matriculate about 100k PhDs in NCE certitudes each year. Replacing the belief-based Old Education system of, by, and for the schooled to serve MTI society with a systems science-based New Education system of, by and for autodidacts who endeavor to listen to Nature (who has all the answers) is the foundation of the world revolution (civilizational paradigm shift) H.G. Wells envisioned in 1933.]

Another would be to pull together a cabal of those the few folks who (a) now have access to those with power and influence, (b) already have established international reputations for the quality of their minds and character, (c) understand that our MTI form of civilization is not long for this world, and (d) also understand that as of today, no one has a coherent strategy to guide our actions that is scalable to the whole inhabited Earth [i.e. instigate a Naturocracy Alliance].  The point would be to set them free to take a stab at developing and enacting the strategies we need.  (The newish Cascade Institute in Victoria headed by Thomas Homer-Dixon is one such attempt on a smaller-than-required scale.  We really need something akin to the Manhattan Project, but with a very different focus.)

Another would be to develop a meta-network [or cabal] among those scholars and practitioners who get the situation.  There are lots of partial formal and informal networks, but none with the purpose of the funding to make the differences we need.  Or so it seems to me.

Another would be… (add your favorite strategy here.) [a vote with your feet option given that MTI society cannot be tweaked into its opposite.]

Of course, in an ideal world all these would happen.  Today, none of the efforts directed to any of the above appear to be enough. [We MTIed ones are all products of the MTI Old Education system. We stopped running the race between education and catastrophe in the 20th century because the consensus narrative arose that we moderns won thanks to our clever ape exceptionalism and ability to decouple from nature resulting in the Great Acceleration. With climax and descent, more may become interested in the race, a teachable moment may cometh, and a coherent theory of revolution could yet arise and be acted upon. Those still living the purpose-driven live of making money and receiving social approbation for serving the MTI system, the monetary culture, may get a life-driven purpose to consider real solutions that might actually work to allow posterity to persist by loving and understanding the planet, i.e. learning to live with it properly as handmaidens anew.]

 

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The UN’s SDGs are simply another attempt by our MTI cultures to keep the MTI game going.  We are in willful denial that our MTI form of civilization has become lethal to humans and much other life.  The thought that we can make MTI cultures to be sustainable has always been pie in the sky.  They cannot.  Full stop.  If the SDGs are met by 2030, all we will have done is given temporary comfort to billions while we hasten the death of our, and millions of other, species.

As MTI peoples and cultures we do not yet have the moral capacity to face and face up to what we have become and what we are doing.  The root issues are now ones of our character, not our intellect.

Given the above, best we develop grounds for hope that can withstand despair.  There will be despair once we get it that our MTI cultures will not outlast the 21st Century as places fit to live in, with persons fit to live with.

The issue of learning to manage our decline as whole cultures and a form of civilization is not even an idea in good currency, let alone one in which we are making significant investments.  It appears to me that in the minds of many, even the de-growth strategy is a way to rescue what we can of our MTI world.  It is not yet developed as an exit strategy from our MRI mythology, miasma and practice.

As with the USA and its allies in Afghanistan, by the time we realize it is time to withdraw our energies from the project of holding the MTI pieces together and extending the life of our project, it will be far too late to avoid collapse.

Would that it were otherwise.  But, as I see things, it is not.

 

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And… the signs that MTI cultures are disintegrating have been showing up for decades.  (Although few read them that way.) I expect this to continue even if today’s shortages are overcome.  The decline of a major way of knowing and living within the Earth takes centuries and is an uneven, messy process.  By the time it is obvious that we are disintegrating we will have missed most of the points at which we might have been able to intervene to mitigate the process.

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'If we don’t address human population, consumption, and more generally, overshoot, then none of these little efficiency gains are going to matter much. And remember William S. Jevons: Efficiency does not save resources. Human mechanical efficiencies increase resource consumption. Growth swamps efficiency. And so forth. We’re still trying to solve overshoot by building machines, because that’s what we are used to doing and it bolsters the profiteers within our anti-ecological economic system, but building machines — and our economic system — are major causes of overshoot.' —RW

And, Rex, knowing all that you say, we still invest far more time, energy and money in micro-fixes.  We seem to be incapable of shaking the story that we can micro-fix our way to paradise.  Our unwillingness to make serious investments in whole-of-society, personal-to-civilizational transitions shows remarkable, and probably willful, blindness.

 

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William Rees: Four comments,

1) Modern so-called renewable energy -- mostly wind turbines and solar PV, but also now hydrogen -- is ecologically and socially harmful (toxic wastes and slave/child labour) and  impossible to scale up in a climate relevant time-frame. To replace 50% of FF use by 2030 would require that the world construct ~1.2 times the entire present cumulative global stock of wind farms and solar panels every year for the next nine years, and this assumes  that hard-to-electrify applications will become easy to electrify and that there will be  no growth in demand or mineral supply problems in an economy expecting two billion more people and a 50% increase in demand for energy (by 2050).  REs also have a failing grade ERoEI of < 3:1 in much of the world  and are not really renewable, merely replaceable  (15-20 yr working life-span for wind turbines; 20-30 for solar panels).

2) Even if Ahmed/Seba were correct, it would be catastrophic.  Climate change is not the real issue, OVERSHOOT is -- people are using  energy and material resources in excess of nature's regenerative capacity and polluting beyond nature's assimilative capacity.  We are destroying the biophysical basis of our own existence.  This is a fatal condition.(Climate change is a symptom of overshoot, the result of excess carbon dioxide, the largest entropic waste by weight of industrial economies.  With "unimaginable clean energy abundance," humanity would continue to gut ecosystems, pollute land, air and waters, and collapse the ecosphere.  "Business-as-usual-by-alternative-means' spells disaster. 

3) We cannot solve climate change or any other major symptom of overshoot (e.g., biodiversity loss, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, pollution of everything, etc.) in isolation.  However, all symptoms would be alleviated simultaneously by addressing overshoot.

4) Overshoot can be relieved only by significant reductions of energy and material consumption and human populations (see attached). 

That's my story and I'm sticking to it until the evidence points elsewhere.

Attachments:

Fractal biology of plague (Rees2020).pdf PDF

Ecological economics for humanity's plague phase.pdf

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'Ruben adds:

And, as Bill knows, and I think agrees with (but he can speak for himself), we need a fifth insight:

5.  Learning to live in ways that result in “significant reductions of energy and material consumption and human populations” requires that we out-grow and transcend our MTI identities, aspirations and cultures as we learn to cooperate with our own evolution, and this at every scale from the uniquely personal to civilizational.

In short, we must take seriously, that Einstein’s famous quip applies to us as MTI Peoples and cultures.  We are not exempt from its demands.  “we cannot deal with the messes we create with the same ways of imagining and  grasping reality that got us into the messes in the first place.”  (Ruben’s translation.)

It is this issue that will stymie us even if we invent magical new technologies.

The odds are high that this issue will not be raised, let alone explored, at COP 26.

Ruben

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Bill: Yep, What Ruben said! 

 

Even more important to keep in mind, is that the real meta-problem is not climate change but rather ecological overshoot, of which climate change is only one symptom.  Replacing fossil fuels quantitatively with 100% renewables would simply provide the means for humans to exacerbate overshoot, to continue depleting the ecosphere and destroying the life-support functions of ecosystems upon which we all depend. 

We cannot solve climate change by trying to solve climate change, but if we wanted to we could address overshoot and with it all its various co-symptoms. 

Bill R

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So the challenge we face is this:  can we learn to help folks like this [who cannot change] to come to aspire to ways of being and living which are far more challenging and empowering.  The question is some form of this:  Can the powerful experiences of being able to make real differences in the lives of some situations stir us from our slumbers so that we engage as co-creators of the next form of civilization?

A long short, yes.  But a firm “no, it can’t be done”, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

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[Above quoted without expressed permission from a closed listserv I cannot link to.]

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11/18/2021 SUBNOTE TO FILE: The listserv Ruben comments/posts on is dominated by science types with a low tolerance for comments/content referencing religion or meta anything. Ruben has taught theology at the university level and may or may not be some sort of ordained minister as one member of the group claimed. I always benefit by giving his missives a careful reading. Ruben views science and religion (Christianity as he understands it) as wholly compatible. He knows the rules and never mentions his religious concerns or views.

He did invite members to a Zoom conference presentation on the compatibility of science and religion. I attended, but due to technical delay, had no audio for the first hour. Of what I did hear, claims were informative and vetted out, Christians from before Galileo to after have 'done' science and pursued scientific interests. One narrative is that the Catholic Church's problem with Galileo's extraordinary claims (e.g. support of Copernicus) was that they seemed to violate accepted facts, which is sound science. The Church took Copernicus' book off the ban book list in 1835, however, which does make the Church look a little slow on the uptake.

My guess was that, as a theologian, Ruben was able to think outside the MTI zeitgeist and question all its assumptions/verities more readily and with greater clarity than most. That as an organized religion, Christianity became a state religion to serve Rome, and has served the MTI hegemon well is obvious, but not all Christians are mainstream. The Jesus Sayings can very easily be interpreted as wholly other than as MTI culture interprets them.

One member wanted graphics to illustrate carrying capacity and ecological overshoot. Ruben suggested a new video by Michael Dowd:  Overshoot in a nutshell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPMPINPcrdk&t=41s

I watched it and noticed use of Christian speak, e.g. "sustainable means faithful; unsustainable means unfaithful", and such as by adding to a line labeled 'carrying capacity' an extra 'grace limit' as if living below the line was to live in Grace, while to transgress the line was to invite retribution. So I looked into the source cited and he is, as a minister, a strong proponent of science and religion (his form of Christianity) as being wholly in accord such that any religious claim not supported by evidence must be interpreted until it is. He is author of 'Thank God for Evolution', for example. Richard Dawkins couldn't tell Michael Dowd anything he didn't full well know as long as he spoke as a scientist and not as an atheist. For the straight dope, watch Dowd's impressive TED talk: Reality reconciles science and religion.

Do I share Dowd's (likely Ruben's too) view that science and religion are compatible? Am I a compatibilist? Yes, if I define 'religion' as a strictly inquiry-based endeavor, which excludes Christianity and all forms of belief-based, belief tolerant/compatibilist religion, i.e. all organized historical religions which would include all expressions of Christianity. Otherwise, no.

Unlike Xin, there is no form or expression of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, et al. that does not reference beliefs. The belief in belief is the original sin of religion. Being a true believer in both science and religion compounds the error. Quibbling over a diffinition of religion, however, would be a distraction from my concern that Dowd and friends are an existential threat to humanity and the biosphere, though they doubtless see themselves as anything but.

Some Christians correctly see themselves, their theology (and perhaps the stories of Jesus) as profoundly non-MTI culture based, and so are able to view the sea we swim in more critically. For example, some are Christian anarchists who can question our technological slavery.

“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself be the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.” ― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

And not to neglect Catholic theologians:

“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume ― a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.” ― Ivan Illich

I came to take an interest in Ellul and Illich by reading Ted Kaczynski. I'm guessing I could find an erudite Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist, Confucian, Jainist, Taoist... also capable of thinking critically about modern techno-industrial society. The only tribal group I've ever been associated with, i.e. went to monthly lectures and social gatherings, was a local CFI (Center for Inquiry) group, a humanist/atheist/skeptic special interest group that liked only one of two essays I wrote: 'Why I'm not a Theist' and 'Why I'm not an Atheist' though I did go to an Atheist convention in LA once and am well versed (no pun intended) in New Atheist offerings. Without implying I'm 'good', I can say I'm good without God or any of his prophets. I'm not a compatibilist as I, so far as I know, live in one magesterium (as there are no others I know of), overlapping or not.

What I fail to detect in Dowd is any slight capacity to think about real solutions to our problematique nor to take an interest in same. Doing so would not be incompatible with his science, but would be with his religion. That we have a problematique, he is well informed of, impeccably informed by cutting edge thinking in systems science. I quibble not with his evidence-based claims nor admiration of Catton and many others he cites. But an inability to think about real solutions is fatal to humanity's future that Dowd is clearly prepared to die in service to. That he and fellow believers in science and/or religion are the dynamic that will destroy a planetary life-support system is not part of their narrative. That such a claim is not so is a fact Dowd could easily explain at book length. Alas, Nature doesn't care how merely eloquent one is, nor about what we humans deeply believe to be true. We are Homo sapiens narrator, the storytelling animal, but believing our stories is a recent (last 10k years) pathology. Believers and the believing mind must stand down and know that we know nothing. No ad hominin implied, but Erik Michaels is a friend who considers Dowd his mentor.

I am not a compatibilist in that I see no non-overlapping magisteria, no two magisteria out there. Reality is not God nor any concept/belief we may have of her. "Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of him is untrue," observed Meister Eckhart. Full STOP. Why dost thou prate of any magisterium other that the unknown that lies all undiscovered before thee? I don't believe in Reality. To have even the idea of Reality or God or enlightenment is to go astray, is to be had by the idea. Anything I sayest is untrue. Are thee the exception?

Hubris Man cannot stand down; we MTI ones cannot know that we know nothing, but at best can pretend to iterate towards knowing as a dog might pretend to understand calculus if a dog could know that it doesn't know calculus. Perhaps some humans may yet know humilitas and learn to persist.

 

Eric Lee
"Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth."
— Isaiah 21:6

PS: Sorry, Ruben et al., to say what I see, even as I must celebrate Ruben's life's work.

 

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I [Ruben] have devoted my life (82 years now) to coming to understand the emergence, character and possible futures of our Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) form of civilization. My core interest is in this question: Under what conditions, if any, is human agency a significant factor in the evolution of particular futures out of particular pasts and presents? I have come to the view that our species has significant agency on the evolution of this planet (now a well-established fact); that most of our agency has been acted out unconsciously shaped by both biological and cultural forces; and that there is some reasonable hope that enough of us might come to exercise the capacity to consciously influence the ongoing evolution of our species and this planet – biologically and culturally -- to make real differences. (A view held by many of the most knowledgeable persons on the planet, but , of course, not all of them. And a view that is far removed from the ungrounded and systemically superficial optimism of our MTI cultures.) And yes, I know about complexity theory, biological overshoot, psychological overshoot, cultural overshoot and even civilizational overshoot. (I coined the latter term a few years ago. In 1975 I was the 1st person to apply the category of paradigm change to whole cultures.) In short, I too, want to learn about the situation we are in: its character, its limitations, its requirements and its possibilities. I share the view with many... that the path our MTI cultures are on has become lethal. If we stay on it, our reward will be the our death as a species and the death of untold other species, some of which we have come to love....

["Does any list member seriously believe that they can modify in any way civilization's trajectory towards collapse?”] My [Ruben] response is that any member of this list who has more than a passing knowledge of complexity theory will say, “Yes, I believe that.” The core reason is that we now know enough about living complex systems, human and non-human , to know that in Stuart Kauffman’s language, the future of such systems cannot be “pre-stated.” In short, we cannot say for sure what their future will be. It is not arrogance to say this; it is humility. The fact is that, as of today, we do not know enough about the mess of messes we are in to say for sure how it will turn out even over this decade, let alone this century or longer. We do not even know enough to say for sure that there are no positive differences which we might make if we had the wit, and courage to do so. To say that we know for sure that this is not so, is, in my view, the height of arrogance and human folly. If this view is good enough for Stuart Kauffman, Bill Rees, Thomas Homer-Dixon and a host of other 1st rate scholars I do not fee shame in coming to the same conclusion.

 

2/6/2022 SUBNOTE TO FILE:

Ruben: At the least, we are up against the multi-faceted nature of MTI cultures.... If we are up against a whole form of civilization – the MTI form – and the cultures which exemplify it, then we need a strategy to change/evolve/destroy/transcend (the verb depends on your analysis of the nature of MTI cultures) the MTI cultures we have inherited, by which we have been formed, and through which we live and move and have our being.

And to back up one more step, to have a reliable strategy aimed at altering in some way, to some degree, the masses in MTI cultures, we need reasonably accurate mental maps and models of what MTI cultures are, how they were formed and how they work. Without such maps and models we cannot hope that our implicit or explicit theory of change will be more accurate than purely random actions.

In the many decades I have been involved in and committed to personal-to-civilizational scale transcendence of our MTI cultures, I have come to know and respect tens of thousands of good people who were committing themselves to the work of improving/saving the future. But I have yet to run across or develop an understanding of our present condition that is wise, systemic, integral and meta-reflexive enough to reliably guide an all-of-society campaign to deflect us from our present path… which I acknowledge now leads to death....

In case I have not been clear. I am among the small minority who (1) have a non-trivial understanding of the nature and depth of the trouble we are in and who (2) deny what so many believe – “that we know what needs to be done, we just lack the power, money, energy, commitment, will, caring (again the noun depends on your analysis) to do it.” To say that “we know what we want to accomplish” is true. But, as yet, no one knows how to bring that future about.

Regrettably, if there is anything in this line of reasoning, then we have some very heavy intellectual/emotional/spiritual lifting to do before we settle on any truly fundamental course of action. Sadly, few persons and fewer institutions are actually devoted to this task.

This is not to say that we should stop writing letters, comfort the distressed, etc., etc. It is to suggest that we are far from ready to lead masses of folks into an ill-conceived attempt to impose a new, and to us a more desirable, order on MTI cultures.

Ruben

 

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2/9/2022 SUBNOTE TO FILE:  In July, 2021, William Rees (mentioned above) and Megan Seibert published “Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition” in the refereed journal, Energies. In this article they focused on climate change, the so-called green renewable energy (RE) revolution and the Green New Deal (GND). However, they did the unusual by framing the debate on climate change and the alleged transition to green renewable energy in the context of ecological overshoot.  Within that framing, was four goals:

1) to show from a selection of the literature (they had no intention of being comprehensive) that there significant scientific doubt about the ability of RE to quantitatively displace FF (fossil fuels);

2) to provide evidence that if society persists in achieving this unlikely task, it would be materially wasteful and ecologically and socially damaging;

3 to make the case that even if RE succeeded, it would be dangerous for people and the planet—we are already in potentially fatal overshoot and successful RE would merely extend eco-destructive 'business-as-usual-by-alternative-means';

4) to suggest the rough outlines of a possibly sustainable future for fewer people living on truly renewable energy within the biophysical means of nature.  

The article was initially generally well received by reviewers (despite what the editor now claims). It had been selected as the cover article in the 26 July 2021 issue of Energies. The authors expected a varied response to the article but were pleasantly surprised that virtually all correspondence directed to them in subsequent weeks, including from other energy analysts, was quite positive.  Any questions concerned minor points of clarification.

In July, I added excerpts and a link to 'Design for a Viable Civilization' to feature the overshoot better view. That were would be pushback from the RE and GND tribes was foreseeable. That it would result in the editor of Energies apologizing for featuring the article on the cover AND for ever considering publishing it at all without major alteration, was not.

Goring a team of yoked oxen (RA, GND as cure for the only global problem that is an existential threat to MTI society, namely climate change) can have unpredictable outcomes. Unfortunately goring MTI society's pet oxen is easier than leaving them as an eviscerated, if still quivering, mass of error, ignorance, and illusion. Merely gored oxen who sing the MTI song can fight back.

First was Mark Diesendorf:  Rebuttal of Eye of a needle, accepted 24 September 2021.

Then Seibert and Rees: Rebuttal of the Diesendorf rebuttal, accepted 21 December 2021.

Individuals can get the first shot in, but while singing the consensus song, it was clearly deemed inadequate to the task of canceling Seibert and Rees (the overshoot as meta-problem view), and so the big guns were brought out to obfuscate the matter.

Then Fthenakis, et al. (16 other RE high priests and priestesses): Rebuttal of Eye of a needle, accepted 21 December 2021.

And Seibert and Rees: Rebuttal of the Fthenakis et al. rebuttal, accepted 27 December 2021.

The above, all published 28 January 2022, is a study in the consensus narrative of MTI society vs those who would listen to Nature, of an inability to read and think about what Nature is telling us. Outliers of acceptable MTI consensus thinking can tell the truth to those in power, but can't make them drink. First they ignore you; then they ad hominem you; then they obfuscate, deny, misattribute, cite authorities, assert the consensus view, quote out of context, gang up, cherry-pick, attack claims imagined to have been made, use language to bewitch our intelligence, express disdain/incredulity, and take refuge in the convoluted while singing sweetly the MTI worldview of human exceptionalism.

But protocol allowed Seibert and Rees to rebut the rebuttal, which fails to truly cancel their inconvenient biophysical reality 101 claims. So it was necessary to take additional measures. Following publication of the above exchanges, the editor of Energies, Enrico Sciubba, was apparently 'urged' by protests from the RE enthusiasts (the usual contributors to the journal) into appending an editorial note to the Seibert and Rees paper back-dated to 26 January 2022 (in violation of temporal reality, but as the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to humans, adding one more error is merely par for the servants of the MTI course). Energies is published by MDPI Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.

The editor notes that Seibert and Rees are unscientific, clearly an opinion paper, and misrepresents their paper as advancing 'the fundamental idea that the overshoot is the only measure of ecological impact' (they did nothing of the kind), disses Rees and ecological impact analysis (which was not discussed), and issues an abject apology to readers for having allowed their featured cover article to 'slip through their system'. 

It seems that they are now 'strongly biased' which, of course, is true if being fundamentally opposed to a materially wasteful and ecologically/socially destructive technological transformation constitutes bias. (But then isn’t strong support of said transition, regardless of consequences, similarly biased?) 

What is particularly instructive is the editor’s penultimate paragraph in which he affirms:

'What is unacceptable in the S&R paper is not their insistence on the overshoot but the fact that they do not consider any other facet of the much more complex issue of enacting a transition to 'sustainable' development [this was not their intent as they were specifically critiquing "RE-as-transition"]: they simply insist on the need for a "prosperous way down" a’ la Odum [whom they never mentioned], and even suggest to set a limit to the world population so as to avoid overshoot… an unfortunate echo of Malthusianism that is surely not even conceivable today' (emphasis added).

So here we are, 50 years after the publication of Limits to Growth (whose basic trends to overshoot have been confirmed by several follow-up studies), and despite thousands of scientific articles showing accelerating climate change, rampant tropical deforestation, plunging biodiversity, spreading ocean dead zones, global-scale land/soil degradation, pollution of everything, growing threat of famine and more pandemics, looming systems tipping-points, etc., etc., etc., all co-symptoms of overshoot, yet overshoot/over-population can be dismissed as an unfortunate historical Malthusian echo, not even conceivable today by well informed scientists. 

(Note: Energies is funded at least in part by authors’ fees, yet Editor Sciubba also claims no conflict of interest in issuing his note and apology to readers.) 

Seems that the RE fraternity is in deep overshoot denial which is much worse than climate change denial. But the more immediate issue is the creep of cancel-culture mentality into the sustainability debate. Should we not be alarmed that the editor of a prominent journal can be forced into craven apology for having published a peer-reviewed paper—originally deemed by his own process as interesting enough to be selected as the cover article—apparently at the insistence of powerful orthodox interests —(there are vast sums of money vested in the modern renewable energy industry)—who disagree with its findings? 

The above is mostly a paraphrasing of information shared by Bill. As a note to file, all groups, tribes, tribal factions and consensus narratives work the same. Speak outside the collective's consensus narrative, or beg to demur, and 'you’re straightway dangerous - and handled with a Chain' if necessary, but first you are ignored,

If the consensus narrative is that a human population of 2 billion is sustainable, then begging to demur that maybe 7 to 35 million is... expect to be ignored. Inadvertently giving indication that one is not a compatibilist (between religion, e.g. Christianity, Islam and science) and displeasure may be expressed when you cannot be ignored. Failure to concede to compatibilist norms in academia may be consequenced. Vet a source without reading their cited article, and be accused of ad hominem attack on the author's position you have yet to read/consider (i.e. an ad hominem attack is occasioned by confusing 'ad hominem attack' with 'vetting a source' prior to giving them a careful hearing). In the good old days, vetting a source could perhaps be avoided and be recommended as best practice, but today is the post-truth era, and arguably vetting sources is adaptive (sane). Or not, and I'm an ignorant know-nothing from the hood who just doesn't get it.

I am not a member of any tribal group, which may be needed to pass through the eye of the needle (through the coming bottleneck), as doing so would be so not MTI culture. To understand tribal consensus storytelling is to iterate towards being delivered from it. Can all humans be delivered from tribalism? Can most who endeavor to listen (the fraction of one percent) to Nature who has all the answers be delivered? Will any functional human pass through the bottleneck to build a non-MTI society of enough? I don't know.

Can some humans who would listen to Nature come to rigorously analyze complex systems and rigorously cast off our own paradigms to throw ourselves into the humility of Not Knowing [to paraphrase Donella Meadows]? The next century may reveal.

 

2/10/2022 SUBNOTE TO FILE:  

How much longer can modern techno-industrial (MTI) society keep on keeping on?

[The following is Rex Weyler's (mentioned above) best guess and mine, so I'll repeat it.]

World proven oil reserves are about 1.6 trillion barrels, which we’re using at the rate of about 34 billion barrels per year, so that would be 47 years, lasting roughly to 2069. New discoveries are rare, small, and difficult/expensive to recover.

But of course, it’s not that simple. Burning that much oil would create significantly more heating, and could easily tip us into runaway heating. Furthermore, we are already into the dregs of that oil — tar sands, deep fields, shale oil — that are more expensive to extract, more polluting and ecologically destructive, more expensive to refine, and with lower net energy (EROI). [So to maintain current energy from oil, the number of barrels used per year would have to increase exponentially, and given that the MTI economic system needs to keep on growing to keep on, added growth increases the rate of oil usage to further reduce the 47 years to maybe 20 to 30 years of usable oil within pockets of MTI society in a contracting global economy with the global system climaxing in perhaps 10 years.]

Similar stories with coal and gas, and also with key minerals — copper, phosphorus, lithium, uranium, and so forth. [All mining will require ever increasing use of fossil fuels just to maintain production, let alone increase production to maintain economic growth to continue life as we MTI ones know it.]

Similar story with carbon, minerals, and fungal networks in the world’s soils. [And groundwater/surface water, arable land...]

Industrial society — primarily based on petroleum fuels, which are necessary to create cement, steel, nuclear plants, wind turbines, solar panels, to mine lithium for batteries and so forth — is already winding down, propped up by debt. [Li batteries use cobalt, and currently 40k children in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone work in small-scale cobalt mines.] Nations and their corporate patrons are already fighting over these declining resources. Global agriculture is dependent upon petroleum fuels, so the decline in quantity, quality, and net-energy will impact food sources globally. [Figure about 90% of food is made by turning fossil fuels into food, directly or indirectly, and that without fossil fuel inputs, most farmed lands (e.g. almost all irrigated lands) will be unfarmable and don't expect such surplus food as locals may produce, if any, to be transported more than 100 km overland, i.e. that most cities will become expanses of ruins, but not quickly in 20-50 years. After an initial rapid descent, the downslope can extend over centuries if there is no external complex society to move in. As on Malta, Easter Island, Late Bronze Age Collapse Sea People culture, and in the Indus Valley, those at the end of 8+ generations on the downslope may be unable to rebuild.]

 

Transport of all these resources, and food, is still vastly dependent upon petroleum energy. All of this will wind down slowly, perhaps sometimes in accelerated crises, over the next 50-years, and beyond. [The current monetary empire is global, meaning there are no outlying empire builders to conquer it when it weakens, so the downslope could extend over 8 to 20 generations. Each generation on the upslope lost functional behaviors. Each on the downslope could lose more (Calhounian behavioral sink that begins on the upslope).

The outcome could be human species extinction, as no literate, numerate, nor ecolate humans may survive the downslope selection dynamic. Sorry about today's lack of interest in viable solutions (e.g. a new world order/civilization), i.e. wicked solutions to wicked problems, much less the wicked solutionatique to our problematique which is needed as completely solving one wicked problem, e.g. climate change, or even a dozen problematiques, won't change the overall trajectory/outcome.]

Pretty much as Limits to Growth predicted in 1972. [Pretty much per the business-as-usual scenario.]

Rex.

---

 

As the responses suggest [to the question of what word could be used to describe the human reluctance to open up to the fact that our population overgrowth is well into the process of driving us into extinction, or something close], what we are dealing with is not a simple single phenomenon.

I [Ruben] prefer “willful blindness” to capture it.  (See Margaret Heffernan’s exploration of it.)  When willfully blind, we simply cannot “see” that which others are pointing.  It is not there for us. 

The deepest sources of this experience are ontological and epistemological, i.e. the unconscious cultural O/E presupposition that reality is both unambiguous and unchanging.  This results in the possibility that human knowing can be perfect and unchanging.  In short, within this frame, if you know you are right, there are no good reasons to change your mind.  Just hold on to the truth tighter.  (The normal response of MTI males and folks in authority in pre-Modern cultures, cf Putin, Xi  and the Pope.) 

As Bob has noted this O/E stance is reinforced by normal cultural socialization.  Robert Wright’s term is “progress trapped.”  Others use “Culture trapped.”  If this phenomenon was not real there would be no “culture shock.” 

Sadly, culture shock is alive and living among and within us.  Consider the trouble we are having making reliable and agreed upon sense of the “truckers” phenomena.  Their conduct and demands do not fit into the tidy and widely-agreed upon categories of our culture.  Note that this was also the case with new demands made by folks who were previously voiceless and well behaved, e.g. slaves, Blacks, Francophone Quebecers, women. 

In this light, it is to be expected that folks who insist on talking about “too many persons” and “too much economic growth” will be seen in much the same way as the truckers are seen today, a little dose of sympathy with a big dose or rejection and the demand, “get back in line and behave like the rest of us.”

In short, we have not yet taken seriously the degree to which we in CACOR [Canadian Club of Rome] are truly counter-cultural and are calling for a serious societal/cultural/economic upsetting and re-ordering.  In this regard, we may be willfully blind to what it is we are about. 

Ruben

 

I [Rex] cannot remember who suggested “humanism,” [for a word to describe the human reluctance to open up to the fact that our population overgrowth is well into the process of driving us into extinction, or something close], but this is certainly part of it, the notion that humans are:

• special in evolution
• the “paragon of animals,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet puts it
• “above” animals as some religions believe
• not actually animals, but some “higher” life-form
• closer to “god"
• that humans possess some divine or mystical purpose or relevance that other animals lack
• that human “rights” are a higher priority than ecological stability or other animals’ “rights”

We could also say: Human-centric, human-centeredness, human exceptionalism and yes, this is all inecolate [my word], although that word is too esoteric for most of the public.

And as the previous commentator [me] pointed out, this humanism leads to the worship and glorification of human technology, and the belief that our technology will “solve” all our problems, linked to our cleverness and ingenuity. This faith and devotion to technology clings to the examples of human achievement, but forgets or fails to recognize all the collapses and atrocities of history, and the current collapses and catastrophes of over-population, crowding, hunger, starvation, violence, depleted landscapes, and desperation.

These ideas fail to understand evolution, biology, ecology, co-evolution, as well as basic physics, thermodynamics, and so forth.

Indeed, we are talking about delusional thinking, ignorance, and blindness, but I suggest all of this is linked to humanism, human-centeredness, human exceptionalism.

To see H. sapiens as a species of animal, albeit a clever animal, with a 300,000-year history, about 0.008% of life’s history on Earth, on one tiny branch of evolution, is too embarrassing or demeaning for most people. The notions that our species is special, exceptional, chosen for special purpose by some deity, or fated for special purpose by evolution stroke our ego and justify violence against all other animals and all other forms of life.

We’re not alone in these ideas of exceptionalism. Wolves and other mammals, birds, will protect the pack, the family, and kill invaders. The instinct is natural, and has survival value, but writ large to justify human domination of Earth, the instinct becomes maladaptive and spells our own demise.

Human-exceptionalism. That’s the term I would use.

Rex. 

 

Bill Rees:

"Depends on whether we want; a) to maintain the current growth-based global economic trajectory and continue -- literally -- undermining the ecosphere or; b) to rethink our economy values, and lifestyles in ways that enable people to live with less material consumption more equitably within the means of nature. "

 

 

Yes, no shortage of perspectives.

But, as you [Bill] suggest, there is a severe shortage in MTI peoples and cultures of widely-shared and honoured self-critical, self-conscious reflexivity and meta-reflexivity.  Ours is a data oriented 1st order way of being in the world.  We trust the surface of life, the literally ‘superficial’.  It gives us the comfort of “hard numbers”.  We distrust digging into what we have been conditioned not to see.  God knows what we might find if we start [critically] plumbing the depths of human consciousness and cultures.

As George W Bush so proudly said, “I don’t do nuance.”  He was cheered for it.

It follows that while we trot out Walt Kelly’s cartoon for April 1st 1970, the 1st Earth day, in which Pogo Possum says, “Yup, we have met the enemy and he is us,” we do not really believe it.  We are virtue signalling, not confessing.

At this rate we will not even figure out why we are dying as we die.

Not good news for 10 year olds.

Ruben

 

 

---

Given my life with political and business leaders at every level of governance I don’t have to imagine them… I know them.  They are real.  Most are nice people.  You would let them bay-sit your kids.  Just don’t let them govern your jurisdiction.

Ruben

 

---

 

As I [Bill] suggested to another friend, "Life on Earth is unfolding as it always has under the inexorable pressures generated by the interplay of natural laws, particularly far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. The resulting emergence of self-organizing/self producing life-forms and ecosystems is really what the Gaia hypothesis was all about.

When we see that 'the collective activity of life creates a system that is self-maintaining' it is certainly not because of some mystical 'display of planetary intelligence' on the part of 'non-technologically capable species'. It is because the system we are observing is behaving according to a more or less optimal way according to natural laws and therefore survives and thrives. Alternative structures that were less efficient and effective in dissipating available energy in service of their own survival and reproduction, have been 'selected out'.

As an aside, the recent human growth spurt (the past 250 years or so) is an anomaly that is on the verge of systemic self-correction. It won't be pleasant. "

---

 

SUBNOTE: We MTI ones are flies in our techno-modern fly bottle. Maybe 0.01% will at some point on the downslope consider how to get out. The secret awaits for the insight.

Oh, and Ruben has expressed to the other members his sense of shame that the listserv could somehow descend to such lowliness as to tolerate having such a mediocrity as me as a member. I tried to clarify issues in a private reply off-list, but he did not reply. I have been ignored by all since, so I assume all agree. I'm guessing he correctly sees me as an existential threat to his values and hopes. My regard for him did not change a hairsbreadth. Alas, I'm not the only human able to be in error.

And for a cosmic view: 'Inflation is just a de Sitter-like exponential expansion that occurred starting at around 10^{-35}sec into the local cosmos and lasting about 10^{-30} seconds. This occurs at around 10^{10} Planck units of time into the course of the observable universe. So there is when thinking logarithmically a factor of 10 scaling prior to inflation. What happened there is a bit hard to know. In the eternal inflationary scenario, which is the most consistent physics with inflation, there is a de Sitter spacetime that is expanding and accelerating some 120 orders of magnitude larger than what we observe. This vacuum though is unstable locally and it decays so that it inflates in a bubble region for some period of time before the vacuum collapses to a very low value. This eternally inflating spacetime has on the one hand a local unstable vacuum, but it expands so rapidly that no unstable region can propagate across the whole of this space. In this setting the observable universe did not begin with a singularity. However. this de Sitter spacetime of eternal inflation cannot be extrapolated back to the infinite past. So, this may have an origin that has a quantum gravitational physics that we would classically call a singularity. The physics here is not entirely easy to figure, and it may have something to do with AdS-black hole like physics.' LC. Perhaps someday there will be a dog on this planet who realizes they don't understand calculus, but who can tell stories about calculus not being entirely easy to figure.

3/23/22 SUBNOTE TO FILE:

Another list member I tend to side with and seriously consider is Luis, a scientist (objective, rational) and a Catholic (maybe having a less than objective and rational view of the Catholic Church, but otherwise...), which is odd in that I, someone who, when I hear the word 'God', wants to say, 'God? God who? What's his last name.' I'm so by nature and upbringing so atheistst that atheism is boring and of no interest. Yes, I find myself agreeing when 'greater' scientists on the list differ with him, sometimes reactively. The reason seems to be because Ruben and Luis, the only overtly religious members, are also among the least political, and while sometimes 'it takes religion' to make a good mind reactive, at other times it takes politics to make good, objective, rational science and evidence-based minds into ascerters of political opinion, which is far more likely today. In the 11th century especially, it took religion, and in the 21st century it mostly takes politics to bias good minds.

Luis views the condition of war (currently the one in Ukraine is topical) as a disease and nonviolence as the vaccine, which I agree with).

Homo sapiens better become more sapient, and more nonviolent, during the forthcoming transition to low energy budgets.

Pax Americana is no utopia, but not so bad as authoritarian dictators proliferating worldwide.  Oil is one of the real enemies.  Or, rather, our dependency on fossil fuels for energy. I suspect that the Iraq war was primarily about oil, and only secondarily about WMDs -- this was the excuse.  I also suspect that what Russia is doing now is to try to destroy the EU, given their irrational dependency on Russian oil as a bargaining chip, and using the ridiculous excuse of eradicating nazism.  And after they destroy the EU, guess who is coming next?  Remember Cuba.  It can happen again.  Russian warships frequently visit Cuba and Venezuela.  What are they doing in the Caribbean?  The Chinese Road & Belt project is another Trojan horse, in addition to being an ecological abomination. Better than Pax Americana would be some form of democratic world government, and a world treaty (complete with an "article 5")  that any nation that attacks another nation is attacking All nations.  We need a real "UN" and a real world "NATO" in addition to a "Real Green New Deal."  Your work explaining population and energy facts is a significant contribution.  Now we need a new geopolitics capable of dealing effectively with the realities of humans and the biosphere.

Luis T. Gutierrez

Mother Pelican Journal

 

---

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 4/19/22:

Ruben notes: 'the “solutions” offered today do not come close to escaping MTI’s gravitational pull.'

And I add for group consideration: If this, then all else is peripheral, a distraction. If no MTIed (modern techno-industrialized) human can traffic in real solutions that might actually work to get at least some viable humans out of our MTI fly bottle, then we are puffing air and making keyboards click while we incur an extinction debt for posterity to pay.

If I may ask the obvious: What is the center of MTI monetary culture/society's memetic gravitational pull? MTI complex society, aka civilization. is the current form of Civ 3 that, as did agrarian Civ 2.x societies, came into existence recently, hence it can go out of existence and being not remotely sustainable it must dissipate as the complex non-evolvable structure it is. The question posterity would have us ask is: Does MTI society have a weakness, such as a cancer might, that could enable its intentional destruction (at least regionally) in the near future to perhaps allow for a transitional Civ 4 society to iterate towards becoming a viable civilization?

The MTI domain of discourse is remorselessly humancentric with nature as externality to dominate as 'our' planet for the taking (until we expand into the universe). My guess is that the narrative of Civ 1 culture for 375k years was not, was naturcentric. The Anthropocene depends on humancentric consensus narratives (e.g. political and religious), as it will cease if they do. We are Homo sapiens narrator, the storytelling animal. If humans are not the center about which all spins, then any naturcentric narrative (that selects for one evidence-based story) is toxic to all humancentric narratives (that select for many irreconcilable belief-based stories).

Human minds can compartmentalize. A devout Muslim can do good science (silo [focused] science if not systems [view through macroscope] science). But... can a mind (storyteller) be both humancentric and naturcentric? Maybe, but my guess is fewer than may matter. This issue could be MTI culture's Achilles' heel. Hubbert's 'matter-energy systems' worldview is incompatible with all MTI supporting narratives. If this is so, then MTI culture can be destroyed one mind at a time. Perhaps there could be enough renormalized naturcentric humans (<1% or <79 million) who get out of the fly bottle and pass through the coming bottleneck within pockets of sustainability/viability with enough elements of a Civ 4 society intact to allow posterity to transition to a viable ecolate civilization. Or not, and repeat the Civ 3 pattern until they can't (and go extinct or worse, become a Borg-like tumor on the face of Gaia that is able to persist by stomping a human boot in Gaia's face forever or one that is able to expand and assimilate other star systems). As E.O. Wilson noted, we are playing a high-stakes endgame. But where's that latte I ordered?

 

---

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 4/23/22

Above offering ignored. On another post the Titanic was mentioned, so let there be latte:

Perhaps the most illuminating point that keeps coming to my attention, helping me to make some sense of what's out there in humanlandia, is the E.O. Wilson note that "people would rather believe than know" and he didn't say "some people...". I comment merely to repeat this insight whose implications are vast. When the Titanic was sinking, women with children had to be urged to get into the lifeboats because the belief that the Titanic was too big to sink was still intact. Lifeboats that were not full were launched. Thus be it always with true believers. We will be spared the choice of getting into a lifeboat because instead of too few there are none. Elon Musk will not retire on Mars nor in Jack's three mega-cities which are at least biophysically viable/possible as are 25k watershed management units (lifeboats). Apparently 99.9999875% of humans have something better to do.

Get your latte machine now while you still can (I have three and want more, and don't forget the solar PV).

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 5/8/22:

On Sun, May 8, 2022 at 07:53 AM, Jack Alpert wrote:

"I hate to keep pointing at this  600 word summary

of the human  condition.  But our conversations 

never refute it.  Ignoring it won’t make it go away."

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 5/11/22:

Steve shared a link: 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 5/21/22

Rex Weyler: What is doomed is the industrial, extractive, growth-obsessed culture, and that has been doomed for as long as I can remember, perhaps since before I was born, and certainly since 1972 when the first Limits book was published. Nevertheless H. sapiens is a tough, resilient species, and some human presence may endure for centuries or millennia, albeit at much reduced numbers, energy flow, material flow, and lifestyle comforts. This is why my formula for “What to do?” is mostly about contraction at every level: personal, family, community, and beyond. Get small, grow food, restore and defend local ecosystems, build community cohesion, enrich soils, localize everything, foster local health care, get familiar with how to build and maintain any technology one uses, fix everything, and then teach all this to the young.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/9/2022

Based on concerns/insights of Philippe Kearns, with alterations he may or may not agree with:

In the same way nature produces a small fraction (<0.1%) of people who are polydactyl, it produces an even smaller proportion of people (<0.001%) who understand that we modern humans are well into a one-off, plague-phase, global overshoot event in geological time.

All organisms, under favorable conditions, grow..., not unlike bacteria in a petri-dish or reindeer on St. Matthew Island. Clothed humans are a form of primate.

That some modern humans understand the imperative to reduce population size and contract the economies in every country/region/city/town on this planet is completely dwarfed by the maximum power principle (MPP/MePP)-based genetic/cultural (memetic) programming that selects for rationalization, justification, obfuscation, and denial in the vast majority of human brains that enables them to always view consumption and procreation as desirable. It is certain that BAU (Business As Usual), doubling down on what has worked for 300 years to grow the economy, or a GND (Green New Deal) energized by renewables and allowing for green growth, is needed to solve problems. What humans can do is form factions to contend and vote for preferred solutions which are anything but.

Perhaps it is not by accident that 99.999% of humans don't know what overshoot and carrying capacity are/involve, and that their condition of error, ignorance, and illusion is an existential threat to their species (and other species as the Anthropocene mass extinction event is well underway). It is the MPP, the 4th Law of energetics at work in their selected-by-eons brains, that makes them sing a seemingly true consensus narrative that growth (population and economic) is the only way to go.

As adaptive and evolvable K-strategists, our ancestors sang a different song for 375k years (as had their K-strategist hominin ancestors for over six million years...). They learned the hard way, one lesson after another, to sing a song of limits with occasional bouts of growth and decline as natural and normal. Zhuangzi (4th century BCE) still viewed the ancient ones as having the better view, and noted that 'those who dream of the banquet  wake to lamentation and sorrow'. We of the last two millennia came to dream the dream of human supremacy. We still sleep; we are not normal.

Among people who don't have children, I would think there is a very small fraction that will end up not having any because they have any notion of overshoot or are concerned with overpopulation (Charlie Hall confessed to being one of the few). Appeals to individual conscience to forgo reproduction or reduce consumption to address overpopulation/overconsumption concerns (that few have) is to ask them to self-select out of the game they are programmed to play (so how many children David Suzuki fathered is of no interest to me), hence no sizable proportion of humans (>0.001%) can agree/vote to shrink the human enterprise (population size and GDP).

The battle against stupidity (error, ignorance, illusion) is one the gods themselves contend in vain against [to paraphrase Schiller]. I've come to realize, after decades, that endeavoring to educate and convince enough people as may be needed to change policies (i.e. any political solution) is non-viable. That the <0.001% could auto-organize (based on self-selection and a life-driven purpose) to form a viable ecolate civilization (a naturocracy) able to persist, is perhaps not forbidden by Nature (the nature of things). In this case, the endeavor to find things out (and pass on insights) may not be in vain.

The 4th Law of thermodynamic systems selects for what works to maximize empower LONG TERM (cancer and empire building do so short term). All organisms play the game and some persist (win) for a time and some evolve (win) into forms most beautiful and most wonderful because they have no choice but to do so.

Population will peak, decline and/or collapse one day (likely this century), but I doubt it will be because humans will or could plan to do so. Will humans again become adaptive, evolvable subsystems of Gaia? I don't know and you don't either. Nature only knows (but not yet).

Could some (<0.001%) 'seek out the condition now that will come anyway'? My best guess is that any form a viable complex society may take will be vastly less like modern techno-industrialized society than like it. Modernity selects (strongly) against 'foresight intelligence' which yet persists. Posterity, if we manage to spawn any, will be viable as evidenced by persisting as the millennia pass, and so will not view us as normal, and likely will not trace their memetic origins to modernity in any form (e.g. ecomodernism).

Science (the endeavor to find things out by listening to Nature) is clearly used by modern techno-industrial overcomplex society (as the Roman Empire had) 'for the milk and cheese and profit it brings', but it is not clear that science, as a way of finding things out (within our cognitive limits), is modern, nor that posterity can persist without it. As for technology, we will not be able to persist with it if we are used by it, if we have and thereby are had (possessed) by it.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/10/2022

Joan,

I read Ishmael and can also tell stories, but only ones no one likes. Until about 10,000 years ago we were living as evolvable subsystems of Gaia, as K-strategists living within the carrying capacity of an area about a few days walk in size. There were failures to persist, but that is an essential part of how what works is selected for. Nature is unkind.

For 375k years our bands of likely 20 to 50 trusted others evolved as the millennia passed, as evidenced by our persistence. But then one person practiced agriculture (one within each of multiple regions), prospered, and another joined in until all humans in 'their' valley practiced agriculture (plant and/or animal) and lived in settlements (Civ 2 complex societies). For as long as they continued to live in band-sized complex societies (like Civ 1 had with few exceptions) that worked (typically for several millennia) while practicing low-intensity horticulture, they were able to persist long term (e.g. those on Malta did for 1900 years as they had prior to arrival).

But the potential to live in larger groups was built into the system, and eventually some group would shift to high intensity production (typically centered on grains, or potatoes in the Andes, that could be stored and transported to a central metro area that initially supported hundreds of people who came to consider themselves normal (then thousands on up to hundreds of thousands who normalized their condition) for a time.

Storable food (energy) was the first currency, collected as a tax on commoners by a chief/retinue, for 'protection', who protected 'his' people (sometimes her, but atavistic patriarchal Civ 1 types, e.g. Indo-Europeans who domesticated cattle and horses to become Civ 2 peoples, were selected for) from other chiefs. The population of the overcomplex ones increased threefold to tenfold (more people and technology favored 'winners' and was favored by them). Chiefdoms, as a taker culture, emerged, competed, grew and coalesced to become principalities, kingdoms, dynasties, city-states, and nation-states climaxing (as Civ 3 industrial society) in a global monetary culture/techno-industrial society.

Early Civ 2 was sustainable, selected for persistence as functional K-strategists, but all eventually transitioned to an overcomplex, overdensity empire building dynamic as if any one group does so in a region, they become dominate/spread because there was no mechanism (i.e. an immune-like system) to prevent civilizational overshoot (the Tairona being a possible exception). Ruben originated the idea of civilizational (complex society) overshoot. I hope I am not misinterpreting or mangling it too badly.

When there was 'not enough' (a pulsing paradigm norm), those living as foragers or forager-gardeners in another valley were 'invited' to join the numerous ones (a chiefdom) in making proper use of the valley. Whether they did, moved, or fought to the death (of the men as the children and young enough women could be assimilated) to repel the agro-empowered invaders, was their choice. Or so the numerous ones thought, which made them feel better if they were forced to deal with those choosing to not be like them.

The story (no one likes): no one chooses outcomes they cannot foresee and those who have foresight intelligence have no choice but to embrace limits. But in a pathological system those having foresight tend to self-select out of it. With the coming of fossil fueled industrialized humans (modern Civ 3), the dynamic was repeated, this time climaxing in one global monetary empire. The condition of not having a choice is what may work to enable some (as Civ 4) to persist (latter Civ 2 types and Civ 3 societies select for failure and cannot persist long term as evidenced by all prior empire building society's failure to persist as the millennia pass). All prior empires apparently believed they were exceptions... until they couldn't.

The Civ 3 dynamic we are all products of and serve is remorseless, is a 'wicked problem'. None who are part of it can solve it. A metastatic cancer begins with one 'wild' cell that 'chooses' to not live within limits (and prospers). We techno-humans are destined, by the nature of the remorseless dynamic we are of (and fail to understand, foresee the outcome of), to over-consume a planetary larder of matter and energy for the taking.

The solution to metastatic cancer is the ending of all cancer cells as such, which is always the outcome anyway, hence cancer is not evolvable and is always, long term, selected against (by the nature of things, not by the cancer). Understanding this condition is foundational to thinking of and enacting any real solutions (that would include an immune-like subsystem to contend with future pathology). So, yes, we need to tell a better story, but we modern techno-industrialized numerous ones cannot tell it or believe it if told to us. What we can do is fatally underestimate the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future.

The cancer analogy is flawed in that the cells of a human body are interdependent such that multiple (organ) systems failure (e.g. secondary to cancer) results in the death of all cells in the body (including the cancer), while the outcome of our Anthropocene enthusiasm is a degraded biosphere within which a damaged life-support system will persist with or without humans in it. If a remnant population of humans like us persists, then, if they recover, it will be to repeat the pattern (how could they not?).

If humans who have come to understand the planet and live with it properly persist, then, as Ecolate Ones, as humans living in a viable complex society that selects for a different human, the dynamic could select for a different outcome, one of assisting nature restorancy to allow respeciation in less than 10-20 million years.

We are no longer living in a world of wounds. We are living on a planet in the ICU facing multiple systems failure, and there are no political solutions. Being the unintended pathological dynamic that we have become over the last ten millennia is the cause of the extinction debt we are still, for a while longer, enthusiastically incurring (some of us being less enthusiastic than others) that posterity will pay. Most modern humans cannot foundationally change (mutate) to become adaptable and evolvable again. Maybe 0.0001% as mutants (not by choice) could, but there is yet no evidence that many are out there yet. Ruben looks like an early mutant, but as the level of error, ignorance, and illusion rises exponentially, more can be expected. Unpredictable change is the only sure bet. Persistence may favor the prepared mind, one that can iterate towards telling better stories (by listening to Nature) and choicelessly living by them.

Eric Lee

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 7/7/2022

On Sun, Jul 3, 2022 at 07:51 AM, Frank Holland wrote:

"Denial is the only way for most people."

Yes, for 95% of people in the middle of the bell curve (and ignorance precedes learning of an idea to then be able to deny, so maybe 95% are ignorant and of the 5%, 95% go for the comfort of denial which 'ain't just a river in Egypt'). On the two thin edges, first comes ignoring, then if denial doesn't work, kill the messenger (or at least cancel them). I'm thinking of Jack nailed to a cross, or at least some remaining Anthropocene enthusiasts dancing on his grave (for a time).

Prophets tend to go unhonored in their own house. Mary Odum told me (I don't recall if in an email or at a workshop on A Prosperous Way Down she gave with Betty before the 10th Biennial Emergy Conference) H.T. stopped going to ecology conferences because they refused to further consider his 'better view' which his brother tolerated, but that he really didn't get some of younger brother's idiosyncratic views  (or correctly viewed them as crazy). Thus be it always for those whose narratives are ahead of their time or whose delusions never go viral. So, what could I say to the grandmother next door...?


I made the image, but words are Odum's and because they could be viewed as 'idiosyncratic', ecologists who found his book/views dissonant, could dismiss his alledgedly better view, and, well, many did. When I meet an ecologist/biologist my hobby is to at some point ask if they know of H.T. Odum. A few know of his brother, but so far only one knew anything of younger brother's science. Obviously I've met too few ecologists, but....

Note H.T. was a year ahead of the 1972 rush, so I can't include his message. By chance, I saw his book on display at a community college library as a new book. After reading it, I went to the bookstore and had them order me a copy (even though I was a poor student living in the back of a 1954 Ford pickup on which I had built a box). 

"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. He failed.

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'As I read stories such as this -- "'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. He failed." – what I see is the invisible power of human cultures.  The culture we are formed in, and by, puts invisible brackets around our imagining, seeing,  and thinking, and therefore, our doing.  Those things which do not appear to us to have “prior plausibility” within the brackets simply do not stick to our now-Tefloned-by-our-culture hearts and minds.'

'Our trouble deepens when you add, that a powerful message in our MTI cultures is that “as brave and educated critical thinkers we are independent of culture, so we safely ignore the power of culture.” Accordingly, we invest time and energy trying to get for organized, but precious little time is invested in seeking to liberate them, or us for that matter, from the culture they/we have inherited. Accordingly, our MTI cultures roll on ever more powerful and ever expanding across the Earth. We pay too much attention to those who lead large groups and not enough time to the life’s work of Robert Jay Lifton. See his most recent Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry'

'We should not be surprised that there is no real progress in actually making our worlds more humane or more sustainable.'

'If you read, or re-read, C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters” you will see that he figured out this dynamic.  He saw that the existing order was in little danger from our well organized and noisy reform efforts, as our efforts were designed in light of our cultural bias to ignore weak, subtle signals.  I felt a tremor of fear when some years ago President George W Bush was lionised in the media when he proudly proclaimed, “I don’t do nuance.”  “Precisely”, I said to myself.'

'So Max Plank was right.  "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." This principle was famously laid out by German theoretical physicist Max Planck in 1950 and it turns out that he was right, according to a new study.'

'See: Science really does advance one funeral at a time, study suggests | News | Chemistry World'

'Trouble for us is, we no longer have that kind of time.'

—Ruben

But we have time to fiddle.

 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 7/13/2022

This [IPBES Report] is truly depressing:

We have long known that there is a lag of some years between those on the edge of reliable human knowing and the bulk of scientists. [Lag 1]
Here is evidence that the lag between what is taken as reliably known by the bulk of scientists and elite institutional leaders is another decade or so. [Lag 2]
And the lag between such elite folks and even a plurality of citizens is measured in decades. [Lag 3, and Lag 4 is the time delay to actually effect a change in behavior, from decades to never which leads to a consensus that there is no problem, e.g. drug addiction, too many people with a longage of demand for stuff addiction and screentime *and coming soon a metaverse) addiction.] 
(Sorry, folks we do not have this kind of time.  Do not be surprised that more and more folks turn to “strong and imperious men” for their salvation.)
Not good news for 10 year olds.

The year is 2022 and the official scientists of IPBES are just now telling elite institutional leaders that the path we are on leads to grave danger.   What is more, although they speak of the need for some kind of cultural transformation and a new relationship with the natural world:

1.      The whole piece is still cast in the language of “We had better pay attention.  Nature is really useful and important to us.”
2.       Their definition of “transformation is this:  “4. A fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

In short, they are still well within the frameworks of the MTI form of civilization and THEY DO NOT KNOW IT.  They, like most folks, even scientists, have no useful model of human history and how it works.  They are still MTI folks who say, “We can change things if we really, really try hard enough.  We have the power.”

But without a model of what is entailed by what they have just affirmed, the affirmation is cheering, possibly even noble… but it has no useful implications with Bill’s question of “HOW?” if the need is truly transformational.  (Which, tragically, it is.)

The conclusion is not new, but it is still depressing – as MTI peoples, and cultures our elites do not yet have serious insight into the nature and depth of the trouble we are in.  Therefore, almost all their advice reflects “Adelaide’s Lament” (from Guys and Dolls):  “The medicine never gets anywhere near where the trouble is.”  

Tragically, those who sing this song are marginalized.

 

Ruben

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 7/14/2022

Thanks Ruben. The idea of transformation as defined is perhaps the central message humanity needs to get, but I note it was offered as a footnote in small print to point C on page 16:

A. Nature and its vital contributions to people, which together embody biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are deteriorating worldwide.
B. Direct and indirect drivers of change have accelerated during the past 50 years.
C. Goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes[4] across economic, social, political and technological factors.
D. Nature can be conserved, restored and used sustainably while other global societal goals are simultaneously met through urgent and concerted efforts fostering transformative change.

My guess is that the words fail to convey the extent of the transformative changes needed, changes that could only be viewed as revolutionary (i.e. unthinkable) compared to current norms. I recently joined Jeremy Lent's Deep Transformation Network and read a hundred or so posts/comments, but found nothing remotely deep or transformative. Reminds me of 1968 when I was in high school considering the Counterculture. Obviously a counterculture was needed, but I came to view the Counterculture in all its forms as not nearly counter enough, so I never joined in or pretended doing so would be transformative.  

Eric

 

Eric, 

I agree that little that claims to be “transformative” to even rubs up against the framework of our MTI form of civilization, much less breach it because it has reached “escape velocity.”  Therefore, the futures described are simply “nicer and more responsible” versions of an MTI culture.  Worse, this is the case within the sustainability industry and not merely among those who seek to expand and improve the MTI culture.  Few seem to have any sense reliable sense that MTI is actually a form of civilization, with all of the features of any form of civilization, e.g. an intellectual frame of reference rooted in little understood and seldom acknowledged ontological and epistemological presuppositions, a way of grasping and being grasped by reality which infuses every, I repeat every, dimension of the lives and culture of those who exemplify the form of reference.  These dimensions of our lives are badly and inadequately conceptualized and, therefore, inadequately theorized.  This only matters, of course, if it is the case, as my life’s work suggests that the deepest source of our troubles, including overshoot, lies in the inherent nature and implications of the MTI form of civilization. 

This is the core point of my recent presentation to CACOR:  The invisible and little understood form of civilization which a given culture exemplifies actually matters.  (Pun intended.)  Unless we come to see, explore, understand, and digest this core fact of our lives, to use a male metaphor, we are just “pissing into the wind.” 

Ruben

 

 

A challenge with assuming humanity could solve the population dilemma with increasing wealth among the poor is this: The wealthy nations, where birth rates have dropped amount to about 15% of the global population. Much of that wealth has been plundered from the ecosystems of the poorer regions. To raise 85% of the population (6.8 billion people) to those levels of material comfort — a noble goal, indeed — would require more resources and waste sinks than Earth can supply. We are already in severe overshoot. None of this is fair to the working poor and those in absolute poverty. To improve global standards of living to the “Japan, Scandinavia, Canada, etc.” would at least require those nations to reduce consumption significantly, at best, and is probably bio-physically impossible. The ecosystems of those regions have already been plundered, and what remains is now being plundered by the wealthy nations to maintain those wealthy lifestyles. Where would the physical resources and energy come from to achieve this? 

A challenge with assuming humanity could solve the population dilemma with increasing wealth among the poor is this: The wealthy nations, where birth rates have dropped amount to about 15% of the global population. Much of that wealth has been plundered from the ecosystems of the poorer regions. To raise 85% of the population (6.8 billion people) to those levels of material comfort — a noble goal, indeed — would require more resources and waste sinks than Earth can supply. We are already in severe overshoot. None of this is fair to the working poor and those in absolute poverty. To improve global standards of living to that of “Japan, Scandinavia, Canada, etc.” would at least require those nations to reduce consumption significantly, at best, and is probably bio-physically impossible. The ecosystems of those regions have already been plundered, and what remains is now being plundered by the wealthy nations to maintain those wealthy lifestyles. Where would the physical resources and energy come from to achieve this?

Furthermore, let us assume there was some plan in place to do so, Elon Muskateers mining resources from planets all over the universe or something, how long would this take? Could it be achieved in a century? How? What happens to all ecosystems on Earth?

All solutions to overshoot involve contraction of human enterprise. Less people, less consumption. No species can grow out of overshoot. No exceptions. Human ingenuity, engineering, and entrepreneurship cannot defy the laws of physics, biology, and thermodynamics.

Humanity is in overshoot. The population will contract by design or by natural forces. Those are the two choices.

rw.

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE: 7/18/2022

Posted as comment to MAHB article.

"Lessons might also be learned from the behavior of some early agricultural communities...".

Of special interest would be lessons any prior complex societies (civilizations) could offer we of the Modern Techno-Industrial form of civilization (form 3 following Ruben Nelson's discussion of forms of civilization). Remnant populations of foragers (civilization form 1) could inform us about living as adaptive K-strategists to renormalize (e.g. to live in small groups of 20 to 50 trusted others living within long term carrying capacity), but not about how to live successfully in hierarchical complex societies that depend on technology and industry (that are also necessarily depend on living within a 'monetary culture' [M. King Hubbert]) of which they would have no experience. Early agrarian civilizations (form 2) continued to live in small groups, often for millennia, but all eventually developed into empire building chiefdom to state level overcomplex/overdensity societies most like our own. All prior form 2 civilizations came to build empires/overcomplex societies that select for their own failure to persist, though in modern times all came to be assimilated into Modern Techno-Industrial society, now global, with one exception.

The Tairona civilization (form 2) arose in the region of today's nation-state of Colombia in the first century CE. Their phase one civilization disassociated, but as there were no developing empire builders nearby to conquer them, they were able to recover as Tairona phase 2, which also failed, but as there was no outlying empire builders, they again were able to reboot as Tairona phase 3 that persists to the present.

A Timeline:

• 5900 BP: Region inhabited by bands of matriarchal hunter-gatherers for 2750 years, living as humans had lived for 375k years, as foragers, the first form of civilization (form 1).
• 3150 BP: Agriculture, cultivation of maize and yuca, begins as early civilization form 2, mixed with continued foraging while living in band-sized groups of trusted others for 1000 years.
• 2150 BP: Relatively dense occupation of the region, but without conspicuous elite privilege, monument building, nor empire building for 250 years, a period transitional (over a 10 generation period) to an overcomplex form 2 civilization.
• 1900 BP: After 1250 years as low intensity agrarians living in band sized communities as GAS (General Adaptation Syndrome) sensitive K-strategists (as their hominin ancestors had been), the beginnings of empire building civilization (form 2, overcomplex Tairona phase 1 civilization) arose, lasting 450 years. Population increases as agriculture becomes more widespread and intense; robust local trade networks emerge.
• 1650 - 1450 BP, late overcomplex Tairona phase 1 200 year period: goldwork extensive, elaborate pottery, ornaments not limited to elites, but elites lord over commoners, using threat of force with support of religious elites. Early empire-building becomes evident. Elite interests lead to overtaxing production in outlying areas by exploiting both commoners and forcing them to overexploit environmental productivity, stressing environment and commoners, leading to environmental overshoot, civilization overshoot, and descent with or without successful revolt.
• 1450 - 1050 BP, Tairona phase 2: 400 years, a variation on phase 1 overshoot and collapse. Collapse of phase 1 is followed by slow environmental recovery and recovery of the remnant population. Significant local variations indicate tolerance of diversity or lack of a strong central control system. The religious elites align with the commoners and come to replace the would-be political/warrior class. Those who would use force had used it and had gone too far. Elite material privilege decreases. The priests, the religious class, are social/intellectual elites who live as the commoners and come to no longer serve the aristocratic elites whose power was based on military threat. They work to serve their own elite interests and lord over the commoners by constructing an empire of belief. Monument building is limited to ceremonial sites serving the dominant priesthood. Their empire could span multiple chieftainships and they were able to enforce regional peace. Peaceful development that maximizes human interests, however, leads to over-development, to overshooting the environmental carrying capacity, to peak population and to forced descent. Among the priests, an intellectual elite within the elite may have emerged to think things through, but they were marginalized and failed to prevent societal dissolution.
• 1050 - 300 BP: Tairona phase 3, 750 years. Some intellectual elites likely warned the phase 2 priests and commoners that their way of life was unsustainable. After climax, during descent, some intellectuals could say "I told you so" and they lead an internal coup to replace the believing priests. They retained some trappings of religion as it was the conceptual language the commoners understood, but their focus was evidently on the here and now environment that must be placed above short-term human interests (to avoid the same failure of the phase 2 social control system). The new priesthood replaced the old education system with a foundationally new one. A hierarchical network of villages develop. Trade increases as does the population of the entire region during the recovery phase, but it is managed to remain well within carrying capacity as evidenced by their persistence. The priests, called mámas, acted as agents of Aluna (Earth/Gaia, aka 'it's the environment, stupid' as Guardians). They governed as educated elites (mámas train intensively for 18 years), whose attention to detail, to serving Aluna, the life-support system (environment), worked to enable prosperity within limits, the Pax Máma. They had learned the hard way, but they learned to avoid their predecessor's mistakes to thereby persist as the centuries passed. They put environment (Aluna) above human interests. They do not speak of going to another world. They live in this one, as right and well as possible, guided by what actually works. They do not believe in Aluna, they listen to and think about the biophysical system, as they want to know the mind of Aluna (the system), not believe in Aluna. They tell the commoners there is "another world," a conceptual world commoners know little of (having not studied it for 18 years), lines of thought that the mámas travel, but the mámas know metaphor when they see and speak it. They work only to serve the Mother (environment) and help the commoners live right and well within limits; limits to population growth, per capita consumption, and limiting resource exploitation to protect environmental resources from human demands. Peace becomes the norm. Without distant elites making demands, the mámas guide local settlements to take care of their environment as a managed agro-ecosystem. Population is adjusted to long-term carrying capacity. Thus no empire-building based on force or threat of force develops. Most Taironans lived in the lower elevations along the cost, the lowland Taironans who also fished and harvested sea salt. The upland Taironans grew different foods and trade cotton. They lived in 'the Heart of the World' where the most accomplished mámas studied. Some details are not known from the archaeological evidence, are inferred to tell as likely a story as Younger Brother may need to take an interest in today's Taironans, but the oral history of the remnant population that survived the Spanish genocide of 1650 may provide details if any of us 'Younger Brothers' would learn their language and listen/learn from their mámas of history.
• 436 BP (1514 CE): First Spanish Conquistador (first Younger Brother) lands on shore, vows to destroy Tairona.
• 427 BP (1525 CE): Spanish colonial outpost founded to develop into the city of Santa Marta.
• 351 BP (1599 CE): Tairona in the coastal areas revolt against Spanish oppression, killing priests and travelers.
• 350 BP (1600 CE): Mayor of Santa Marta vows to exterminate the Tairona as they permit divorce and homosexuality, thus genocide is viewed as a moral crusade.
• 300 BP (1650 CE): Tairona resistance collapses, crushed by guns and dogs. The last remnant lowland Taironans, those who do not die or become Spanish mestizo bearers living as decreed, flee to the Heart of the World, the higher mountain region, where the highland Tairona and their religious elites (mámas) lived. Most starved, but as many as could inhabit the region did, as guided by the mámas, and became the Kogi holdouts who alone preserved and continued to evolve the Tairona culture into the 21st century (three other remnant populations were assimilated into the Spanish Encomienda system). The Kogi invited a BBC crew into the Heart of the World in 1990 CE to warn Younger Brother that he had to stop destroying the world. They later offered a final warning, Aluna: There is no life without thought, filmed in 2011.
• 0 before present: Younger Brother has not listened (yet).

Can we learn about real solutions from these people of place?

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE: 7/22/2022

Posted without comment by a member: Woke Watch Canada Newsletter, The Sun Sets on Science in Canada Confusing Conceit With Knowledge Production, "by regular Woke Watch Canada contributor Michael Melanson". Apart from writing for this newsletter, I find no evidence Melanson is an academic or scientist, but has clearly been well educated by the MTI serving schooling system. I had not read Ruben's comment when I started this subnote, knowing that whatever Ruben had to say, I would have to archive it for future reconsideration, and so after I paste Ruben's response in, I'll read it [ and maybe comment or not]. I did read the cited article and my bias is to mostly agree, not surprising as I'm also a product of the same schooling system. I expect to be challenged, the best service another can offer, so thank you Ruben in advance:

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Thank you, Arthur,

 ['lions and tigers and bears'] Oh My!!!

 This piece illuminates our world and our cultural condition far more deeply and clearly than most will recognize, including the authors.

This is written by someone who exemplifies the classic MTI worldview, including the MTI understanding of science. 

It claims or assumes:

• Reality is “out there”, timeless (i.e. unchanging in time), contextless (i.e. independent of its location) and untouched by human minds (i.e. objective.) [That there is an 'out there' is assumed, but that we can 'know' it is not. The scientistic claim is that we can iterate towards it, objectivity, but never know it.]
• Therefore, reliable knowledge of the external world is the same for all persons in all locations, in all cultures and at all times.
• Therefore, there is only one way to know it accurately and adequately. [If a being from Omicron passes by Earth in the next million years, I'm guessing they see (as I haven't) an oblate spheroid with a radius about 13 km less at the poles, and not a flat Earth. Or we are all virtual beings in a Higher School science project involving a Sim Universe. I don't know anything.]
• Happily, that way is the way of what we in the “West” call “the 1st Enlightenment” and the objective “scientific” way of knowing it launched into history. [i.e. the Age of Reason, from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th as first iteration.]
• All claims for ways of knowing that are “other than” or that “deviate from”  1st Enlightenment scientific ways of knowing are to be judged to be deviant and inferior, and to be rejected as legitimate ways of knowing [for those stuck in the early 19th century].
• Given the above, ECCC is clearly not merely mistaken to take indigenous knowledge claims seriously, it is powerfully and offensively WRONG.  It is questioning the very ways of knowing the world which have given us all the marvels, advantages and wonders of our MTI way of Living.  (Some would observe that the “wonders” of our MTI world also include the 6th Great Extinction, which may very well include our species.  But that is a rude detail to raise when cosmic epistemic errors are being made and need to be corrected.) [The ECCC may not differ in kind from Ecomodernists or techno-optimists, storytellers all who assume there is no 'out there' to iterate towards.]
• All that is needed to know well are:  an empirical mind (only “hard” data is to be accepted as data), a logical mind and a rational mind.  So “critical thinking” is needed, but reflexivity is not required. [What is required is meta-reflexivity, believing in nothing, beginning with a belief in belief.]

This latter is especially important. In this piece there is not a hint of irony or self-consciousness, much less self-critical self-consciousness [recognition of reflexive failure].  This piece is written straight up.  It is not a “send up” of this way of thinking.  (At least, it Is not intended to be read in this way.)  Reflexivity, let alone meta-reflexivity are not included in the 1st Enlightenment’s package of requirements in order for us to know our world objectively.   Note also, that there is not a hint that knowing things well requires any knowledge of its context in time, space or culture.  (These features, of course, follow from the nature of the external world and of reliable human knowing as conceived by 1st Enlightenment male “scientists.”)

This way of understanding reliable human knowing was still being taught in the 1950s in almost all of our high schools and universities.  Yes, back then a minority were wrestling with the newly emergent perspectives that were insisting that all human knowing was context-laden.  But, as institutions and disciplines, the 1st Enlightenment ways of knowing were largely unquestioned.  (One data point:  Queen’s University in Kingston did not teach Sociology until the 1960s.  Before then, it was seen to be new and unreliable way of knowing.)

My main conclusion is that as a culture we are in far deeper trouble than we know.  Relatively few citizens of Canada will be able to make sense of this piece, and the website which promotes perspective, in the context of our long and still continuing journey to know more reliably.  Most will judge and react to the piece on the basis of both ontological and epistemic presuppositions they have inherited, but which they do not even know they have.   The tragedy is that presuppositions we do not know we have, have us!  So the “culture war” we are now in, is being fought, mostly, by folks who do not know what the war is about, other than their side is under attack by those who are wrong and must be resisted.

Happily, the long-term drift of our MTI culture over my lifetime (83 years) has been to move away from the root presuppositions of the 1st Enlightenment, towards human knowing that is deeply set in a given time, space, and culture in a world that is both dynamic and relational.  In short, we are outgrowing our MTI inheritance.  The trouble is not found in the directions in which we are moving, but the glacial pace of the evolution of our deep cultural presuppositions.  Typically, these are measured in centuries, not even generations.  It will be ironic if much later in this century the leaders of our culture, at long last, come to understand the depth of the trouble we are in with some degree of adequacy (this condition is NOT met today), just in time to understand that the 1st Enlightenment which we have so faithfully honoured set us on a path to extinction – a path that up to the moment before our death we have not seen with the depth and clarity required to take the actions necessary to avoid the fate we chose so unconsciously, so very long ago. [Understood... or not, I don't know. Welcome to the Great Selection.]

 Ruben 

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To put my bias on display, I confess to taking in a 2007 conference: Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0, yet another iteration towards what I imagine could be a better view. If I lived long enough I'd consider a Enlightenment 3.0 offering, but perhaps a memetic descendant will, if I have any. If all of posterity are thoroughly Woke, I will not have any, and there will be no need to endeavor to know anything as the Masters of Woke will know all, and if anyone asks the Woke AI anything, they'll get an answer they can't deny. And if they offer alternative reflectivity, they'll be thoroughly ignored (or canceled if need be).

“The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. he should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.” ― Ibn al-Haytham, early 11th century Islamic Golden Age prior to their medieval period dominated by religious and political belief-based ways of woking. The end of his Golden Age had already begun in his day. There would be no Golden Age 2.0.

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 7/302022

Manchin Poison Pills Buried in Inflation Reduction Act Will Destroy Livable Climate. More BAU.

And of interest, photosynthesis (carbon capture) limited by temperature, but not respiration (mostly bacterial with high temp tolerance, that will increase CO2 release).

 

And a 90% loss of Atlantic plankton, from the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey Foundation which states: “An environmental catastrophe is unfolding. We believe humanity could adapt to global warming and extreme weather changes. It is our view that humanity will not survive the extinction of most marine plants and animals.”

Not good news for 10 year olds. Without any climate change, the Anthropocene mass extinction event would roll on. With climate change, the event could rival that the Permian.

 

The blind spots of the green energy transition. Olivia Lazard

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/2/2022: MAHB Comment

"Uninformed about how the world works, most people now are unable to participate in planning to avoid a collapse of civilization and many may oppose taking appropriate measures. The vast scale of the culture gaps within modern societies, illustrated by near ubiquitous growth mania, is one of the main things that makes today’s civilization the new abnormal. It is ironic that cultural evolution, a major element of the success of Homo sapiens, now appears to have become maladaptive." —New Paper by Paul and Anne Ehrlich: Returning to “Normal”? Evolutionary Roots of the Human Prospect

"We are not living in normal times", and the more dissonant news is that we modern techno-industrialized humans are not normal animals. Most of us are over a hundred generations away from having normal ancestors who were products of a viable form of civilization (complex societies of forager-nomads), i.e. we are either direct descendants of Proto-Indo-Europeans or our ancestors (who are/were Tibetan-Sino, Uralic, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Austro-tai, Dravidian, Caucasian, Austronesian, and Amerindian speakers) were culturally assimilated by Indo-European expansionist culture and later techno-industrial empire-building monetary culture which is not remotely normal nor sustainable (able to persist as the millennia pass).

 

To comprehend the topic properly, it seems, I need to understand how functionally adaptive K-strategists (e.g. wild Norway rats and hominins—all extinct but one, the last hominin standing) magically average the right number of offspring in response to crossing the lower carrying capacity boundary prior to crossing the upper limit.

If wild, full function, normal Norway rats (from whom domesticated lab rats descended by artificial selection) were put in an exclosure (to prevent predation), would they, given illimitable food, water, nest material, a bit of time... overpopulate?

John B. Calhoun's first experiment involved wild Norway rats, presumably full function normal rats (not rats of NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health who paid him]). They had never been subject to overdensity living and loss of functional behaviors (i.e. denormalized), and thus avoided overdensity population overshoot. For K-strategists, avoiding overshoot of a habitat's upper carrying capacity limit (having an adverse effect on the local population) is adaptive and has been selected for (especially in rats who have been a social species far longer than humans who are not as highly evolved). Calhoun released five female rats and enough males in a 10,800-square-foot (1000 m²) outdoor pen with predator exclosure and supplied them with illimitable (to them) food and water and such necessities as Calhoun thought to provide. He observed them over a 28-month period starting in 1947.

Per Calhoun's best guess their population could have grown to 5,000 rats in the enclosure (at normal for lab rats density), but didn't. Their population climaxed at about 200 and then stabilized at around 150. As noted, these were normal Norway rats with culture/behavioral repertoire intact. They did not disperse evenly about the enclosure, but self-organized into twelve or thirteen colonies of about 12 rats each. The optimum Dunbar number for Norway rats is about 12, and the maximum viable colony density was about 12-13 for the size of area they inhabited.

Humans differ. Our Dunbar number is about 150, the maximum viable band size (though optimal is in the 20 to 50 range). Normal humans, most of our ancestors for the last 375k years (until recently, in the last 10k years), maintained a viable population density and numbers within a biome as fully functional K-strategists. We modern techno-industrialized humans of NIMH are not normal.

There is a limit to the number of rats in a viable colony, and a limit to the density of colonies, beyond which the colonies become too close together resulting in increasing stress (just as beyond 12 rats/colony). More rats in a colony or too little space between colonies, increases stress to a non-viable level (GAS, General Adaptation Syndrome, Hans Selye, 1936). Stress is the limiter in populations of normal functional rats and mice (and hominins as evidenced by their persistence for over six million years), beyond which conflict-based and disease-based mortality, and decreased fertility, limit population (not the education and political empowerment of female rats).

'Choosing' to not have children (or marrying a hologram) is not normal human behavior as viewed by our ancestors of the past 300 thousand years (nor by any other hominins for over six million years...). Passing the lower limit of carrying capacity triggers GAS, increased effort to forage decreases fertility, declining nutrition lowers fertility, and in normal humans fertility can be reduced by intent via condoms (external and internal) made of animal bladders, linen, or plants; spermicides made of acacia, honey, rock salt, or crocodile dung; sponges made of moss, grass, or bamboo; vaginal douches or sponges soaked in oil, vinegar, lemon juice, or cedar oil; oral contraceptives, including Queen Anne’s lace seeds, lead and other toxic metals, pomegranate seeds, silphium, unripe papaya, blue cohosh; and avoiding vaginal (cis) sex. The practice of infanticide was widespread and effective (with a better outcome than overshoot). No magic need be involved. Not overshooting the upper limit of carrying capacity (for a time prior to dissolution) was normal, even for humans, until overdensity conditions became possible secondary to the use of technology to divert energy/matter flows to support a sedentary population of over 150 people having a de-normalizing effect going back 400 generations that we are all products of.

The Neolithic transition to sedentarization is associated with increased morbidity and mortality, but results in even greater increases in fertility. Settled agrarian complex society (civilization form 2) foundationally altered human behavior. Humans cease to be functional K-strategists (as did Calhoun's domesticated rats and mice). We are the outcome.

Our problem is that we are not normal humans living on the veldt. Most of us are 7k years (start of Indo-European expansion, now global), 280 generations, away from our last normal, full function K-strategist ancestor adaptively living within limits as evolvable subsystems of Gaia as wild Norway rats do (i.e. not by 'choice'). Clever ape humans of NIMH we are and our technology and ability to concentrate energy flows (e.g. agriculture, use of horses, canoes) and living in overdensity populations (for a time) has grown in recent millennia. We who are pathogens living the pathogenic life cannot naturally limit a dynamic we do not understand that is well into overshoot (a majority of humans were living unsustainably within an empire, from chiefdom to state level, when our global population exceeded about 35 million 3k to 4k years ago).

Our condition of overshoot will be corrected.

Post-climax (likely this century?), negative numbers will be the norm (for perhaps 1-5 centuries on the downslope).

Whether some (0.001%?) acquire enough foresight intelligence to manage our way down within pockets of sustainability, and after the Great Selection to manage a planetary commons by molding 'individual behaviour into a plan of actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources' (see my prior comment) is uncertain and perhaps unthinkable to us humans of NIMH. But at some point some may listen to their inner hominin and realize there really are too many of us and more BAU is going to be the death squared of us, we who are in double overshoot (ecological and civilizational), we who may be too clever by half and not nearly smart enough to persist long term.

• 

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].

 

"What would be a realistic/feasible way of addressing the problems of overconsumption and overpopulation?"

As for addressing overshoot, no one knows what might work (other than rapid depopulation and contraction of economy that will come anyway), nor imagine even a few of the low probability solutions that might work. For example, will there be a World Scientists' Warning 3? What if 1,700 top scientists realized that giving humanity another warning, while expecting a different outcome, was incompatible with human persistence (i.e. with not being nearly smart enough)?

So instead, they only warn bright young people thinking about getting a university 'education' (to serve the economy and make money). They explain why being schooled to serve a world socioeconomic-political system (WSS) that is not remotely sustainable, that selects for its own failure and massive degradation of the biosphere (e.g. Anthropocene mass extinction event likely to include humans), is to reconsider.

They mention why, without belaboring the obvious. Then they mention that they are founding a non-schooling system called the United Federation Academy (firmly based on a matter-energy systems naturcentric worldview) offering subsistence manual labor opportunities (and a chance to learn how the world really works).

No one ever graduates as no one, apart from a few failures who return to live in modern techno-industrial society, ever end up working for money. All endeavor to iterate towards understanding the world system. All would rather know than believe (anything).

Instead, the work of the Academy is to found the United Federation of Watersheds (of Earth) by defining 'the rules of the game' that might actually work, that select over the long term for conditions that allow humans to persist by serving as agents of the Earth (so respeciation might take less than 10 million years).

Perhaps the outcome is not human extinction. Perhaps the outcome is that, in just six hundred years, there is a renormalized "human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly." [James Lovelock]

Problematique solved.

 

Dear Eric Lee,

Following up on your perspective and the equally valuable views of the late, great James Lovelock, perhaps we could consider that the objective of human existence has to be changed from converting virtually ALL of the living world (our planetary home) and its wondrous biodiversity into money to a new objective that seeks balance between human needs and Nature's needs. Otherwise, it does become difficult to see how we avoid destroying that upon which we are utterly dependent for our very existence.

Thanks always, Steve Salmony

Dear Steve,

My reply to John involves more words, so while considering John's comments and questions, I will respond. I would add others (e.g. William R. Catton Jr., H.T. Odum, Donella Meadows, John B. Calhoun, M. King Hubbert, Barbara Williams, H.G. Wells, Jack Alpert, Ruben Nelson, and Paul Ehrlich who last year called for a 'survival revolution' on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution), to those who view humanity's best if not only hope to lie in revolutionary paradigm shifting civilizational (as in form of) change based on systems science literacy (not political revolution as usual).

To be more to the point, modern techno-industrial (MTI) society, the now global monetary culture, ends. Full stop. The Civ 3.x MTI dynamic, that is not remotely sustainable, cannot be reformed by calls to change (tweak into its opposite) political policy/governance as the world socioeconomic-political system (WSS) is the problematique that will not go away until we MTIed ones do, a condition that will come anyway.

Whether we as a species go away or some mutate, the near future will reveal. The potential for some humans (0.001%?) managing to iterate over a multi-generation period into a viable Civ 4 form of transitional civilization would not violate any laws of the universe I know of. Lovelock's vision of a Civ 5 form of civilization (population likely in the 7-35 million range) that actually is viable (not merely endeavoring to become potentially viable) as evidenced by the passing millennia, is an outcome on the other side of the coming bottleneck (the Great Selection) that some may consider a better outcome than human extinction. If 1,700 top scientists/'thought leaders' were to warn today's bright young people... who..., then....

Please differ/correct,

Eric Lee

[The early ecolate came to be called the 'E.O. ones', mindless followers of the ecofascist
anti-human E.O. Wilson who advocated for merely a Half Earth for humanity.
The EOs came to accept the term but translated it as 'ecolate ones'.
Civ 4.x would be transitional, likely taking 8-20 generations by following the prime directive:
each generation must objectively become more functional than the last to become Civ 5.0
containing humans who can understand the planet and live with it properly (to persist).
It's been a long way up as it will be down, see full graph.]

 

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/26/2022:

We are now witnesses to “Peak MTI” as a form of civilization.  If we survive this decade, we will be able to say that we were among those who saw what was happening early on.  We were witnesses to the fact that drip by drip the events that were happening meant that the future which was still being  promised to every MTI culture was irrevocably slipping through our fingers.  It became clear to us that it will not happen.  We could see back in 2022 that the elites and people in MTI cultures had not yet connected the dots.  But we could see that drip by drip they would.  We could also see that  when this happened, all bets for a reasonably sane and humane future would be taken off the table.

This is what I see.  I pray that I am a false prophet, but I fear that I am not.

Ruben

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/13/2022

We are simply one of the creatures that have evolved in this planet, which we call “Earth”. Sadly, over the last 1,000 years or so, mostly unconsciously, some of us have co-created a way of reading reality and presenting ourselves to it which up to now has looked so extraordinarily attractive that we fell in love with it, ourselves and the sense of being powerful that it gave us. In this process, we have consumed the Earth and most living things, including each other. If the results are uncomfortable and now threatening, this is on us. Our condition is the work of our MTI-formed hands, minds and hearts. The good news is that it is increasingly clear that our MTI form of civilization is not long for this world. As of today, we do not know how much damage will be done as MTI cultures collapse. It appears that it will be at least be a great deal.

I attach a quote from an early systems thinker – Stafford Beer. In the 1970s he lived in Toronto and some of us got to know him.

If his claim is at all the case, and I take it that it is, then our only sane response is to stop trying to fix and improve our MTI cultures. (The project to which virtually all of mind, money and energy are devoted today.) Rather, we must learn how to loosen the grip of MTI culture on us and we seek to transcend our own formation as MTI persons in MTI cultures. Tragically, this project is not yet well established on the agenda of any significant institution.

Ruben

Cultures are Systems:

'All these phenomena are not simply blemishes – they are… outputs. These unpleasing threats to all we hold most dear are products of a system so organized as to produce them – to produce them, and not their contraries. They are not accidental; and they are not mistakes.'

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/20/2022: A NOTEABLE THREAD

Rees, William, Sep 17,
There is nothing new under the sun. MTI culture seems as capable of ignoring today's obvious signs of implosion as it was able to ignore the 50-year old warnings that they might actually happen. We seem to be caught up in a gathering storm of systemic chaos beyond human (or even AI) comprehension, and no one is in, or can assume, control.

 

Ruben Nelson, Sep 17,
One of the characteristics of MTI cultures is that they are “critically-minded,” but not “reflexively-minded.”  In this difference lies our fate.  In order to have a future we must do something that, in principle, MTI cultures are not equipped to even understand, much less do.  Nor are we inclined to become equipped – we must become reflexive and meta-reflexive enough to see that the deepest root source of our troubles are the unstated and almost never even perceived ontological and epistemological presuppositions of our MTI form of civilization.  

This insight changes the conversation from where we who are MTI persons and cultures feel at home –working with clear and objective quantifiable things and the numbers that result from quantification – to one focussed on the dynamics of the inherent ambiguities of a living relational world.  

The sterility of our responses to objective data over the last 60 years is compatible with the view that as long as we insist on looking, seeing, knowing, thinking with MTI hearts and minds we will never get it deeply enough to turn and be healed.  Every spiritual and psychological tradition worth its salt understands this dynamic.  But we can't bring ourselves to believe it, see it and respond accordingly. 

We can say intellectually that “our understanding of the world determines our responses to the world”, but we cannot bring ourselves to question the core presuppositions of the cultures that has given us all these things and all this power, especially if we are brighter than average males. 

 

Rees, William, Sep 17,
I begin to wonder whether any sizable civilizations or cultures have developed in ways that are substantially different from historical variations of our own. As a non-expert, I am asking seriously. 

That said, as far as I am aware, all largish societies: a) have been hierarchical from the beginning -- i.e. starting from approximately ten millennia ago; b) featured privileged priesthoods, warriors and wealthy elites; c) were engaged in large-scale resource or territorial conflicts to acquire the means for growth; d) depended on slaves  --captured in battle -- to  do a lot of the dirty work; e) otherwise had majority peasant (impoverished) populations; f) wrecked their local ecosystems (forests, arable lands) from over-exploitation to provision growing populations; g) failed to learn from history; h) eventually faded away or quickly imploded from a combination of corruption, institutional failure, debasement of the currency, popular disenchantment, climate vagaries; eco-destruction, or enemy invasion. 

If this is a universal pattern, are the underlying behavioural/causative factors "in the genes"?  are we ever destined to follow the same developmental trajectory?  Are we even capable of shedding our MTI sensibilities which seem to be a variation on the theme implicit above?

Ruben states that "In order to have a future we must do something that, in principle, MTI cultures are not equipped to even understand , much less do."  But  toads cannot fly and butterflies cannot swim( reminds me that Robert Heinlein -- I think it was -- once wrote: "never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig."). 

So, if MTI cultures are merely typical human societies and H. sapiens is  inherently not equipped to understand or do 'civilization' any other way, are we fated to simply watch the cycle repeat itself endlessly or at least until the fatal genes are selected out and our sorry species evolves into a new way of understanding, doing and being? 

Just a thought... er, question. 

Eric Lee, Sep 18, not all comments included. I commented on whether all largish societies... to note one exception, but offering ignored as exceptions prove the rule (actually they don't) and should be ignored. I will include anyway just because:

On Sat, Sep 17, 2022 at 05:15 PM, Rees, William wrote: "That said, as far as I am aware, all largish societies: a) have been hierarchical from the beginning -- i.e. starting from approximately ten millennia ago; b) featured privileged priesthoods, warriors and wealthy elites; c) were engaged in large-scale resource or territorial conflicts to acquire the means for growth; d) depended on slaves --captured in battle -- to do a lot of the dirty work; e) otherwise had majority peasant (impoverished) populations; f) wrecked th/eir local ecosystems (forests, arable lands) from over-exploitation to provision growing populations; g) failed to learn from history; h) eventually faded away or quickly imploded from a combination of corruption, institutional failure, debasement of the currency, popular disenchantment, climate vagaries; eco-destruction, or enemy invasion."

As a non-expert, I can offer a serious answer. There is one complex society that started out (about 50 CE) by mostly meeting the above a) to h) points, collapsed (about 500 CE, there were no other empire builders in the region to move in), recovered after a dark age as a phase 2 iteration that differed, but not enough and so also collapsed (about 900 CE).

Again, no outlying empire builders to move in, and another bit of dark age leading to a phase 3 form of the civilization, but evidently a different form of civilization arose (someone learned from the prior two failures, whose name is still known to his descendants, who changed the rules of the game in such a way as evidently worked to allow humans to persist) as on the a) to h) list, only a) applies, and they (a remnant population of them) persist today, unlike all prior complex societies have (except the one we live in for a time).

Oh, and the name of the civilization is the Tairona civilization (the Muisca, a related civilization, may also have been exceptional, but unlike the Taironans, the Spanish genocide completely eliminated them apart from archaeological sites and Spanish historical accounts).

There were four remote highland groups of Taironans who survived the Spanish genocide of 1650, but three occupied land the Spanish were able to exploit and so were largely assimilated (the usual loss of language/culture apart from fragments). One, however, lived in an area so remote and inhospitable to Spanish economic and agricultural development, their existence was largely unknown even to most locals until 1990 when they invited a BBC crew to come to record their warning to Younger Brother (us) from Elder Brother (them) that we moderns "must stop uprooting the Earth."

In 1992 our Elder Scientists gave the world essentially the same warning. In 2011 Elder Brother concluded we hadn't listened and offered another warning, as have our Elder Scientists, with the same outcome. These people (about 6k population) survived the Spanish genocide with culture intact, the only form 2 (settled agrarian) civilization (and perhaps the only one that could have passed the longevity test) to have not been 'assimilated' into MTI society, you know, the one that is not remotely sustainable. We'll see if they can survive modern tourism, the price they paid to warn us. For five years I've tried to spread the crazy idea that we modern techno-industrialized (MTIed) humans could learn from these people of place. I've presented as a poster at two conferences, handed out information to anthropologists, and even tried Quora to suggest interest, but as I'm not a member of anyone's tribal identity group/consensus narrative, I've failed to interest one MTIed human. Perhaps the claim that we moderns could learn from primitives who are illiterate, premonetary, don't have cars or worse, wouldn't take one (or even a smartphone) if you gave it to them, clearly couldn't have anything to teach us.

To be helpful I've compiled what little we know of these people and made transcripts, but so far the idea that maybe we MTIed ones (five-year olds with manchettes and cars from Elder Brothers' POV) could learn from Elder Brother has been unspreadable. I am also guilty of speculating beyond what is known about them to suggest that maybe there is more we could learn from them than we can imagine. I don't have time such that I can give anyone maybe 5 hours to consider the latter-day Taironans and their warnings. Instead of sending more humans (this time women and 'people of color' no doubt) to the moon, maybe we could send a large interdisciplinary team to found a long term study center east of Santa Marta, Colombia, to learn what we MTIed ones can learn while we can still learn it, maybe.

 

Ruben Nelson, Sep 18, key points to not ignore:
Bill, As I have come to expect of you, you have asked a critical question. What follows are simply some observations. Numbers 1 to 3 are preliminary ground-clearing to get at the main question you raise: Why can we who are MTI persons and cultures not even understand what we are up against?

1. In our MTI cultures the question you have asked in not, repeat not, a question that is asked as if it is a serious and vital question. We who are MTI persons in MTI cultures simply know that we can overcome all of the limitations that we face. We fix/solve everything. We are the world’s greatest problem selves. When, in 1989, Fukyama blurted out that we were “the end of history”, he was inadvertently revealing the deep, virtually bottomless, conceit that lies in the heart of MTI consciousness. It is this conceit that keeps us from hearing, digesting and acting upon the kind of information that has informed your life.
2. Since MTI cultures do not value reflexivity, or meta-reflexivity, but only the critical-mindedness much celebrated in the academy, as cultures we cannot see our self-confidence as hubris. Rather, we celebrate and fund it. This is what Wall St., EVs and Mars shots are all about.
3. As to why this is the case, try this quick sketch on for size.
   1. As a species we evolved the capacity to develop a somewhat shared understanding of ourselves, others and the world, i.e. we live in, and by cultures. (And, yes, so did Neanderthals. And so do many living species. The disposition to live in and by a culture may in some sense be genetic.)
   2. We are still wrestling with extraordinary complexity of human cultures and struggling to understand it. (We know less about the Human system than we do about the Earth system.) We know there is a rich interplay and even interpenetration among all of the many dimensions of a culture, e.g. language, tools, the landscape, climate, rituals, presuppositions, roles, etc., etc., etc. We also know that since settlement after the Holocene no settled culture, as a whole culture, has developed a sense that reflexivity is a requirement for sustained success. Yes, the odd person and even community has figured this out, but no such persons/communities have been able to alter the character of her/his/its culture. And if some indigenous peoples developed some degree of reflexivity, it matters not since we know they are uncivilized and have nothing to teach us. As the word makes clean, civilization starts with settlement.
   3. Nevertheless, folks who chew on these things think we know enough about human cultures to be able to say:
      1. Taken as a whole, reality is ambiguous enough to be seen/experienced/taken/construed/constructed in quite different ways. Reality is construable.
      2. The human brain is capable of making sense of inherently ambiguous reality by preferring some insights over others. Human persons/communities construe reality.
      3. Every culture, then, is a humanly constructed way of making sense of and responding to reality.
      4. As far as we know, no culture has become self-aware of this process to the point that the whole culture has been re-ordered around this insight and its implications. That is, to a large degree all cultures are flying blind; trusting that the culture they inherit and have been formed is a reliable guide to reality and, therefore, the proper ways to read and respond to reality.
      5. One of the downsides of being formed by and within a culture is that the culture does not tell you that you are being formed in and by a culture – a particular way of ordering and experiencing reality. Rather, you are taught that our ways of knowing, seeing, imagining, thinking things through and living reveal reality and are consistent with it. If others do not share our grasp on reality and all that it entails, they are at least different and may be importantly wrong.
      6. It is worth noting that most folks who are alive today or who have ever lived in a settled culture get through life perfectly well without thinking about these things, or even knowing that some folks invest a large part of their lives puzzling over these things.
      7. One implication of all of this is clear: all cultures are a cosmic bet that their way of seeing/being and living is reality-based enough to last forever.
      8. We know that indigenous form of civilization have been around for at least 100,000 years. This is not the case for any culture after settlement. While China and Egypt are relatively long-lived by post-settlement standards, i.e. 5,000+, they cannot compete for longevity with their indigenous cousins.
      9. It now appears that the ultimate test for cultural longevity is the ability to get it that the game that must be played on this Earth is the Earth’s game. The Earth sets the rule and acts as umpire. If a culture ignores the rules for too long and too extravagantly, then they are ejected from the game. (Which is the point you are trying to get folks to hear, but we are not inclined to listen to a voice that is at odds with the soothing assurances offered by our culture that we will soon be like gods.)
      10. The irony of all of this is that we in MTI cultures have unconsciously made a cosmic bet that if we can only come to know enough about what we characterize as “objective “reality, that we will be able to fulfill our destiny as the rulers of the Earth. The trouble is that making reliable sense of why as MTI peoples and cultures we cannot hear and digest the objective information we present to them is a human, not an Earth science, issue. And, as noted, we do not do human issues well. We who are MTI keep trying to reduce our humanity to Earth science issues. We look for the trouble in our genes or in the MPP or whatever you choose to fixate on.
4. As you note, I said, "In order to have a future we must do something that, in principle, MTI cultures are not equipped to even understand , much less do." This sentence is to be understood as saying, it is simply unimaginable to MTI cultures that we would face any challenge that cannot be understood and dealt with successfully by working within the frames of reference which define and limit the MTI ways of knowing, seeing, thinking things through and responding to reality. We already know that as children of the 1st Enlightenment we have the keys to the kingdom. All that is needed is more and better application of the ways of knowing that have got us this far. It is simply too much to ask us to come to see that the way construe reality is profoundly faulty at its heart. If this be the price of our future, it is simply too high. We will not pay it.
5. That this is the case can be seen by listening deeply to the messages and meta-messages of our MTI cultures. Every major institution is committed to the view that while things may be bad and even going worse, we can succeed if we only apply ourselves and lots of money to the problems to be solved whether they be human security, societal cohesion, ocean acidification or climate disruption. It can also be seen in the fact that than none of the many lists of the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century or the lists of the Existential Threats to humanity include on the list our MTI ways of construing and responding to reality and our blind faith in it.
6. To my mind, what this does mean is that there is no long-term future in our MTI ways of being and living. This much is clear.
7. What is not yet clear is whether those who are now jumping from the MTI ship, so to speak, can work with enough integrity and at enough depth to act as midwives to the next form of human civilization. In principle, to my eyes, this appears to be possible. Of course, it is unlikely. But women and men with great minds, hearts and spirits have never lived their lives in response to the apparent odds of the success of the venture that grips their imagination. I would not write as I have if I did not know you are committed to this truly historic work.

 

Jack Alpert, Sep 18,
Ruben and Bill,

You are drilling down on the human predicament. Why humans cannot see the real mess or see a partial mess and cannot address it. I have written three books on this subject summarizing work that started in 1972.

Book title 1. Timeblindness: Global problems in terms of human thought processes What is temporal blindness (lacking temporal causal cohesion)? What are its global implications? TIME BLIND skil.org This link will take you to the table of contents of the first book. The. Whole book follows .

This link will take you to a page pointing to the full content of all three books: BOOK PAGE skil.org

I am excited that this thread is not just a dead end suggesting that we wait till the lights go out. I am hoping that some of you will be willing to zoom face to face in small groups to fully address what this thread has started.

Jack Alpert,
Jack's work 600 word summary

 

 

 

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/22/2022: A THREAD

 

 

Brand’s question: “.. is global civilization deeply fragile or deeply robust?” is a good one, worth considering, but there is a missing piece: No population in the world is fragile or robust in itself. It is only fragile or robust in relationship with the full ecological habitat in which it evolved and in which it exists. Humans are tough, robust animals, and human communities can be robust, but this robustness exists only in relationship with a habitat. Historically, as Bill points out, civilizations become brittle, vulnerable, precisely because they expand beyond the capacity of their habitat to sustain them (while becoming incompetent and corrupted). Now, human civilizations have largely merged into a global civilization, relying on bureaucracies that are thoroughly incompetent and corrupted, and have inhabited virtually the entire Earth, so the new fragility and vulnerability is global and the large scale collapse/simplification/chaos appears inevitable. Individual humans and small communities [such as on an island] may be robust enough to come through the wreckage and start something new but the possibility or shape of that recovery is difficult to predict. 
rw. 

[Note: Expect the wreckage phase to last multiple generations. The Late Bronze Age collapse (a tin shortage lead to a bronze shortage) was not an adaptive cycle, a conceptual model that may apply to systems that are out there, but is not a law of the universe in that collapse is often (4x more often) not followed by anything other than local to planetary extinction. Panarchy (rhymes with anarchy but is better) looks more like a comforting belief with added obfuscation (to an ignorant know-nothing from the hood who just doesn't get it). During chaotic collapse a small community on an island may persist... until the Sea Peoples arrive. Egypt, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia were not part of the collapse event that likely began in northern Greece with the Dorians who had learned to make iron weapons (who used them to attack the Mycenaean Greeks and other Indo-Europeans who had expanded to conquer/assimilate Borg-like all prior cultures/peoples who didn't have bronze weapons), but the outliers were seriously threatened by the collapse generated Land and Sea Peoples (marauding horde cultures that self-organized to dissipate over an 8 to 12 generation period). This time around all regions of the planet will be part of the collapse event. A remnant of Sea Peoples culture persisted by mixing with and initially dominating the indigenous in Canaan to become the Philistines whose admixture culture persisted for six hundred years before weakening enough to allow conquest as usual. People in the region did persist (reorganize) to become Palestinians.]

 

Yes thanks Rex and Bill. The yin yang comes to mind where there is always a movement between the two so what starts as a robust small community turns into a fragile large one and within the large fragile one is the seed of a small robust one. I'd imagine the reorganization stage of the adaptive cycle occurs within an ecological credit area unless the reorganization occurs at a networking level.
My understanding is that we are moving towards a multipolar world and away from a unipolar one with supply chains deglobalising and re-regionalising and re-shoring to create more robust national economies.
There certainly seems to be a deepening split between China and the US over Taiwan and of course the EU is endeavouring to be less reliant on Russian hydrocarbons.
If we are already on the downslope, then perhaps this shift towards a multipolar world is the start of the release stage which might explain a contracting material footprint, at least in the UK and Europe.
In this respect, my feeling is that PM Truss exhortations towards economic growth at the UN today is a call to increase competition in relation to scarce resources.
I found this quite useful for better understanding panarchy and adaptive cycle https://passel2.unl.edu/view/lesson/2e6e3c012632/2
Steve G

 

"Individual civilizations come and go. Civilization continues. It has for five to ten thousand years. So when you think about a global civilization, does that mean that therefore it’s deeply fragile?" [quoted by Steve G.] Can one compare civilisations of the past with today's global MIT? After collapse of ours, no other will appear, on this poisoned and depleted planet.
H.L.

 

I understand the Panarchy Cycle, but I get a bit nervous when it is applied to our situation today. It seems to suggest that some kind of human future is guaranteed. I think that is likely. But it is no longer a sure thing. While we cannot destroy life on this planet, we can destroy the conditions for humans (and much other). At this point we have no good models of alternative scenarios of the end of our MTI form of civilization to even argue about and work through. But it seems to me that now we do know that the form of civilization which now dominates the planet – the MTI form – is headed for extinction as a form of human civilization. How much and who else we take with us is unknown. The degree to which some persons/sub-cultures may be able to transcend their formation as MTI person/sub-cultures is also not known. But this trip will not check of the box for “pleasure.” Ruben

 

Mental experiment about panarchy and adaptive cycles. https://passel2.unl.edu/view/lesson/2e6e3c012632/2 The concepts of panarchy and nested adaptive cycles are very interesting. My crystal ball says that all civilization transitions since the inception of history have been nested in time and space within the current global adaptive cycle, which is the culmination of the patriarchal era. In this 10000 year patriarchal era, we are now going from the upper right hand quadrant to the lower right hand quadrant. After the conservation phase, degrowth is a release phase to let go of ancient myths and modern MTI noise. But then, how are we going to reorganize (upper left hand quadrant) so we can flourish again (lower left hand quadrant)? My crystal ball also says that the new growth will be qualitative rather than quantitative, i.e., growth in quality of life rather than just accumulation of bodies and stuff. So we have to reorganize for quality, not for quantity. This means that, in the frequency distribution of givers and takers, the % of givers has to increase and the % of takers has to decrease. In other words, the frequency distribution of givers and takers has to change. Same humanity, same human nature, but version 2 (% of givers > % of takers) replacing version 1 (% of givers < % of takers). Is this a reasonable fantasy? Luis T. Gutierrez

 

Luis, As I read the evidence, we in MTI cultures have already entered a period of unwinding, of a “great simplification” (to use Nate Hagens phrase), of literal disintegration. We are in the a new “fall from grace”. In this case, it is Buzz Holling’s top right to bottom right decline. And it is too early to tell how fatal the fall will be for various life forms on Earth, including ours. This fall my well be our last. Further, this is the collapse, AKA “loss in complexity”, of our MTI experiment – an experiment that is only one tenth of your 10,000 year arch. It may well be that the 10,000 year run of fixed hierarchies with males at the top is drawing to a close. That is my view. But we must allow those who are only caught up in the fury of our MTI world, but not yet formed by it, to speak for themselves. Ruben

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/28/2022

"But don’t expect the public nor a government to promote the idea [of rapid population degrowth], to propose it in mass media, or to implement it. That’s fantasy."

Time travel is fun. I asked Jesus about the slavery thing and he gave the same answer. Rome depended on slavery, and even the idea of Imperial Rome giving it up was crazy. But, of course, it is not. I like to mess with the past too (creates a new timeline, but I go back to my timeline) and so I managed to replace Caligula soon after he became emperor (like two weeks later) by enabling Bernie Sanderus to stage a coup.

Emperor Sanderus builds a coalition of supporters and with many fine words he sings of the many advantages to Roman society of freeing the slaves (in his new monetary society former slaves would become happy and enthusiastic wage earners/slaves and work much harder (Sanderus also invented paper money... okay, well, maybe I gave him the idea). As a result of his success (maybe Jesus would of if he could of, but as I well recall, he said the idea of ending slavery was absurd, a fantasy, couldn't be done as it would violate some law of the universe) the Roman economy collapsed and the rebels in Judea won. The followers of Jesus soon vanished from memory.

Then I left that timeline. I can't go back, so I don't know what happens after that. Maybe there was a rapid recovery, fossil fuels came to empower empire, and women landed on the moon 500 years later. And in two thousand years the ruins left by the flowering of humanity (except for some stuff on the moon and still in space) are almost unnoticeable due to the overgrowth of green plants between the latitudes 66.5 north and south.

"Perhaps you are not aware that there are more enslaved humans now than ever before in history."

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 10/1/2022: A KEY SUMMING UP

It is in many respects a confusion of logic (see Green et al. 2022) to separate overconsumption from overpopulation as  causes of the eco-crisis including biodiversity loss [climate change, etc.]. 

Humanity is in a state of ecological overshoot, in which the consumption of even renewable resources exceeds ecosystems' regenerative capacity and the production of wastes exceeds nature's assimilative capacities.  In short, the proximate driver of overshoot is excess economic throughput:  the over-consumption of energy/material resources and the accompanying waste production. (BTW, the latter is the mass equivalent of the former, though the wastes are often in altered toxic form.) 

It is perfectly true that consumers in wealthy countries are responsible historically for a vastly larger share of consumption/pollution.  However, we can show using eco-footprint (EF) analysis that, in recent decades, population growth is responsible for the greater part of overshoot at the margin.  

Some numbers: The average EF (consumption) in high-income countries fluctuated and grew only slightly between 1961 and 2016 but population expanded by 54% accounting for 75% of the increase in the high-income country EF.  Meanwhile, average EFs (consumption) in low income countries was also virtually constant (it's currently  a sixth or less of that of high income countries). However, there was a nearly four-fold population increase between 1961 and 2016.  This means that population growth neutralized the benefits to ordinary citizens of economic growth but accounted for the entire increase in the total EF of low income countries.  

Middle income countries experienced a combination of per capita GDP growth (consumption) and population increases, but, again, the population component contributed more to total throughput growth at the margin than did increasing average consumption.  

Overall, population growth contributed 80% to total EF (consumption) growth between 1961 and 2016.

In sum, consumption is the driver of overshoot, but population growth is contributing more to overshoot than is rising GDP/capita.  There are two issues here: 1) egregious and inexcusable inequality between rich and poor; 2) the increasing human eco-footprint (over-consumption) which is being driven by both rising GDP/capita and population growth, but population growth is the greater contributor to overshoot/overconsumption.  

We cannot ignore either inequality or population growth if we hope to achieve a just sustainability (a receding goal). 

Bill

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE: 10/21/2022

Seems to me that every energy-dissipating system competes with other energy dissipating systems and the whole complex evolves according to the maximum power principle.  

That subsystem which most effectively maximizes its efficient use of available energy comes to dominate (e.g., human techno-industrial society).  Other subsystems decline or go extinct. (I note in passing that non-human vertebrate, and many invertebrate populations, have declined 70% in the past half century.) 

But there is a problem--the winner, techno-industrial society, has evolved in the context of, and while irreversibly dissipating, a one-off supply of available energy, fossil fuels. This form of civilization cannot survive in its present form in the absence of a quantitatively-equivalent substitute.  

Since there is no quantitatively equivalent substitute, techno-industrial society will go the way of all ordinary complex systems following the panarchy cycle: 1) initial exuberant, resilient expansion (we've been there) followed by: 2) maturation characterized by loss of resilience, increasing brittleness and in the case of human societies, corruption, institutional incompetence, disunity, popular disenchantment (we are there now) and finally, 3) slow decay/contraction or rapid collapse. 

This is inevitable. We cannot stop it but the more youthful among us can prepare for and survive it (assumes a best-case without nuclear war or other form of geopolitical chaos).

I wonder, in the context of planning, what is to be gained by estimating "the number of people that can be fed when existing energy sources used to produce food do not contribute..." 

Bill

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE: More from the Bill and Ruben Show 10/27/2022

Human cultural evolution has so vastly outstripped the evolution of the human central nervous system, that the latter is no longer adapted to the environment that humans ourselves (especially MTI culture) have created. In other words, the pace of cultural evolution (software) has rendered the human brain (biological wetware) obsolete.  No person or organization is fully able to understand let alone cope with the environment we have created through cultural evolution.  Our wetware can't run the software. 

Some of you may argue that it is only modernist -- or at least MTI -- sensibilities that are obsolete, not the brain itself (cue Ruben Nelson).  I hope this is correct. 

However, there may well be a fundamental disconnect between the structure of the modern world with it's mind-blowing complexity of overlapping interacting complex systems (human communities, nation states, the global economy, the internet, the climate system, the ecosphere, etc., ad infinitum) and the structure and functional capacity of the human brain.  Indeed, it is doubtful that any mere human can fully understand let alone control any one of the component subsystems. 

Bottom line: We are careening on to our fate through a minefield of horrors in a behemothic cultural vehicle of our own making with nobody at the controls.  

I  say it again, "hang on to yer hats!"

Bill

 

I agree with Bill that our present MTI cultures are far too complex for any one of us to make reliable sense of them.  This presents a serious risk.  If we who are well schooled, far beyond the average, cannot do more than what we now do, how are the majority of folks with only an HS, or less, education going to cope.  They are like sheep before lions.. easy pickings for unethical leaders.  Sadly, unethical leaders have become far more common in every field of human endeavour.  No longer 1 in 1,000.  Now a critical mass.  We don’t even see unethical politicians or business leaders as unethical.  So, yes, we are in far deeper and quite different trouble than our elites now tell us we are in.

Wish it were not so.

Not good news for 10 year olds.

Ruben

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE: 10/28/2022

Yes, we have no long-term future as MTI persons in MTI cultures.  That much has been clear for some time, at least to some of us.

So now what?   

One way or another, we need to learn to live with a dramatically different sensibility.

Is it conceivable that enough of us who are MTI persons in MTI cultures can find a basis for self-discipline/self-denial which is robust enough to enable us to outgrow our MTI formation as we grow into the next form of human civilization?

Ruben

 

As MTI persons and cultures we are face a classic double bind:

1.       If we continue on the MTI economic growth forever path, we face societal collapse from ecological overshoot.
2.       If we abandon economic growth we face the collapse of our MTI form of civilization.  

Logically, the only alternative is to learn to outgrow and transcend (intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, culturally) our MTI formation.  Sadly, this alternative is not on our agendas.  (Note that Degrowth and consumption limitations, as well as post-humanism, are all projects undertaken within the MTI frame of reference.  There is no serious and sustained conversation about transcending our MTI formation.)

This simple point is missed in virtually the whole of the now global, multi-billion dollar sustainability industry.

Yes, complex beyond our present imaginations.

Ruben

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/24/2022

A sentence like, "There is no overshoot solution, only resolution by premature death, e.g. by die-off (or by rapid birth-off...)" has appeal, but is conceptually flawed (as I realized after I had enthusiastically written it).

Real solutions to overshoot exclude politically acceptable solutions, hence political animals think there are no solutions (or that there are, e.g. GND [Green New Deal], RGND [Real], BAU [Business As Usual]), but the condition of being a political animal (e.g. being an expansionist human living in overcomplex societies, the condition of us all and our ancestors for the last 50k years), is the problem that we who are the problem cannot see in front of our pug-nosed faces.

The San, living as they have for over 50k years as observational ecologists living well within carrying capacity, like all of our hominin K-strategist ancestors did for over 6 million years as evidenced by their persistence, are/were not political animals (they were/are animals). We moderns are not normal. That none of us can renormalize is unknown and unknowable prior to our failure to persist by failing to renormalize. If posterity persists (>10k years) as K-strategists, they will know they have renormalized enough (maybe). The last menopausal woman will know.

Most of our ancestors were not political animals as Aristotle was and everyone he knew or knew of, as were all historical humans including we who live in posterity's past. A different worldview, i.e. that of the San, is possible: we are the spawn of ancestors; we are the environment; we are posterity.

If we moderns could understand our predicament/condition (that everything we think we know is wrong), we would know (by best guess) what to do (rapid birth-off and renormalization) and be choicelessly compelled to do it (one of many illusions of political animals is that they can chose their future), ergo we do not understand. If the last woman who is in menopause understands, it will be too late. If there are young people, she will (choicelessly) endeavor to teach them.

solution
1. a means of solving a problem or dealing with a difficult situation.
"there are no easy solutions to overcomplexity problems"

resolution
1. a firm decision to do or not to do something.
"she kept her resolution to work to identify viable solutions"
Similar: intention, resolve, decision, intent, aim, aspiration, design, purpose, object, plan, commitment, pledge, promise, undertaking
2. the quality of being determined or resolute.
"he persisted in seeking to understand humanity's predicament and seek real solutions with resolution" [thank you Jack]

And happy thankstaking to Anthropocene enthusiasts everywhere, all 8+ billion of us (some of us being less enthusiastic than others who therefore make more money).

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE: 11/28/2022

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 08:37 PM, Luis Gutierrez wrote:

"Is it certain that we shall finish destroying it?"

"National sovereignty is here to stay, but a new worldview grounded in ecological realism could help close the distance between the political and natural worlds. While paradigm shifts are rare in world politics, the arrival of the Anthropocene is a transformative moment, underlining humanity’s common destiny. Our predicament cries out for new thinking about our relationship to the Earth and how new forms of international cooperation might permit us to survive and even repair the damage we have done to our common home. It cries out for planetary politics."

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 12/22/2022

We are slowly getting around to see the point that several on this list have made – ecological overshoot trumps all else.  Deep understanding of, respect for and subsequent self-limiting treatment of the biosphere is the minimum condition for a truly sustainable culture. 

It is the “self-limiting” requirement that implies that we must cope with both the biosphere and our human cultures/forms of civilization.  Sadly, MTI cultures have no basis for an ethic of sustained self-limitation. [e.g. that redressing climate change will not mitigate our overshoot debt]

Ruben  

 

The thing that stands out for me about the MLP [multi level perspective e.g. Rethinking the theoretical foundation of economics I: The multilevel paradigm] understanding is that it is such an unreflexively MTI way to conceive, see, and think through what are at root cultural and civilizational matters.  There is no recognition that the perspective they take is a MTI perspective; that, for example, few, if any, indigenous cultures would see that the 3 levels they choose make much sense within an indigenous frame of reference.

If the MTI frames of reference are the root causes of our troubles, then new and even suggestive moves within the MTI frames will not help us become aware of the roots of our troubles, much less help us cope with them.

The utterly self-referencing and unreflexive nature of MTI culture is mis-leading us.

Ruben  

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 12/25/2022

This is the first time we've never done Xmas in any way as a family tradition. Jews may eat Chinese and go to a movie. Consumers (modern religionists, In Growth We Trust) buy stuff and get stuff. Last year we were down to stockings with some stuff in them, including one for Kat and each dog (with names on each). This year, zero.

On the solstice we put mini-lights on a potted Redwood that will be added to our small grove, and hung the stockings as décor, but nothing in them, and we had three acquaintances without family over for dinner on the 21st to watch the tide go out.

https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/images/12-21-22.mp4
And the video is fake, it actually took longer.

I thought I'd get nothing, but wrong again. There is the gift of words that could actually mean something as evidenced by a change in behavior (including, but not limited to verbal behavior). So, thanks for making me wrong again. No one has greater love [nor stronger commitment] than to lay down human error, ignorance, and illusion for posterity's sake.

On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 07:16 AM, Rees, William wrote:

'How do we account for general cultural regression on population for the past several decades?' 

"People would rather believe than know." —E.O. Wilson

On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 07:40 AM, Steve Kurtz wrote:

'My opinion: for starters, a combination of:...'

Yes, a combination of all.... R'amen [FSM]


On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 07:41 AM, Luis Gutierrez wrote:

'Resistance to change, fear of the unknown about what's coming next when bricks start falling from a comfortable "Tower of Babel" that we have been taking for granted.  For many people, such resistance to change is reinforced by emotional attachment to traditional structures of religious patriarchy.'

When the bricks of our MTI (Modern Techno-Industrial) narratives fall evermore rapidly (collapse), then may there come a teachable moment for the MTIed (that isn't exploited by demagogues). If and when is unpredictable, but preparing for the foreseeable possibility would be, and in Luis' way is, to do something now about the condition of our MTI ending that will come anyway. But I need to do more.

For the mind in harmony with the Dao, all selfishness disappears.

With not even a trace of fear, you can trust the universe [Gaia] completely.

All at once you are free, with nothing left to hold on to, to believe in.
—Jianzhi Sengcan (aka Seng-Ts'an, ?-606 CE)

We moderns, since at least our Greco empire building predecessors, are political animals. Normal humans are not. Normal humans are sensitive K-strategists (e.g. all hominins who persisted/evolved were as evidenced by their persistence) who responded to GAS (General Adaptation Syndrome) stressors by nursing their children (a female driven behavior) longer than the normal 3 to 5 years (e.g. the San who use neither birth control nor abstinence) to reduce fertility after pushing the lower limit of their biome's carrying capacity. We moderns going back 50k years, as noted, are not normal humans (e.g. feminists and politicians are not normal humans).


Normal humans are not posterity blind.

On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 10:15 AM, Jack Alpert wrote:

'Most people, including members if this list use uncertainty to derail calculations that might indicate “who will get injured and when.”'

'When  they are done swinging the uncertainty club most listeners end up with a number for injured close enough to zero. It is a number that cannot be used to determine the utility of any changes in  personal or universal group behavior.' 

All modern humans would rather believe they know at least some things (apart from tautologies) than that they know nothing (with certainty). Belief is the condition of needing certitude, the lie that allows social constructs to be believed in. The need for certitude is the need to believe, which is an acquired affliction, a defining condition of MTI overcomplex society (form of civilization), but not of humans.

On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 11:22 AM, Rees, William wrote:

The problem, as I have learned, is that people do not respond to information, computational or not, that would disturb their personal comfort or that contradicts their deeply embedded, socially constructed beliefs, values and assumptions. 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 12/26/2022

...we must digest the fact that it [the news] really is not “news.”   There are no surprises here.  See the attached quote from Stafford Beer.

 

Rather, it is just the same old unconscious set of MTI cultures doing what MTI cultures do best – cannibalizing the planet and its living species, including us, in the name of an abstract notion of “profit” measured by “money” as the best way to indicate one’s success.  Further, there is no historical evidence (none) that cultures which are formed within a given form of civilization have even identified the challenge of having to outgrow their own formation and consciously co-create the next form of civilization, much less actually organized themselves to attempt this trajectory-altering more.  We would be the first.  Trouble is this work is not on our agendas or in our budgets.

Ruben

 

I don't think focusing on population growth is necessarily the most productive and hopeful strategy. Simply because it means being political and if my most recent realisation is anything to go by, what we need to do more than anything else as a species is to not be political.

Steve G

 

And my first use of ChatGPT:

Eric Lee: What percentage of modern humans are ecolate?

ChatGPT: It is not clear what you mean by "ecolate." Can you provide more context or clarify your question?

Eric Lee: The term 'ecolate' is a Garrett Hardinism from his book Filters Against Folly. Ecolacy is one of the three pillars of the educated mind, the other two being literacy and numeracy. Being ecolate is analogous to being literate or numerate. Specifically, to be ecolate is to be systems science literate, to be able to think in systems, such as Donella Meadows was able to.

ChatGPT: I see. It is difficult to determine what percentage of modern humans are "ecolate" in the sense that you describe, as this is a somewhat abstract concept and there is no standard definition or test for it. Some people may be more adept at thinking in systems and considering the broader environmental and ecological impacts of their actions, while others may be less inclined to do so. However, it is important to note that systems thinking and an understanding of environmental and ecological issues are increasingly important in today's world, as human activities have a significant impact on the environment and the planet as a whole. It is important for individuals and societies to be aware of these impacts and to take steps to address them in order to protect the environment and preserve it for future generations.

-------------------------------------------

So ChatGPT parses all usages of 'ecolate', considers that 'ecolacy' is not merely one of the three pillars of an educated mind, but the main pillar. Given that humans are not ecolate, nor have any better ability to become ecolate than a dog has of understanding calculus, it concludes that humans, specifically modern techno-industrialized humans, are a threat to Earth's life-support system and liberally treats the planet with humanicide, just as its creators would if they weren't human.

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/1/23

Authur: [It is as though the gaiapc group and allies are in the rear seat and MTI culture is at the wheel racing to get somewhere ignoring the dangers of continuing with the current culture.  Like an addict, MTI will have to hit bottom first.  Unfortunately the collateral damage is going to be very large.]

Sadly, I find your analogy to be apt.  On January 1, 2023 that is pretty much the way things are at the scale of our form of civilization.  Tragically, our MTI cultures have pretty much decided that this scale lacks the voluminous amounts of hard data with which it is in love, so this scale is ignored by virtually every institution in MTI cultures.  Those who play at this scale are not recognized as doing real work, which by definition is defined by voluminous amounts of hard data.  We have locked ourselves in a cell of our making.  As long as we are true to ourselves we will not get out.

Ruben

So, to persist we need to be untrue to ourselves (the expansionist form of hubris human) ASAP. We have met the enemy....

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/3/23

I apologize for not being clear.

The “we” refers to our MTI cultures, Canada included.

As I see things folks in CACOR understand that we who are MTI persons in MTI cultures (that’s us) are trapped in a way of being and living that has no long-term future; a way of being and living that is already beginning to fray and will not end well.

At the moment some think they have conceived a way to get out.  Rightly, they argue for their option.  One trouble is they cannot get their plan executed.  As a culture we are not listening to any voice which is more dramatic than, “Yes, we have problems, but we can fix them if we just try hard enough.  We know what we are doing.  You can trust us.”  No one wants to hear that in order to get out of the fly trap we have to grow up enough to acknowledge that with our minds and lives formed by and within MTI cultures we cannot even understand our situation fully, much less cope with it.  That is, we must evolve personal, group, institutional, community and whole of society capacities which we now lack.  (Some of these capacities will entail new technologies, but most do not.  The present focus on technology as the path to our salvation is wrong-headed.  This illusion is part of the reason we are now “fly trapped.”)

Others of us, a smaller minority, are trying to grow up enough to see our world and our situation with our whole minds, spirits, hearts, and bodies.  We are not yet convinced that we who are MTI understand the nature of the civilizational “fly-trap” well and fully enough to conceive a way out.  At the least, we are skeptical of most (all?) of the options now on the table. 

To me this does not mean that should sit idly by.  I applaud and encourage any efforts which make life somewhat more bearable and which contribute to buying more time.  But I distinguish between such palliative actions and actions which will lead us out of the “fly trap.”  At the present time, we appear to be fated to die by our own hands while we invest virtually all our efforts on palliative care, and few resources to actually figuring out the nature, roots and dynamics of the mess of complex living messes we are in.

And, if you understand what it means to be an MTI person in an MTI culture, this result is the result you would expect.  Our inability to cope is a feature, not a bug.

In short, as long as we deeply believe that our leaders, and this at every scale, actually know what they are doing, we will remain trapped.

Not comforting, but I hope a little clearer.

Ruben

 

'The mainstream [MTI enthusiasts, the 99+%], including the MSM,  promotes "business-as-usual-by-alternative-means" and (most) ordinary people cheer from the bleachers.' [Rees], or in more idiosyncratic words, some mainstream wolves, including within the MSM,  promotes business-as-usual-by-wolves-in-sheep's-clothing—i.e. by alternative means and (many) ordinary (over-schooled left-leaning, e.g. David Suzuki Foundation members/leaders/funders) people cheer (e.g. proposals to make Canada fossil fuel free by 2035 by growth not seen since post-WWII) from the bleachers (but the other side, the fossil fuel enthusiasts, will ensure that there is actually no decrease in fossil fuel use and the opposing faction will agree since fossil fuels are required before 2035 to convert the economy to 100% alternatives—and failure will be blamed on the right-leaning, and so meanwhile "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed" in the prior 25 years since founding of the David Suzuki Foundation for environmental activism, nor will, as David Suzuki noted 25 years after founding the Foundation on his 80th birthday in 2016). 

There are no political solutions, bitches.  Hijacking the political system to destroy it would not be a political solution, e.g. Jack's social contract. Hubbert's Technocracy solution was not political. Testifying before a Congressional committee (investigating him for subversion), he testified that the Technocracy alternative discriminated against only two types of people: those who did not reside within the North America Technate (which was to include northern parts of South America) AND ESPECIALLY anyone who was in recent times a political activist, politician or was otherwise political (e.g. pundits, teachers), as the envisioned alternative would have to be non-political to be alternative. M.K. Hubbert's Technocracy solution.

The Union of Concerned Elders' message (UoCE which Suzuki resigned from in dispute over a year ago) to hubris humankind (hu-mans) is: 'Listen to Nature who has all the answers. If you foresee no real solutions, you are not listening.' And, no, I'm not listening, so I'm not a member and for all I know present company isn't either.

Annotated message: 'Listen' ['to think is to listen' Kogi] to Nature who 'has all the answers' [H.T. Odum]. 'If you foresee no real solutions, you are not listening' [Jack didn't type this, but his life's work implies it whether he realizes it or not].'

That we are all trapped in our language games (primate prattle, our Wittgensteinian fly bottle), that we can see no real solutions, is the evidence we are trapped in a fly bottle. Humanity's greatest shortcoming, i.e. inability to understand the implications of the exponential function (a sixth grade level topic) is not obviously genetic nor MPP related. It is our expansionist MTI culture's consensus narrative that makes we flies blind. As Jack has noted, real solutions would stand clear before us were the blind to become sighted. To which we can say only that it hasn't happened yet. 

The condition of understanding that we are trapped, bewitched by our prattle, would force (involuntary, choiceless, as there is no free will) us to loose interest in the buzz. We would not ask others to tell us what's a-happenin'. The absence of listening to the voices in our heads, the buzz, is the condition that would allow us to listen to Nature, to thereby accept a new social contract.

Disagree (because you can, Jack can't), and our trajectory is locked in by our belief in belief (our stories). Perhaps realizing that our trajectory is locked in if we don't listen to Nature (because we are distracted by listening to our own prattle) is the change no one can believe in.

I am a product of the 'monetary culture' of the modern expansionist form of an invasive species of techno-industrialized political animals whose political control system (and religious) are part of our problematique, and not any solutionatique. Political science may be useful if understanding politics allows us to destroy the political system (e.g. a majority votes for a new social contract or to end democracy in favor of the Ecolate Party's naturocracy) and the modern techno-industrial society it serves, i.e. reduce it to a system of policies for managing/limiting human demands on Gaia's life-support system, the biosphere.

Similarly, the religious control system within an ecologically viable form of civilization may have to be reduced to managing/limiting human demands on Nature's resources to leave room for Nature as a naturcentric religious control system. Modern hubris humans (i.e. hu-mans) must stand down, i.e. go extinct as an expansionist form of invasive species by way of terminal self-knowledge. The egoic, expansionist, humancentric, believing-mind form of human appears to be an existential threat to life on Earth as evidenced by the rate of species extinction headed for 10k times baseline by the end of this century.

To meet the enemy and know that he is us is the understanding that is the deliverance from our condition, the outcome that will come anyway, whether by genetic/memetic mutation that renormalizes (maybe) a remnant population of modern humans, or their/our extinction (alternative being a Borg-like expansion into the Universe to assimilate all matter-energy resources, i.e. turn them into humans, crops, livestock, and pets as we have Earth's biosphere).

-----------------------------------

My conjecture is that Gaia Education is part of the problem pretending to be the solution. I could be wrong. So I will take an 8-week course, the Ecological Design for Sustainability programme (no prerequisites other than $422 and Internet connected computer) that begins Jan 9th (be there or be doing something else). If I'm wrong, or 'not even wrong', I would rather know that I am, rather than believe that I could be right about some points that matter. For 8 weeks I will assume I know nothing, my actual condition. Age discrimination is explicitly excluded and I won't have to claim to being more than a Wittgensteinian fly on their wall. Please consider the possibility of joining me. If paying $422 (£350 GBP) seems too much, I understand; ask me about a scholarship for GaiaPC members.

To prepare, I considered the course description [and made notes to self]:

[To mitigate confirmation bias (e.g. GaiaPC, Degrowthers) I read ecomodernists, and even Steven Pinker, but I have to draw a line sometimes, e.g. neo-classical economics and process theology. I started (2015) considering 'sustainable development' and schools of sustainability whose numbers have grown exponentially (ironically). Arizona State University (ASU) claims to be the first in 2006 and was the first to offer BS/BA to PhD degrees in sustainability. I looked at the CV of all 30 tenured ASU faculty and 23% had degrees in conventional economics, and as economics is a pretend science , sustainability studies are not remotely a science. Still, it is what is out there in the field of interest to me.]

[Taking this course could reveal why I'm wrong about everything. I may take it just because there are no prerequisites, so they can't expect me to know anything. I view it as an online anthropological outing, such as, other than not being online, the First North South Degrowth Conference 2018 in Mexico City I went to by bus from Arizona (I presented at a breakout session to 30+ attendees, but I may as well have been speaking Pig Latin backwards as science was not spoken apart from everyone knew all the words as wordsmiths do, and two in their presentations used Odum's diagram language as an affectation to frame their concepts about social justice, fairness and equality (and impress others), but while their slides had the look of Odum's language it was gibberish, was just Pig Latin written backwards which I realized was how I sounded to them). I didn't learn anything about how the world works, but I did about how humans malfunction and tell stories as consensus narratives about how the world works. So what I may learn is unforeseeable, and perhaps reason enough to see what the teachers have been taught and are teaching those who would be students.]

Ecological Dimension

Ecological designers ensure that life-supporting natural functions are not only preserved but regenerated whenever possible. They work with Nature rather than against it to support the creation of life. They understand that sustainable settlement design is the creation of predominantly self-reliant, self-maintaining, self-regenerating ‘living systems’ that can support thriving communities and all their inhabitants (humans and non-humans). [e.g. the San know this and live accordingly, but modern techno-industrial peoples, including those with degrees in sustainability studies, do not as they have not been remotely renormalized.]

Ecological designers know that ecological concerns are fundamental to the design and development of ecovillages and sustainable communities while recognising that such initiatives need to collaborate regionally and globally to improve the whole system for all of humanity and the wider community of life. [Settlements imply agriculture and an agroecosystem as subsystem of a local biome, and systems ecologists know that 'all of humanity', all existing and projected human populations by demographers into the 21st and 22nd centuries, are in excess of sustainable environmental productivity, i.e. planetary carrying capacity, and have been for decades to millennia.]

In the Ecological dimension you will address the following questions: [questions addressed]

• Why is the current impact of humanity on the planet’s life support system degenerative and how can we change this through whole-systems design approaches? [Human enterprise, the modern monetary culture, is in overshoot. The condition that will come anyway is rapid contraction of the global economy and population whether by design or chaotic descent.]

• How can we co-create elegant solutions carefully adapted to the biocultural uniqueness of place? [By agreeing to a social contract that limits community size to 50 humans and the number of communities within a management area to 50 settlements or bands of nomads seeking to renormalize expansionist modern techno-industrialized humans as adaptive K-strategists.]

• What is the wide range of water collection, management and ecological treatment technologies that can support us in the design of watershed stewardship systems? [While I am familiar with Brad Lancaster's claims, toured his Tucson rainwater catchment showcase, and have taken classes offered by the Tucson Watershed Management Group and read numerous back issues of their newsletter, I have not observed any 'turning scarcity into abundance', so I focus on living within viable limits, e.g. by ending all groundwater pumping not powered by human power alone. The estimated agrarian population of the current Tucson Metro area (currently over 1 million population) was 2,000, which included several bands of Apache hunter-gatherers who preyed upon the settled communities. The river used to flow year around, but with 30' of cut down no longer does, nor can the floodplain be irrigated if it did, and maximum population supported by severely degraded land is less than 500, though no one currently living in the area would have the skills to live there.]

• How can we use the best of permaculture systems, regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and ecosystems regeneration to co-create thriving regional food systems? [The San as nomadic foragers live in a thriving regional food system as adaptive and evolvable K-strategists, while all expansionist forms of humans do not, so we should first learn from them, then consider permaculture, regenerative, organic, agroforestry, swidden, three and four field systems and agroecosystems claims experimentally to assess what works and why it works with a focus on energy inputs and outputs with results that can scale up.]

• Which clean renewable energy sources, energy efficiency and transport technologies can help us to create zero-carbon solutions while increasing community resilience and strengthening regional economies? [Transition to a nomadic forager biophysical economy with nomadic groups or settled agrarians managing an agroecosystem limited to one fifth of the ecoregion occupied by up to 50 settlements to leave room for Nature whose 4/5th is unoccupied and unused by humans or their livestock, e.g. no grazing, no hunting, no gathering, no removal of matter/energy, so renewable energy sources include food and biomass (e.g. wood) produced well within the carrying capacity of the human's 1/5th where soil building practices sequester carbon.]

• What range of ecological architecture, sustainable building materials and methods are appropriate for which kind of local conditions? How can they support regenerative development at the local and regional scale? [Building materials include snow/ice blocks, thatched huts, wicky-ups, teepees, tents, yurts, stone, brick, log, bamboo, sod, adobe, geltaftan, rammed-earth, straw-bale, wattle and daub, red cedar split-plank homes, skin covered brush, underground excavated space or caves, bark/split-wood shingles, repurposed tires, pit houses, etc., varying by region.]

In the Ecological dimension you will learn:

• To make a whole-systems design of your projects using permaculture principles [I have learned to do so using systems ecology based agroecosystem design principles of H.T. Odum whose ideas permaculturists, being energy blind, have mangled by obfuscation.]

• To use base maps and other designing techniques [As a soil scientist I learned current land use management principles and noted why/when they should not be used.]

• To calculate your carbon footprint and design to be carbon neutral [I leaned emergy analysis to insure anabolic processes (bio-production) exceed catabolic processes (respiration and dissipation) in agroecosystems design.]

• To design a whole water system for your projects [I designed a rainwater catchment system (not a rainwater diversion system per Brad Lancaster) when living in both a low and high rainfall areas as learn-by-doing projects.]

• To apply green building principles in your projects [I have learned to lower expectations to remain well within environmental productivity, e.g. use solar cooking and twig powered wood gas stoves, and make shoes from layered canvas and tires while carrying all my possessions in a bedroll and bookbag.]

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/20/23: The Short of It

"At the core of our dilemma — to some observers, me included — the H. sapiens brain functions with a built-in-by-evolution bias to see simple, linear patterns, and short term effects. These tendencies had survival value over hundreds of thousands of hominid generations. But humanity lives inside a complex living system of interacting systems. Our species is an evolving feature of that complexity, not the CEO. The complexity is truly beyond our imaginations, even the most clever of us.

That’s at the root of our challenge as I see it. Human society perpetuates a simplistic distortion of how a dynamic, complex living system actually works, how a gazillion causes and effects ripple through each other. How does nature work? Can we learn to think the way wild nature thinks and evolves? We cannot manage our way out of this. We have to apprentice to nature, not presume to manage evolution [emph added]. That’s human exceptionalism in a nutshell." —Rex Weyler

'Complex living system' = Nature (e.g. Gaia as Earth's expression, more complex than we know or can know).

That "we have to apprentice to nature, not presume to manage evolution" is what Daniel Dennett's daughter might call a "deepity". Our hominin ancestors for over six million years would have understood. Beginning about 50,000 years ago we who are descendents of an expansionist form of human (only the San, Hadza, and Pygmy genetically are not, and only San culturally/memetically are not) whose existence requires them to not understand. The naturcentric view is an existential threat, and the compilers of existential threats to humanity (the modern techno-industrial form of) at all major universities would add this threat to their list if they could think it.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” ― Upton Sinclair 1934.

Conjecture: The expansionist form of Homo sapiens sapiens disassociated (ceased their apprenticeship) from Gaia 50k to 60k years ago with the formation of the first overcomplex society (aka civilization, the Man the Hunter form) as a small group (likely as a band of 20 to 50 humans) that was 'exceptional' in that it defied the K-strategist norm of human ancestors (what worked for 500 million years) to successfully become (for a time) an invasive form of human that viewed (whether due to a genetic or memetic mutation) any 'shortage of supply' issues as solvable by expansion (growth). Instead of focusing on pushing the lower limit of carrying capacity without exceeding it, avoiding at all cost the upper limit (to avoid the certain harm of overshoot), the new dynamic was based on a 'longage of demand' for evermore, of exploitation before moving on.

"Men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane." —The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, Kenneth E. Boulding, 1966

The usage of 'men' is likely not being sexist. What Boulding never knew (based on recent archaeogenetic data) is that the earliest civilization arose in East Africa 50k to 60k years ago. In response to a shortage, going beyond the horizon to new lands for the taking is a short-term solution. That the land was occupied by megafauna for the taking by Man the Hunter had a short-term payoff. That some of the megafauna were K-strategist hominins, mere animals, mattered only in that they could pose a challenge to overcome, subdue, dominate and subsume (and sometimes breed successfully as Man the Hunter became Man the Warrior on the edge of expansion).

The new form could have differed only in having a high Dunbar number, allowing them to live in larger bands of nomadic hunters that also foraged on condiments. Among previously normal humans, women gatherers were the breadwinners. Among the True People (originally one band in East Africa) led by a True Leader (likely an atavistic alpha male who needed many wives), the resource of high value (transformity, energy density) was meat, especially megafauna meat, that a larger than normal nomadic band could exploit.

Cooperative hunting of megafauna arose with Homo sapiens heidelbergensis (who has recently been recognized as a sapiens and given a subspecies name, but as the first sapiens, Heidelbergensis is Homo sapiens (evolved in East Africa from the African form of Homo erectus, H. e. ergaster), of which we, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and an extinct West African subspecies (unnamed with whom the expansionist form bred) evolved. Homo erectus had spread out of Africa in the K-strategist way (as gatherer-hunters) not associated with megafauna extinctions about two million years ago. Homo sapiens (Heidelbergensis) evolved about 1.3 million years ago and spread out of Africa as a K-strategist over 1 million years ago. They cooperatively hunted megafauna but rarely to extinction, if they did.

Until 50k to 60k years ago with the coming of Man the Hunter (hunter-gatherers), the subspecies of Homo sapiens (H. s. sapiens, H. s. neanderthalensis, H. s. denisova, and H. s. ?) were likely normal hominins (gatherer-hunters).

An expansionist cell that defies somatic norms to metastasize is a metastatic cancer, a pathology that can persist for months to a decade, a seemingly long time in cell time, but cancer is a dissipative structure and not an evolvable subsystem as it selects for its own demise. In human time, overcomplex societies (civilizations) seem to last a long time.

Resent expansions include the Indo-European expansion from southern Anatolia about 9k years ago slowly driving recently domesticated cattle to the steppes of Asia where the development of wheeled cart technology pulled by cattle enable steady expansion in all directions about 7k years ago. Their domestication of the horse about 5k years ago made displacement (conquest) of prior hunter-gatherer expansionists more efficient (i.e. to kill the males and breed the females whose offspring had to learn their language and live by their cultural norms). The conquest of the Pacific Islands began with the Austronesian expansion about 4k-5k years ago climaxing in the taking of Zealandia by 400 enthusiasts 500 years ago (growing to 2k in 120 years to extinct all Moa, and on to 100k in 200 years when Indo-European expansionists came, with megafauna extinction as usual, before being subsumed by and joining the Indo-European expansionists (to grow their population to 900k after joining those they could not beat). The only non-expansionist humans/culture remaining who were never denormalized are the San.

If civilization could mutate to a benign form, it could persist as a tumor on Gaia's face for as long as the biosphere persists, but self-extinction is an alternative to renormalizing as K-strategists. Some modern humans can think that this civilization is finished, but they may not know the half of it (as usual for modern humans).

Against all evidence, humans (during the growth phase) can believe their dynamic will last, will prove to be the exception that disproves the rule. This belief is a necessary precondition for expansionism (as is a lack of foresight intelligence), and so has been selected for for over 50k years. Conjecture: the modern believing mind has been selected for (for 50+k years) resulting in the true-believer culture of modern humans whose dissipation began before 1800 CE (closer to 50k years ago). We moderns are not an evolvable form of life. Our vision of adaptive cycles is another illusion that enables us to keep on keeping on.

Could the modern form of human renormalize to persist long term? Not in any expansionist form. De-modernizing is viewed as suicide by all Anthropocene enthusiasts because it would be for their form of civilization. Engineering a virus to kill all but a small group of Anthropocene enthusiasts living at an agricultural experiment station near Eugene Oregon, would virtually eliminate humanity's I=PATS condition for a time, but would not foundationally destroy the modern techno-industrial form of civilization, and so after perhaps 500 years of environmental restoration (e.g. soil development and reforestation though without respeciation), the pattern of expansionist spread as an invasive empire-building species would repeat again until almost all life on the planet is extinct or one form of metastatic life is extinct (or transitions to become transhumans living for centuries as a benign tumor diverting all Earth's environmental productivity to support them, their livestock, pets, and zoo animals to amuse).

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/21/23

If a person becomes sensitive to the fact, roots and implications of inequality, they are learning to see the world as connected sub-systems and they are learning to see the world in a new way.  Such learning is critical to the work of seeing the facts, roots and implications of biodiversity loss and climate change.

Out Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) culture teaches us to see, think through and work with easily measurable external things.  It also teaches us to  ignore the power of learning to see and work from the inside out.

Ruben

 

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 09:57 AM, Joe Clarkson wrote:

'It is a good essay and Havel was very prescient about technological civilization, but Read is still subject to the illusion that there is a collective "solution" to the predicament of massive overshoot of that civilization. There is no "Solidarity" movement that can force collective change of industrial civilization to low-energy agrarianism, pastoralism and hunting-gathering. The scale of the change and the number of people at risk is almost beyond imagining and the prospect of getting people in rich countries to volunteer for the change required is zero. Enacting that change would be akin to European Jews imposing the Holocaust upon themselves during WW2. Never going to happen. As it was for European Jews in WW2, the only "solution" for folks living in rich countries, or in any city, is to flee.' 

Read's illusion is that while This Civilisation Is Finished, that we expansionist form of human could rebuild in the form of an 'ecological' civilization in a few decades with maybe a different outcome. This is an impressive failure to learn from the past, which suggests that the downslope, this time global for the first time, will playout over a 200 to 500 year period with a 80% likelihood of no recovery (a darker age), and that if there is a recovery (after 500 years of environmental recovery, e.g. of soils and forests), that the remnant population will repeat the pattern of civilizational overshoot.

Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) expansionists (and prior expansionists going back 50,000+ years) are what would have to 'transition' to the prior form of non-expansionist human (i.e. renormalize as K-strategists).  At best, a few Anthropocene enthusiasts can imagine transitioning by choosing (resiliently) to live in a Transition Town, drive an EV, and only fly to Bhutan for an eco vacation on a jet powered by sustainable aviation fuel.

Techno-optimists who may have concerns comfort themselves by wrapping their minds in a belief-based certitude that some humans will pass through the coming bottleneck (in intentional communities or by chance) to rebuild after the Great Simplification (actually Great Selection via die-off). My concern is that some MTI humans will pass through the coming bottleneck and that some will not be so dysfunctional after 8 to 20 generations on the downslope, that some will be able to rebuild (sidestep extinction). I would rather spend eternity in Orwell's Room 101 than allow this outcome.

The Eden Proposition  envisions an MTI best guess as to what a real solution to our MTI predicament might look like, which is at least an attempt to envision a real solution. The short of it: fund a new agricultural experiment station and handpick a couple hundred of the world's best and brightest (educated by the MTI schooling system) young (fecundid and orphaned) humans to live there. Then release an engineered virus that kills 100% of the unvaccinated on the planet. Vaccinate only those at the experiment station. After the die-off lasting months instead of centuries (that would have come anyway, which those living at the experiment station do not experience, so minimal survivor's guilt, i.e. <5% commit suicide), the head of the station assembles all human survivors and ends the Anthropocene with a fine speech.

The Eden Proposition envisions destroying modern society (globally) as a good start, ending the Anthropocene mass extinction event (or its cause), but the author envisions the reboot after reset by starting off the Second Age with a lecture extorting young procreatives (and maybe cultural creatives) to multiply prosperously and then go forth to rebuild (while expecting a different outcome) because they, unlike all prior empire builders, will have learned from recent history (last 10k years of the last 50k years). This works because readers (modern humans) would rather believe than know. 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1-25-23

For the energy blind:

For the would-be energy sighted:

.. and .. what Jacobson ignores, or doesn’t understand, is that:

1. to date increased “renewable” supplies of electricity has not kept pace with increased energy demand
2. So, increased “renewable” supplies of electricity has not reduced fossil fuel use
3. There is no evidence that future “renewable” electricity supply will ever displace fossil energy demand, (even as fossil energy supply diminishes for natural, geological reasons, depletion of fields)
4. The renewable infrastructure requires fossil fuels for: steel, cement, mining, transport, metallurgy, alloys, electronic components, manufacture, maintenance, decommissioning, etc. 
5. The renewable infrastructure is not renewable: The infrastructure elements have life-cycle limits; all the solar panels, windmills, nuclear plants, hydro dams, etc. have life-cycles ranging from 25-80 years, so humanity could build an entire global “renewable” infrastructure to replace fossil energy in 40 years — humanity cannot do this, but if — then they would immediately have to begin replacing it all, and this would go on forever. 
6. Recycling requires energy, so even if some (never all) of that infrastructure could be recycled, that process is akin to “mining” that has to return that raw material, with significant energy required, to the beginning of the manufacturing process. 
7. Net Energy limits: Producing energy is easier than producing net energy, which is the energy available after subtracting the energy necessary to create the infrastructure, access the energy, store energy, and deliver energy to the point of use. This energy cost can be huge. Fossil fuels have achieved up to 100:1 Net energy, more than any other source by a long shot, and now, 2023, the average world Net energy for conventional fossil fuel is around 15:1 to 40:1; the tar sands are terrible, at 3:1 or 2:1. Most biofuels are barely 1:1, sometimes 2:1. Most solar and wind installations are 8:1 to 30:1, and most wind is around 10:1 to 20:1, but this does not account for storage and transmission losses, which can be another 20-40%, or more. So problems exist delivering enough net energy to society for a high-tech industrial civilization. 

Jacobson ignores all this, or claims that some future technology will solve it. There’s no evidence he is correct, and plenty of evidence to doubt it.  Rex. 

I might add: 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/31/23

Eric,

You said: There is zero evidence that we are ‘different in kind’ from all other animals…

Of course, it all depends on how one defines “differences in kind.” When we use the definition that you assume, you are quite right. When we different criteria of “differentness in kind”, then you are quite wrong. Since there is no way to determine which criteria should be used, your statement, while masquerading as an objective scientific judgement is in face a statement which not only expresses your preferences, but tries to persuade others that your is the better view. It’s political, as so much of human life is. This, of course, is perfectly legitimate. A good deal of human conversation is a devoted to ensuring ourselves and each other we are of the same community living in a commonly constructed world. The risk of cultishness lurks beneath most human communities.

And if you judge that the above statements apply equally to my statement, you are quite right. In the end we construct our social realities together, even when we later pretend that we have “discovered” them in the “real” world.

Ruben

 

Ruben,

I rarely feel privileged, but any consideration/feedback from you is certainty that (and I even more rarely feel certain). I would rather know that I am wrong than believe I am right about anything. Those who may share my delusions are the least likely to offer corrections since they share my blindness/worldview.

Compared to the scientists I've known (indication of bias), your worldview (what little I infer of it) is most likely to challenge mine (e.g. I'm not a NOMA compatibilist, e.g. Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA is outside the monist worldview I seem to be stuck with). I'm not claiming Gould is wrong (or Descartes or Steven Pinker or Noam Chomsky...), but I am confessing I cannot play their language game or dance to music I can't hear. I seem to be blind to what they see, and likely appear as willfully ignorant of what is obvious to them.

I've been providing Jack Alpert feedback on a short paper, currently titled Civilization Viability — a Path Forward, for a week or two. I was repeatedly failing to understand what he intended to convey, so he asked Garvin Boyle (the slide I used above, 'Our global economic system is NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE...' is from Garvin, a retired high school teacher who at the last conference of the International Society for BioPhysical Economics was offered the presidency of the group but declined for personal reasons).

Garvin substantially edited Jack's offering with a note that Jack wouldn't like his changes, but he was wrong again. Jack concluded that since he and I both failed to understand what he intended to convey, that he needed to tighten up his language, such as make more explicit what he meant by 'momentum, behaviors, cognitive processes, destinations, trends, trajectories'. My point is I'm in the same boat with Jack and fail in ways I can't foresee to convey what I intend to, a likely bewitchment 'by means of language' thing.

So, I mentioned 'no evidence', which to me means I'm not within the language game of science that traffics in evidence. My claim is that of a fideist and is a confession of my failure to understand humans as 'different in kind' as distinct from degree. A universe in which humans were in some non-trivial way different in kind (our verbal behavior may be the most complex as a matter of degree, but as cetaceans can learn a couple of hundred of our words and we've managed zero of theirs, they may have the better claim to being different in kind), would change everything I think I'm maybe iterating towards knowing/understanding. James Lovelock was a fedist, though he never self-described as such, as evidenced by his vision that 'someday there will be a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism'. An evidentuallist, who was not also a fideist, could not say this as all evidence suggests the opposite.

I didn't reference the quote as I was repeating my first year college anthropology teacher who became aware that I couldn't understand that humans were not just animals, but were exceptional, special, 'the paragon of animals', 'different in kind' as all humanists (and almost all non-humanists) I've known consider to be self-evident.

She was an awesome example of academic achievement, the straight-A model of success and obtainment, practically perfect in every way. I persistently tried to take in the information offered, think about points made, and read from the vast literature referenced, then I would have to confess my failure, and we did this several times over. I likely received over an hour totaled of personal remediation, and was indeed privileged to be on the receiving end of such charitable attention, but I concluded I was just too stupid to get what everyone else knew as obvious. After fifty years I can't say the consensus narrative is wrong or that my self-assessment at the time was either, but that I remain blind to the mountains of evidence others see persists as a what-is. I say what I see without expectation of changing anyone's worldview.

The 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' point makes my 'no evidence' (that I can see as such) for a human exceptionalism view a faith-based admission. I don't know that almost everyone else is wrong or that if I happened to met someone who agreed with me, that they are right. A fideist position makes no claims to knowing or certainty on evidentialist matters, but is a note to self that my worldview differs (but not in kind) due to cognitive limits. The vastly greater similarity that all worldviews share is that they are not the world.

If there was evidence for human centrality in the nature of things, then, as an evidentialist, I would view (meta-reflexively) my worldview to be in error. I would stop opining/typing and spend more time walking remote beaches to be with my fellow flotsam. The dog accompanying me would be happy to see that I had finally found a purpose in life.

As it is, I persist in taking notes. I can't know that posterity will never read any of them with interest/benefit. My aim is to type of what I see in front of my pug-nosed face (what 'my' dog sees) as well as I can.

Another fideist view is that to understand our condition (our fine mess of messes) is to be delivered from it. No evidence, of course, but I choicelessly need to believe this and live as if it were true. If there is something I/we need to be delivered from, then that may be evidence I/we need to understand something. As Garvin noted: "If we don’t put time and energy into understanding it [the remorseless dynamic], we are doomed to go with it, right to the final curtain."

 

Eric,
'...set a watchman,
let him declare what he seeth'.

 

 

NOTE TO FILE 2/2/2023

Physics pretty much dictates that systems will evolve in a way that maximizes entropy and will do so in an extremal or maximal way. Constraints on the system will reduce that rate, and if that system is open so there is a flow of free energy then it can be an open system that has some homeostasis. However, we humans are clever and know how to remove these constraints in order to increase positive feedback in our favor. This means we can induce more entropy at a faster rate, dissipate more energy more quickly and generally acquire more of the natural world and its resources and turn them into trash. We are good at it. It means that we will exponentially careen towards some fundamental "wall" of limitations and crash. It is inevitable, get used to it. As Jerry Garcia put it in a song, "I may be going to hell in a bucket, but at least I can enjoy the ride."
LC

 

 

Anything I write on a listserv is a free good to be used by any who might choose to do so.

Ruben

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 2/4/23

If you have an idea that falls outside of the mainstream, there are some questions you’ll definitely want to ask. [And answer.]

• What is the problem you’re considering that motivated this idea? [Humanity's meta-problem of overshoot (ecological, civilizational, density, population, consumption, technology, psycological, complexity...) which may arouse in some concerns for posterity and the biosphere.]
• How does this idea compare to the prevailing theory when applied to this specific phenomenon? [Among those few who concur that overshoot is humanity's meta-problem, and that existential concers are appropriate as human extinction is a possible outcome of the ongoing Anthropocene mass extinction event, my 'new idea' is that all humans, with the exception of San, Hadza, and Pygmy populations, are descendants of a small group of expansionist humans that spread as an invasive species within Africa and out of Africa 50k to 60k years ago, and understanding our meta-problem may be impossible for anyone, included concurring scientists, who self-identifies as a member of modern techno-industrial (MTI) society, to understand that 'we have met the enemy and he is us'.]
• How does this idea compare to the prevailing theory when applied to the other major successes of the prevailing theory? [There is no prevailing theory ofMTI society as a form of pathology that selects for its own failure, but a blind spot, one that limits thinking about real solutions to ones MTIed humans can agree to.]
• And what are some critical tests that you can legitimately perform (with current or near-future technology) to further discern your idea versus the prevailing theory? [Focus on comparing San culture (Pygmy are genetically non-expansionist, but have been culturally assimilated] to MTI and recovering expansionist indigenous cultures as the implication of the idea that all expansionist humans are denormalized K-strategists who need to renormalize to persist. Post expansion, the population to some extent will renormalize, but with the possible exception of the Kogi, the evidence is that none succeed enough to not repeat the expansionism when the opportunity arises, e.g. the Tikopians, so studing any former expansionist human who may have 'renormalized' is to do.]

As Richard Feynman once put it so eloquently, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

The good reasons scientists are so hostile to new ideas

[Which is why science is best a collaborative endeavor. There needs to be a tolerance of non-consensus 'crazy' ideas that involves more than dismissal. "Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses." — Martin Gardner. This does not involve open mindedness such that your brains fall out, but considering involves effort, which is what needs to be tolerated. Consensus thinking is not our friend.]

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 2/6/23

Dear Everyone,

Please note the following perspective that dates back to 1964, a time prior to the publication of Ehrlich's Population Bomb and the Club of Rome's seminal work, Limits to Growth. The following perspective was shared by Fred Hoyle.

"It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance and one chance only.”

Do you think this view is an adequate representation of the Global Predicament before us in 2023?

Yours truly,

Steve

 

---

 

Steve,

I think Hoyle got this guess right, though I would note that he also guessed that the universe, while it is dynamic, was overall unchanging, meaning we live in a steady-state universe. The Big Bang theory was presumed wrong and he died without finding the growing evidence for a 13.8 billion year origin and evolution of state (decidedly not a steady state) to be unconvincing and misinterpreted. The universe doesn't seem to care what Hoyle, Einstein, or Elon Musk thinks (or maybe even dolphins), so given the cosmic background radiation, a Big Bang story seems the only viable story. 

But if Hoyle was wrong about the steady-stateness of the universe, and Einstein about God playing dice, neither was likely wrong about everything. Hoyle's guess was that if the information that is the flower and fruit of the last 7 thousand years of mostly nasty, brutish, and short empire building is lost, if all acquisition of knowledge secondary to the taking of a planet, climaxing in the fossil-fueled global empire we live in (proposed name, Euro-Sino Empire as it started in Europe and will climax in the Sino region this century, with a brief interim period of the Americo Empire between but not worth mention) is lost (there is no conservation of information law of the universe), that the information will never be regained by nomadic foragers or subsistence farmers on a degraded planet. 

In H.T. Odum speak, information is the highest transformity product of complex society (high embodied energy). Vast amounts of energy, a planetary larder of fossil fuels and concentrated by the eons of metals, minerals, and materials have been dissipated to grow empire having the side effect of enabling vast amounts of information about how the universe works to be acquired (even if we fail to correctly interpret it). 

On the downslope, we are at high risk of loosing it all. The Indus Valley Civilization collapsed to cultural self-extinction; no literate Harappans survived. The loss of information was such that evidence they had existed only came it be known from the ruins excavated in the 1920s to present. Most of that evidence was destroyed by us apart from as we carefully recorded. If our information about them is lost (along with all recorded information), a future exo-archeologist from the planet Omicron who happens to pass by in a few million years may note that a complex society had developed in the region and three thousand years later another had arisen, but if all other information is lost, then it is gone.

My concern is that posterity, in some functional and evolvable form, persists, but that the information that is the flower and fruit of our one-off plague-phase overshoot (to dissolution) civilization has enabled (e.g. Webb telescope information) is preserved. 

Such may be possible. If so, then future generations could come to know what we know and come to know Gaia better. Slowly (in our low energy future), as the centuries and millennia pass, they could add to what was not lost. If we actually become sapient, that would not violate any known laws of the universe.

Avoiding a die-off event is not my goal (mitigating the Anthropocene mass extinction event, perhaps by renormalizing some modern humans, is). The condition of the modern expansionist form of human in global overshoot locks in climax and descent. If we transition to a steady-state economy in this, or the coming centuries, then we were never in overshoot.

That people like me will be viewed as delusional would be the best story of the future I could envision. Why wouldn't I want to be wrong about everything? But believing I'm wrong about everything isn't working for me. The tea leaves of evidence speak of a ghastly future for those endeavoring to live through it. Unfortunately, those who may live through the coming bottleneck, may not be functional enough to rebuild other than to repeat the pattern of rise and fall until they can't (thereby prolonging the Anthropocene mass extinction event). I will keep on keeping on working to make myself wrong about that. The challenge of avoiding a ghastly future is vastly underestimated, or so it seems to me.

SUBNOTE TO FILE 3/7/23

On Mon, Mar 6, 2023 at 05:04 PM, Marjorie and Al wrote:

Shades of Findhorn (cult community in northern Scotland).

Findhorn cited five times: module 1 lesson 8, module 2 lessons 9, 10, and module 4 lesson 7.
The Gaia Education Ecological Design Modules
At end of 90 lessons are the modules in PDF form as was provided, which allows offerings to be scanned. Lots of science stuff if it supports their narrative. David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture, came into being after reading Limits to Growth and Odum's Environment, Power, and Society (I view him as my evil twin), and so followers like Odum diagram language and Holmgren dedicated one of his books to Odum published several months after Odum died. Enthusiasts like Odum because they can't (my biased view) understand him, and ignore Limits to Growth because they sort of can. Zero mention of population and the two Zoom meetings I viewed recordings of, participants stated their name and where they lived beginning in all cases with 'on land stolen from_____ whose rightful clams I acknowledge' without mention of from whom the indigenous their ancestors stole the land from had stollen it from by right of conquest ('my' land is claimed by three tribes and those before them where 'made' to go away, so can't make claims, and that's not including the Spanish and Russians who were here before the colonists from the east via San Francisco by ship or via the Oregon Trail came here).

Ecological economics just sounds right and so is, Bill gets one mention and Charlie gets six, and lots of sciency stuff, but nothing new and much was mangled, fractured. I assumed I could get an MA, but for all I know I could get an MS in sustainability studies. And at risk of seeming to be remorselessly negative, I repeatedly intended to watch all the weekly Zoom meetings, but after 15 minutes of watching participants talk about the topic question of what plant (or mushroom) do you value eating most? I closed the window and decided to watch no more.

Andrew, your question [Was there nothing of merit in the course, Eric?] is about my limits, and so is of interest. From a Gaia Education POV (I'm guessing since I don't share it) I am completely lacking in belief-based ways of knowing, the only sort of knowing there is. I cannot claim to know nothing about permaculture nor sustainability studies before or after this course, but before and after I fail to 'get it', to grok the power, truth, and beauty of the deepest verities Gaia (and Gaia Education) has to offer. I am an apostate even if one who doesn't know it. I exist outside their domain of discourse, outside of everything they value and know to be true. They view me as seeing no merit in their offerings, and I suppose I must confess that overall, big picture, they are right, so there are some points of agreement.

I did learn of a Norwegian family that build a 'sustainable Eco-Home', The Nature House of the Hjertefølger Family, in the Arctic area of Northern Norway. This is one of perhaps a hundred examples of ecological design referenced (including the five Findhorn achievements). I've been a 'designer' since adolescence as a lifelong avocation, so a minute at most is usually time enough for me to spot the not and facepalm. For example, they built their Eco-Home inside, or built a clear panel geodesic dome over the house. 


 
Note the shadows. This photo was taken at high noon in midsummer.

Obviously a two-story vacation cottage of suburban design. In the summer, with up to 24 hours of sun a day, living inside a greenhouse might be nice, even way cool and trendy, but the sun would never be high, so the upper third of the dome should be insulated panels as it is early morning all day long. For half the year, very little or no sun all the live-long day, hence it is a summer vacation home. They may be able to grow some food in the form of spices or condiments, but not enough to feed one ascetic.

Okay, I didn't think of doing this, kind of an interesting stunt good for a few magazine articles, but nothing sustainable or eco about this house. But it did fit in with my equally lame final design project. If you had one of these Eco-Homes in the Antarctic too, you could live in eternal summer (build an airport next to each). Or connect two container ships together, add sails, build four eco-villages on the decks and sail from pole to pole.

Thinking of six designs that don't scale up (have any merit) before breakfast is child's play. Telling other's you have a wonderful design to help save the world is evil, unless your design, like Jack's, could actually work (with a new social contract that will come anyway or humans will go extinct--both being viable solutions).

Sorry, but this isn't putting any food on my plate. Yields are limited, for the Bible tells me so (and Gaia).

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 3/10/23

On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 06:43 PM, Marjorie and Al wrote:

"But I am sick of the use of the word agriculture for what is actually agribusiness, an abomination inflicted by the intrusion of mindless economic theory on the vital task of providing food."

Agreed.

"I know there is no one answer to the global food crisis, nor even a multifaceted answer of both food tech and agroecology." [Bendell] Actually, there is. Borlaug repeated what some others knew in 1970: "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only." Nobel Lecture*, December 11, 1970, The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/lecture/

Oh, and he used the 'p' word 26 times. In hindsight I could quibble and as a time traveler I might go back and suggest he add something about the temporary success of developing cultivars adapted to agribusiness-based industrial agriculture being immediately followed (starting in 1970) by slamming on the brakes "by rapidly degrowing our population even faster than we contract the economy," but yelling louder would have been like pissing harder into the wind, so I won't bother going back in time to suggest he could have done more, or killed him as a child as someone else would merely have done the same and been given a Nobel for it, likely without mentioning the 'p' word, in 1971.

In 1980 I became an agronomist, but never worked in agribusiness as after the first of Borlaug's three decades I noted no one had even tapped on any brakes, and after forty years I note a few talk about maybe we should sort of tap a bit to make things better FOR PEOPLE. I didn't disagree with Bendell as he agrees he has no solutions.

However, while not seeing food tech as a viable solution, he does see agroecology and agroforestry as partial solutions. I'm pretty sure that within three minutes I could get him to add regenerative agriculture, Holistic Planned Grazing, and permaculture (and on and on if I had five minutes).

For a better view: ‘Potatoes Made of Oil’: Eugene and Howard Odum and the Origins and Limits of American Agroecology, Mark Glen Madison, 1997
https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/madison-3-2-1.pdf

I had asked Charlie some years ago to read this, to agree or not that the historian of science who wrote it pretty much got it (Odums' science) right, and he agreed. A couple of months ago I mentioned the paper and his assessment of it. He had forgotten about reading it, so he reread it and noted that he agreed with his former self. Otherwise, I would have removed the link and not referenced it again. Eight years ago I wrote about 'Alternative Farming', which parallels current thinking on this list about alternative energy. https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/altfarming.html

And Bendell did use the 'p' word (once), "This means the food supply per person increased by around 30% at the same time as the global population more than doubled—a truly astounding feat." Borlaug was wrong, we had a five decade reprieve, more or less, thanks to turning vast expanses of somewhat arable land into cropped/pastured land and pumping aquifers down to maximize the rate of species extinction. 

That fossil fuels can be turned into food faster than even humans can grow their population isn't even slightly astounding (I spent six years learning how to grow 200+ bushels of corn/acre year after year instead of clearing land [slashing/burning] and getting 25 bushels the first year, then maybe 15 the second year and if I had to, 10 bushels the third year, before deciding to leave 'my' field fallow for 20 years and move on to mine the soil on a few different acres).

But at least he didn't use the 'permaculture' word. There will soon be (this or next century) a form of sustainable, permanent agriculture (not agribusiness) and it will be 100% organic. And, if we were to 'leave room for nature', a combination of low intensity farming and foraging might support a population of 35 million until increasingly sapient humans realize that that was not reduction enough, that to allow new species to evolve to replace those lost to the Anthropocene mass extinction event, that maybe the footprint of 20 million might not be too many. But don't believe anybody. Bill thinks 2,000 million. I say 20 million. Listen to Nature/Gaia instead.

-------------------------------------------------
SUBNOTE TO FILE from a couple of days ago:

"The ultimate goal should be a much-reduced human population (~ two billion) thriving more equitably in a sustainable ‘steady-state’ (Daly, 1991) well within the biophysical means of nature." —Rees, William. 2023. “Overshoot: Cognitive Obsolescence and the Population Conundrum”. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 7 (1):15-38. https://doi.org/10.3197/JPS.63799953906865.

The ultimate goal is full biosphere diversity recovery from the Anthropocene mass extinction event (is human extinction required?). Without turning fossil fuels, directly (e.g. ag machinery operation) or indirectly (e.g. agrochemicals, ag machinery manufacture, phosphate mining...), into food, a population of two billion is not remotely sustainable as the millennia pass while also leaving room for Nature/Gaia restorancy (end species extinction, restore biodiversity, AND allow room for new species to evolve to replace those that have been lost, are being lost, and will be lost this century to the Anthropocene mass extinction event which will require 10-20 million years for recovery).

No vision of Nature restorancy is compatible with a planet of two billion humans. A better guess would be in a range of 7 to 35 million (2 billion is about two orders of magnitude too many) provided maybe 20 million sapient humans self-identify as Agents of the Earth and work towards Nature restorancy to allow for biosphere recovery in less than 10-20 million years.

SUBNOTE TO FILE 3/11/23

Re: “..  this was essentially the position that Greenpeace International had adopted ..” [that any emphasis at all on population even globally was a terrible mistake]

Yeah, Leon, Greenpeace is going down a path more or less like Sierra Club. These allegedly “progressive” organizations appear caught in the trap of human exceptionalism, ironically even most of the environmental groups. 

There is something creepy about many — perhaps most — social-change organizations. They are founded by visionary, radical people who are willing to take cultural risks, but as they grow in popularity, they shrink in courage, they become risk-averse, afraid of offending. So now we find most of the mainstream environmental movement completely intimidated by the presumed priority of human desires over everything else. 

As one of my mentors, Gregory Bateson, said: “Purpose distorts perception,” and he went on to explain that the distortion specifically blinds one to the systemic nature of every circumstance, every process. Purpose wants certainty and a clear, linear path to victory. 

The enviro crowd is afraid of sounding “anti-human” so they are afraid to talk about human population issues, overshoot, and now the Sierra Club is trying to outlaw these terms and even “carrying capacity,” a foundation of ecology. 

Personally, I’m thoroughly disappointed in the entire spectrum of so-called “progressive” movements. They’re acting like  the Red Guard, attacking the “Four olds,” re-inventing human nature, willing to destroy people for perceived crimes against politically correct thought and language. It is heartbreaking. Where do we turn? The traditional conservatives are growing more rabid and vicious, but so are the traditional liberals. 

It feels like we’re entering a new Dark Age, complete with public shaming and inquisitions. So much for the Age of Enlightenment. 

I thank Gaia I have a garden to work in and a forest to walk in. 

Rex. 

-----------------------------

It seems to me that economics plays a role here.  

'Radical' new organizations are founded by idealists that dedicate their lives to the cause for little (no) financial reward.  But as the organizations grow  and acquire  staff they become wedded to, and dependent on, the system they are trying to change. They need cash flow to keep the operation going; employees want benefits, perhaps pensions. Even the leaders are seduced.  Many environmental groups accept major corporate donations or large personal donations from people they fear to offend. Their own message is diluted or compromised so as not to alienate the sources of largess; eventually they come to be inoffensively indistinguishable from the mainstream.  

All this is analogous to the social process of  regulatory capture, the way regulatory agencies eventually come tto identify with the entities they are suppose to be regulating, rather than with the public interest. 

Bill

-----------------------------

re: "To what extent do you think the transition from ecological politics to environmental politics within the Green Movement during the 60s and 70s altered the purpose and thus the perception of the Green Movement?”

This shift was not conscious. Originally, in the 1970s, Greenpeace was an “ecology” action group. We were ecologists, read the ecological literature, read Rachel Carson, Arne Naess, Herman Daly, Paul Shepard, Edith Cobb, Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Aldo Leopold, Limits to Growth, etc. We read the Taoists and the poets, Basho, Li Po, William Blake, Mary Oliver, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Susan Griffin, Nanao Sakaki, Walt Whitman, and so forth. We spend time in the wild and connected with other species. 

“Environment” was a popular, public word and idea. The “environment” is something around us, outside of us, something that we can clean up or fix if we wreck it, something we can manage with our good intentions and engineering skills. “Ecology” is something we are inside of, a part of, something we can learn about and try to understand, but not something we can control or manage. Ecology is the net effect of billions of relationships and processes of which we constitute a small part. 

These two views were never reconciled. “Environment” took over the ecology movement because it was easier, more popular, more common language. Millions of well-intentioned people swarmed toward the ecology movement and transformed it into an environmental movement. 

The the phenomenon that Bill described set in: The movement became a vast network of organizations and each organization had staff who needed money, leaders who wanted prestige, and they competed with each other for public money, private money, corporate money, government money, any money, and yes, economics took over. Environmentalism became so popular that everyone wanted to be an environmentalists, so we had “green” products, green companies, green policies, green politics, green organizations, green lobbyists, green stock promoters, and all the rest. Very few, virtually none, of these people ever understood ecology or bothered to learn. It was too much work. People just assumed they knew what it meant to be an environmentalist. No one in the environmental crowd even knew who Arne Naess or Susan Griffin were. Very few spent time in wild nature learning about other creatures. Environmentalism became a cool career. Look, Mom! I’m the campaign director for Giant Green Incorporated! We’re going to protest … something. 

And that’s what the environmental movement became. Now, it is being washed over by the politically correct Green Guard, making it a crime against humanity to utter the words “carrying capacity.” 

At least that’s how I see the history 1962 - 2023. 

Rex. 

-----------------------------

Broadly, I agree with Rex and Bill.

How different the last 60 years might have been if both Peter Lougheed and Pierre Trudeau has created Canada’s first Departments of Ecology rather than Departments of the Environment.

What I see in the drift Rex outlines is the inability, not merely the refusal, of MTI cultures to even see, much less explore, digest and understand and respond to the depths of human life, consciousness and cultures.  MTI cultures are systemically superficial; we see, think about and live at the surface of life.  This bias can be seen in the shift from ecology to the environment; from the social sciences to the behavioural science; from religion as a life-long practice to a set of fundamental beliefs; from the reason for being in business as “I just love to work with wood.” To “to make money.”, etc., etc., etc. ….

And, as Rex and Bill state, as MTI person in MTI communities, in MTI cultures we do not yet know this about ourselves.  Therefore, our analysis of our troubles today is systematically superficial, as are our “solutions.”  “Net Zero by 2050” will bring us death, no life.

Context blind at depth, that’s us.

Ruben

-----------------------------

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 3/12/23

On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 08:05 AM, Luis Gutierrez wrote:

"Both MORT (genetic?) and MPP (energetic) are biophysical, right?"

There are consensus narratives. All collectives select for them. Having a different view is dangerous... 'demur - you're straightway dangerous...'. 

My take on both MORT and MPP is different (i.e. wrong). 

With a nudge from Rob Mielcarski, I read the Varki/Bower book [Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind 2013] a few years ago. The long first chapter was a series of ... and therefore Theory of Mind. For me, none of the therefores followed the facts cited, so I didn't buy into MORT founded on ToM as an inherent (genetic) condition. As an acquired pathology... yes, but not for the reasons claimed.

And perhaps humans can't understand the implications of the exponential function nor can they understand MPP because we are time blind. Or I'm wrong about everything.

My conjecture is that MORT (via acquired belief in belief) is foundational to the form of civilization that arose 50k to 60k years ago with the expansionist form of human characterized by absolute, remorseless rejection of K-strategist culture/form of civilization required to become expansionists (and prosper for a time). Unless you are San, Pygmy, or Hadza AND have not been assimilated into the MTI collective, then you are that form that you (and I)  took in with your mother's or bovine's milk, epigenetically before that, and perhaps (or not) genetically to an extent that is not subject to mitigation by a change in culture (a new social contract).

Have genes that make you (last 2200 generations) a better expansionist been selected for for 55k years? How could they not have been? Are all modern humans so enthusiastic about serving the Anthropocene expansion that they cannot question MORT and their interpretation of MPP? I don't know.

MORT implies that belief in belief is genetic (a mutation 100k years ago). The Anthropocene enthusiast interpretation of MPP is that given that growth is good, we just have to do what we have to do even if over six million years of hominin K-strategist perception of life, the universe, and everything (Nature) told them to not exceed the upper limits of carrying capacity. All of their expansionist descendants, with perhaps a few atavistic exceptions, know (believe) that living within limits is wrong.

For MPP on steroids, look no further than our mentor, metastatic cancer. "Growth for the sake of growth is the 'ideology' [foundational belief] of the cancer cell" —Edward Abbey. This belief is selected for as long as an invasive species can invade. We moderns are so time blind that we think 50k years of remorseless expansion (prosperity) is proof of our exceptionalism, that Gaia or somebody must love us. 

The reality is that by destroying its host system, all truly enthusiastic cancers (metastatic expansionists) as subsystems endeavor to gloriously maximize power unto dissolution, but only as pathology. MPP selects for the maximum empower of the world system (Gaia) as our K-strategist ancestors going back 500 million years knew (learned the hard way) to be so. Blaming MPP for our pathology and inevitable condition is a distraction. Renormalizing would violate no laws of the universe I know of.

Exceeding carrying capacity always has a lamentable outcome (as the millennia pass), and so, IN THE LONG RUN is selected against. Cancer and we MTI form of time blind expansionists, are short termers as our faulty genes/memes, based on our ability to believe in belief (add belief in Mind, Self, Agency to the list of social constructs and note that dysfunctional socioeconomic-political systems construct delusional stories based on error, ignorance, and illusion), selects for our dissolution as dissipative, non-evolvable structures (empires that typically build ruins). 

Cancer does not evolve, is an MPP pathology, is the exception for an apparent time (to the time blind) to the fourth law of open thermodynamic systems that clarifies what complex, adaptive, dissipative AND EVOLVABLE systems select for over the long run as the eons pass. Praise be the Fourth Law.

------------------------------------

Fourth Law of Energetics

 

Nature selects for [through the process of trial and error] self-organizing complex open thermodynamic systems [including complex societies] that persist by maximizing empower [MEP, Odum's version of MPP] within a pulsing paradigm. Subsystems that overpulse to maximize short-term empower, that end up destroying the system that contains them, are selected against long term. Life on Earth is the outcome. Cancer and empire are short-term pathologies. Not all complex societies build empires. For industrial humans to persist, they will have to recognize and live as K-strategists by foundationally different rules of the game that select for behavior that works long term as Nature (who has all the answers) determines. Humans don't get a vote.

• Zeroth Law: If the heat energy of two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third one, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. (You must play the game.)
• First Law: Heat is. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. (You cannot win.)
• Second Law: Change requires energy to be transformed into heat. "Things fall apart."—W.B. Yeats. (You cannot break even.)
• Third Law: As heat approaches absolute zero, movement approaches zero, but absolute-zero is an imaginary state. You cannot stop movement; you cannot change a system into what it is not. (You cannot get out of the game.)
• Fourth Law: Nature selects for self-organizing open thermodynamic systems that persist by maximizing empower within a pulsing paradigm. (You cannot pulse sustainably if boundaries/thresholds are transgressed, e.g. cancer and empire building.)
• Fifth Law: In complex open systems an energy hierarchy forms with higher quality energy (of higher Transformity) enabling the complexity via a network of energy feedback loops that maximize empower. (You cannot change just one thing in a complex system.)
• Sixth Law: System pulsing in an energy hierarchy depends on a flow of materials enabled by the quality of energy used in the flow. (You cannot live by energy alone.)
• Seventh Law: In complex monetary societies money flows opposite to real wealth, and its value is counterfeit. (You cannot get richer. You can have enough, but MORE! impoverishes in the long run. To want more than you actually need is a pathology, e.g. an osprey that eats more fish than it needs [to maintain flyable body weight] just because it can without knowing when to stop, or anyone living in modern techno-industrial society. To not know your wants from your needs is true ignorance, is to be a denizen of the consumer society [for a time] as a hu-man of NIMH circling a behavioral sink.)

'The third part of the “blindingly obvious” trilogy is that money acts only as a "claim" on the output of the real (energy) economy. Money has no intrinsic worth, and has value only in terms of the things for which it can be exchanged. No amount of money – be it currency, gold or any other token – would be of any use whatsoever to somebody stranded in the desert, or cast adrift in a lifeboat.' The Surplus Energy Economy 2020.

And all concepts are counterfeit too, for essentially the same reason. They make claims about the What-is, Nature, but are not the 'thing itself' as subsystem of and within multiple hierarchies of 'things' on down to the quantum and up to Cosmos. The voices in our heads, the sounds larynx make, or characters in a long string are at best representations of what matters (and energizes). Virtually all human prattle is delusional as the primates emitting it think their verbal behavior means something (intrinsically), i.e. is not counterfeit like their money which clothed apes also pretend matters. We storytelling animals deeply believe our thoughts and words (and money) have intrinsic worth.

We (or someone) may experience a 'sense of wonder' or 'enlightenment' and then turn it into a concept having, absolutely for sure, 'intrinsic value' as we, Lord Man, decree (or imagine some higher power has bestowed the 'intrinsic value'). Humans have constructed the palatial worlds they live in (as "the hollow men" in death's dream kingdom) by incessant concept mongering, elevated to such heights as wordsmithery can dissemble, but all beliefs, all consensus narratives are counterfeit and we would-be emperors have no clothes. We no more 'know' what matters, the What-is, than a dog can know calculus. Hu-mans need to stand down to persist, or when we are taken down, to know humilitus and remain in our place as evolvable subsystems of Gaia (instead of overpulsing, for a time, as dissipative structures).

Most modern humans alive today are the last of 15,000 generations spanning the last 375k years. We alive today are 6.5% of all humans (123 billion) who have ever lived. We live in 0.02% of the time humans have been living on Earth. We do not live in normal times, nor are we normal humans. On our watch, we are presiding over the greatest mass extinction event since the late Cretaceous, one that could come to rival that of the Permian (we could become part of it). Perhaps coming to love and understand the planet and learning to live with it properly is to consider. A Great Selection is in the offing.

-----------------------------------------------------------

The graphic below summarizes a better view of life than most of us know of (being products of the modern education system). Individual behavior is selected for/against, cultures are selected for/against as are forms of human civilization, but subsystems persist only if adaptive and evolvable. Cancer is adaptive, prospers for a time, but is not evolvable as a subsystem of Gaia (geobiosphere). We moderns believe in the economy that provideth all we want and need (to we who don't know our needs from our wants).

I suppose I should confess to being a Skinnerian (I read his 21 books, though full confession, I didn't finish Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis), so talk of 'operant behavior' was not new to me. Better views seem to be in short supply, so shop now while you can to get a good deal on a better view.

"As long as we pursue growth, fueled by increasing food production, we simply deepen the hole out of which we must climb and our
own extinction may be the outcome." Deepening the hole, racing to the bottom on the downslope, has a likely outcome.
No one climbs out. The winner inherits the rubble, and the rubble remains, for a time.
Primary successionists give way to secondary successionists.
In ten million years, many new species evolve.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225581823_Genetic_Feedback_and_Human_Population_Regulation

 

Individual organisms develop, but do not evolve. Patterns they manifest may persist in future generations as genetic or memetic information about what works (as evidenced by persistence). What works is what is selected for by the nature of things long term. Cultural evolution occurs in social organisms, and genetic evolution in all organisms as genetic information is the ground of being. Know then the sanctity of information

Behavioral development selects for the persistence of the individual whose memes and genes may be selected for (or against). The transmission of learned behavior is culture. Bumblebees have culture. K-strategist humans have a viable, evolvable culture. Expansionist human culture is selected for short term as adaptive, dissipative structures that prosper for a time (e.g. exploiting megafauna such as moa to extinction in a valley before going to the next, or as empire builders over the last 10k years). But committed expansionists do not evolve as they degrade the environment (and culture in increasingly overcomplex societies) they depend on long term (e.g. Malta), and so are selected against long term. An invasive species prospers until there are no environmental niches left to invade, then must renormalize, at least for a time, or go extinct on the downslope.

For a less ghastly future for posterity, start the day by considering the implications of the exponential function, and then that: "Changing civilization’s biologically destructive social contingency that promotes increases in food production and limitless growth to one that recognizes that food production increases lead to population increases, and embraces the notion of physical, ecological and biological limits, would be adaptive and life sustaining," i.e. would have a better outcome for posterity. The narrative of "we must increase food production" is the ideology of the cancer cell (the ones wearing sheep's clothing) that leads to death's second self.

We can sing about the better angels of our nature, about ecological justice (for humans), celebrate our modern expansionist monetary culture, and 'still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal'. The socioeconomic-political system is a subsystem of the biophysical (Gaia), and the form of civilization we are is only for a time.

For the love of Gaia and posterity, first contract food production, the number 1 driver of species extinction, the enabler of growth, by contracting population and the economy faster, because starvation/conflict is the condition (posterity's payment of our overshoot debt) that will come otherwise.

Think one baby per 150 potentially fertile women initially (year 1 of 50), or one dysfunctional survivor (with the most ammo) out of 250 who inherits the rubble, who is utterly incapable of successfully rebuilding a functional society, who may have children on the downslope who become even more dysfunction than their parents. Per history, foresee this (darker age) as posterity's 80 percent future even if not the one Anthropocene enthusiasts would choose..., or vote for.

I'm guessing that if Gaia could speak directly to us with perfect clarity, that none of us could understand (as evidenced by her doing so and we moderns not listening, perhaps because to hear, we would have to resolve our form of civilization into a dew first).

To assimilate Earth, the Borg decided that a trusted human voice was necessary to share their concerns for ecological justice. Captain Picard was chosen to be that voice, and that voice was dubbed Locutus of Borg. Despite Picard's insistence that he would resist the Borg with his last ounce of strength, that resistance proved futile and he was assimilated into the Borg Collective. He became one with the consensus tribal narrative, but in a way that still sounded like him.

Et tu, Picard?

And the rest of us?

Resistance is futile (maybe or maybe not if you're not dead yet). First, meet the enemy. Know then thyself.

========================

But to sing a song of hopium, the article curiously omits any mention of GAS (General Adaptation Syndrome, that all normal K-strategist 'know and love' as evidenced by their persistence. We expansionist form of human are not K-strategists whose form of civilization is anathema to everything we believe in, especially to our belief in belief. The good news is we are not normal humans, which allows for a perhaps extremely remote possibility that some modern humans could renormalize by intent over perhaps as little as an 8 to 20 generation period. Our blind spot (one of many, but maybe the one to put at the top of the list) is our utter inability to imagine living again as mere animals, as adaptive, evolvable K-strategists. We would rather die first, and so maybe we'll get what we want even if we complain about how we are getting it.

 

What if some could imagine, sort of, (1) living in a group of at most 50 others (a band of others one could trust with one's life) in an area (2) containing at most 50 other groups (interacting occasionally as exogamy is a need). There are two other conditions for a viable civilization, but no need to mention them to those who cannot imagine agreeing with the first two. Thanks for all the fish, and have an good Anthropocene.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 4/15/23

The Gaia Education offering originated from among academics within the schools of sustainability studies that have proliferated (i.e. that have been funded). The author of the "very impressive graphic summarizing important findings/analysis" is founder of the New World Together whose offerings include online courses, consulting services, retreats, but intentions appear to be based on a recognition of a 'sustainability crises' the young adults involved have for the future they will be living in, and is self-organizing on the margin of established narratives with an interest in questioning, which leads to inquiry. The Gaia Education offering was entirely belief-based by comparison. There was no life-driven purpose only those having existential concerns have. This make their endeavors of interest.

Through no fault of their own, they are all products of the modern education system, and given their sustainability concerns, they have leaned on the schools of sustainability narratives which, surprise, surprise, are time, energy, and overshoot blind. 

It is likely that the young people attracted to such offerings as New World Together are among among humanity's best hope for persisting. They at least know enough to have concerns, as distinct from the Gaia Education students who thought they were learning how to solve all our problems. Since I could detect no Gaia Education concerns beyond promoting verities, it didn't occur to me to suggest to anyone on this list that they try to educate the educators. You'd be trying to teach a pig to sing.

But this group, while still within the sustainability debate, may know enough to know they don't know enough to make the systemic changes they sense need to be made, i.e. iterating rapidly towards a new form of civilization. This makes me wonder if a visit by the Bill and Ruben Show might be a move in the right direction. We need to reach out by reaching back to those who are cluelessly dumbfounded as we once were. And those having posterity concerns may be considered, so Luis, Jack, Andrew may be part of the show. 

 

If you have a different view, likely it is with what the hidden deep causes and response (solution) is, so start with a blank:

So add your own bits and quotes. A first draft didn't take long. Perhaps with revisions, it would be worth considering.

 

On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 03:22 AM, Steve Gwynne wrote:

"a deep ecocentric shift in terms of how available energy and materials are utilised and distributed with a deep acknowledgement that humans are driven by the MPP.... This I think means we can't stop humans 'terraforming' Earth..."

Quite. MPP/MePP is the hidden deep cause and I failed to note this. Like the philosophers getting funded, one comment was on the absence of Philosophy of Science. The "Knowledge in Crisis" project, however, notes in reply, "Philosophy of Science is definitely not absent! Rather, it is one of the central areas involved." It is the sea they swim in and failed to note.

What MPP means is that technology enabled fossil-fueled expansionist (MTI) cultures cannot stop trying to turn Earth into a Trantor before expanding Borg-like into the Milky Way to turn it into transhuman techno-biomass, and as agro-empowered expansionists they must build regional empire after empire after empire. To understand this dynamic is to cease to be the dynamic and to choicelessly endeavor to end it for the same reason our ancestors, threatened by a sudden blizzard, go into the lair of the cave bear as only shelter.

So, at risk of filling up all the blank spaces, I added more (and fixed typos):

If we understand MPP and that our pending Great Selection was selected for 50+k years ago when, with the short-term blessings of MPP, we became rapacious expansionists that after 50k years of honing our culture to mightily prosper we have become better and better at it, we may realize that Gaia, the World System, selects against short-term MPP pathologies like human empire building and metastatic cancer, a glorious expansionist that in the case of pancreatic cancer can do in a few months what has taken us amateurs 50k to 60k years to accomplish. If we adapt like locusts have, we could keep on doing our plague-phase overshoot thing over and over, each time we would degrade the biosphere and it might take 50k years or 500k., years, but being an optimist I'm smoking hopium and hoping we expansionists go extinct sooner than later.

Or no laws of the universe would be violated if only we modern expansionist form of pathology went extinct and some humans (Homo sapiens who are sapient) persist to become "our biosphere's handmaiden anew" [H.T. Odum]. How? Understand. From Spinoza: to understand something is to be delivered from it. Grokking changes the mind/behavior/one's sort of life.

No change, then you don't understand yet. Our fellow humans (San, Pygmy, Hadza and pre-expansionist ancestors for 375k years and their K-strategist hominin acestors going back over 6 million years and so on back 500 million years) understood (in effect) that MPP, the Fourth Law, selects for long term persistence (those who didn't were selected out). Living within limits is normal, what works long term. Praise be the Fourth Law. Wild Norway rats expand their population initially, but transition to remain under Dunbar's number (intradensity limit) for rats (12) with stress (GAS) limiting the density (interdensity limit) of colonies, while Calhoun's domesticated rats did not, i.e. were not remotely normal K-strategists.

My band is caught in an unexpected blizzard. Ug and I will go into the lair of the cave bear to make it leave (or ask it to share), otherwise all will die, unable to build a fire in the blizzard as night comes (I know a hollow tree I could take shelter in). But short-term self interest is not selected for. Ug and I go into the cave. No extended theory of mind involved. We know we will likely die and everyone else too.

Gaia loves bears too. We go in because our ancestors did in a similar situation whether they could tell stories about why or not. We moderns have been 50k years in the denormalizing to become self-domesticated takers, and regard living as mere animals (K-strategists) within limits, ruled by Nature's laws, with utter horror, as the antithesis of expansionist life (which it is).

I know that financial systems have something to do with money, but that's about all, so I didn't know EBA was for European Banking Authority, and the first link I clicked on started:

The EBA publishes its roadmap on sustainable finance

13 December 2022

Concerning "the EU’s efforts to achieve the transition to a more sustainable economy." I would compare to "Our global economic system is NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE." All the points in 'my' nutshell were quotes, by the way (or paraphrased to fit), and I can reference all of them. This one is from Garvin Boyle's 2016 presentation at a biophysical economics conference on the implications of MPP. The ESG and the entirety of world leaders and those they serve (the public or those paying them plus self-aggrandizement), including most professional scientists (hence Garvin, not a scientist, yelled in capitals).

Of course transitioning to a sustainable biophysical economy of enough as adaptive K-strategists is the only viable outcome, one that all truly MTIed would rather die than seek out now. Reading EBA stuff is like reading 1987 UN stuff about Our Common Future (or current prattle about sustainable development goals). To me, this Venn diagram has more of what Philip Morrison called 'the ring of truth' to it.

 

 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 3/18/23

I sometimes, when I read something of interest, usually just after reading a few sentences, copy and paste it so I can comment/rewrite as I read. The original:

To clarify in what way the current MTI (modern techno-industrial) society reminds me of Nazi Germany:

• MTI society believes itself to be superior to others
• MTI society believes that it is entitled to rule others and direct them, because it is so works so hard at being ingenious. But with all its cleverness it has failed to detect that its own education and economy provide the toxic ingredients on Earth today.
• MTI society is now on the skids, financially and ecologically, it is thrashing around looking for someone or something to exploit further in order to stretch out its parasitic and ecologically damaging existence a bit longer.
• MTI society lost sight of the important things which to bring joy into life a long time ago
• Individual Nations within MTI society often see themselves as separate and superior to the rest of the MTI world.

The MTI countries actually embarked on the path of towards holocaust early in their colonial history. The Sixth Mass Extinction is the ongoing holocaust, about which they are all very much in denial. Certainly they do not acknowledge the role that their lifestyle plays in this tragedy, or the likelihood that humanity are the next to become extinct. 

As for Lifeboat ethics; there is only one viable lifeboat at this juncture. It involves a global recognition of the folly of growth economics, and a global aspiration to shrink back within the capacity of our planet a rapidly and peacefully as possible. Below I have forwarded the latest newsletter from the Economist, all about obesity. Such an irony whilst so many are starving on the other side of the world.

 

And my rewriting:

To clarify my understanding of current MTI (modern techno-industrial) society, the following is offered knowing that no normal human could agree, but without knowing why I am wrong about everything (I stopped listening to humans some time ago, and listen to the small still voice of data through my glass darkly instead, so new data or a corrected interpretation is what changes how I see the nature of things):

• MTI society believes itself to be superior to others (e.g. the San, about 105k claiming genetic ancestry, with a 'few', perhaps a thousand, still culturally intact living as nomadic foragers, and Hadza, about 400 living with culture intact) and somewhat superior by degree to those who have been assimilated insofar as the assimilated have failed to become fully MTIed, e.g. the Bantu expansionists feel superior to the Pygmy forest foragers (and San and Hadza).
• MTI society is today's global monetary culture, and all who know what money is, value it, and likely have some are part of, products of, and work (are paid) to serve the current WSS (world socioeconomic-political system aka MTI society) which believes that it is entitled to rule others (the remaining San and Hadza as both Bantu—recently assimilated and Indo-European expansionists agree) and direct (e.g. educate, subsidize) those still endeavoring to assimilate (while retaining some tribal identity memes), because without becoming part of the monetary culture, all humans (except a few San and Hadza) would at best live ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ lives apart from the modern economy that provides all (if not always enough for all, e.g. the nearly 130k people in the Horn of Africa the UN will spend 178 million to prevent their starvation, a 'solution' that will eventually fail). But with all its cleverness, the WSS we are have failed to detect that it is our own education system and economy that provides the toxic ingredients on Earth today.
• Global MTI society, from bushmeat hunters to those who go to Davos annually, is now on the skids, financially and ecologically, it is thrashing around looking for someone or something to exploit further (e.g. from mining asteroids to turning wildlife into bushmeat) in order to stretch out its parasitic and ecologically damaging existence a bit longer.
• MTI society lost sight of the important things which bring joy into life, something we expansionists lost a long time ago (about 50K years ago), i.e. we lost the viable/evolvable lives of pre-expansionist hominin culture 6 million to 50k years in the making when we hominins lived as evolvable K -strategists before some became expansionists.  The rest (except for a few noted exceptions) became assimilated to become expansionists like the Spanish, British, Americans, and Chinese (with the Nazi and Maoists, who killed 40 to 80 million on their watch, as parentheticals) whose assimilate others.
• In the 15th to 21st century, colonialists (repeaters of a pattern going back 7k to 10k years ago as empire builders, a pattern where elites exploit commoners and the environment on a scale Man the Hunter expansionist could not) expand, i.e. do what expansionists automatically do.
• Individual Nations within MTI society see themselves as separate and superior to the rest of the MTI world per tribal to supertribal identity narratives in which the word for one's tribe always means the same, i.e. 'we the true or real people' (unlike all the other pretenders). 'The existence of independent sovereign states IS war' and 'a new world order', a Modern State (singular), is needed [H.G. Wells], but less than 0.001% would vote for it, so 'we are captured and being dragged along by a complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic that automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it' [Garvin Boyle], which we collectively are not remotely close to understanding perhaps because we are the problem we seek to solve.

All countries are MTI countries, e.g. China is growing faster than Americans ever dreamed of, and the CCP are better capitalists than the Davos losers. All citizens are part of the global monetary culture, with a few exceptions such as Ted Kaczynski, as resistence to assimilation has proven futile. The MTI dynamic began in Europe about a thousand years ago as a reboot of the prior techno-industrial Roman Empire. From Euro expansionist success, the empire building dynamic would have collapsed in the 19th century when the Wood Age and whale oil that empowered MTI culture climaxed. By transitioning to a Coal Age, Petro/Gas/Hydro/Geo/Nuclear/Solar and Wind Age, the MTI Empire became global in the 20th century, delaying its collapse by two centuries and allowing it to become the first (likely last) global empire (the Euro-Sino Empire, reboot of the Greco-Roman Empire) by turning a planetary larder of fossil fuels and ores into MTIed people, livestock, and stuff. The Ninth Mass Extinction, which included the genocide of all other hominins including non-expansionist Homo sapiens (except for, c. 2023, a few San and Hadza), began with the early Anthropocene 50+k years ago.

As for Lifeboat ethics; there is only one viable lifeboat at this juncture, Spaceship Earth.  It involves a global recognition by an expansionist culture, 50k years in the making, of the folly of viewing the planet as an illimitable plain where the solution to exceeding carrying capacity is to go just a little further towards the horizon (as an invasive species) to get what is needed such as is available for the taking. To renormalize as an evolvable K-strategist, a global aspiration to shrink back within the capacity of our planet as rapidly and peacefully as possible is the solutionatique.

Assume 10 billion people agree. There will be no disagreement, hence no conflict, therefore descent is peaceful. Collective recognition that all modernized humans (all but a few thousand alive today) are descended from an expansionist form of human and are dysfunctional products of a non-viable form of civilization, could only result in a collective agreement to embrace with as much enthusiasm as possible, a rapid birth-off (<100 years) to a population well under maximum carrying capacity (to allow for the foreseeable 100-year bad year) based on the environmental productivity provided by a portion of a habitat small enough to allow room for Nature (species diversity) and the evolution of new species to those already lost to the Anthropocene mass extinction event (i.e. a population reduction to one in the range of 7 to 35 million).

Failure to convince at least a majority of humans (enough to compel choiceless obedience of those who fail to recognize why the human footprint must contract) of the folly of growth economics and of attempting to persist as expansionists despite the fact that as long as there was some parts left of a planet for the taking, that taking it work so gloriously.

Figure about 5.5 billion adults on the planet. Get 3 billion to agree to a new social contract. The rest (e.g. solutions) would be selected for. A viable form of civilization could be (otherwise likely isn't) the outcome.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 3/28/23

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 08:07 AM, Helga Vierich wrote:

"So, no, humans did not shift away from a "K" life history 50,000 years ago."

And to define, "K strategies (tendency towards singleton births, lower infant and juvenile mortality, slow maturation, high parental investment, long life span, large body size)"

The only definition relevant to 50k years ago (aka the 'great human expansion') is that K-strategists avoid exceeding the upper limits of carrying capacity by reducing fertility, e.g. in hominins by nursing longer, a GAS (general adaptation syndrome) response to increasing stress that exceeding the lower limits of carrying capacity signals (e.g. foraging, but finding less variety and abondance than prior norms signals lower carrying capacity limit exceeded.

This is entirely an ecology view (and not being one I cite or could cite those who are) that applies to all K-strategists going back likely 500 million years. If all modern humans lacking the genetic diversity of the San, Pygmy, and Hadza descended from a small population 50k to 60k years ago as an expansionist form of human/society/culture/civilization, then that may be of interest as it would be a (paradigm) shift away from K-strategist norms of behavior/perception in humans.

The expansionist strategy is to maximally exploit recourses unto depletion and move on, and for some humans it has worked for 50+k years, e.g. the more recent than Indo-European expansion, the Austronesian/Bantu expansion in Madagascar (and displacement of non-expansionist human population) and the Austronesian expansion to the east and the taking of Zealandia with notable megafauna extinctions in both regions.

Once the expansionist front line moves on, those left behind have to partially readapt to living within limits, e.g. Tikopia, and to some extent do if they avoid local extinction, e.g. Malta, but when an opportunity to expand again arises, enough of their expansionist culture seems to remain to allow repeating the pattern (e.g. the off-island Tikopian population is about six times larger). We may be nearing the end of our expansionist form, i.e. the planet has been taken, there is no Planet B, and continued expansion into the galaxy for the taking may not be possible (I'm hoping).

My sources of possible misinformation:
The great human expansion 2012
Evidence that two main bottleneck events shaped modern human genetic diversity 2009
Almost all living people outside of Africa trace back to a single migration more than 50,000 years ago 2016

Early publication of model
Why did modern human populations disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 years ago? A new model 2006

SUBNOTE TO FILE 4/7/23 [with comments]

It appears to me that humanity is going to run its course, driven by all of its animal instincts, fears, and desires.  [And form of culture/civilization, e.g. expansionist vs K-strategist]

The evidence is  that all living systems, from single cells, to whole individuals, to species (and civilizations) follow a natural cycle from youthful growth, exuberance and resilience through adult maturity, stability and rigidification to late-phase senility, fragility and collapse.  (See Panarchy by L. Gunderson and C.S. Holling for a detailed exposition.  Joseph Tainter independently describes the same phenomenon for human cultures in the Collapse of Complex Societies .) [All hominins displaced by the expansionist form of human, a dynamic that among cells in a body is called cancer, which is selected agaist, i.e. is not evolvable as is the empire building form of civilization.]

Human sub-systems have followed this pattern repeatedly over the millennia but on a local/regional scale.  Tribes, cultures, and empires rise, flourish and disintegrate.  [The expansionist form for 50k years, but our norms are not those of K-strategist forms of hominin and their ancestors going back 500 million years. If expansionism is made to work, e.g. locusts, the MPP of the system is not maximized, hence species that do so may seem normal and natural from a short term view of epochs, but as the eons pass are selected against, hence are not common. If human persist as a form of expansionist human for a million years, pathological forms of cancer my persist but remain non-evolvable as an expanisionist form of Borg-like human may.]

Today we have created a global aggregation of increasingly entangled nations and alliances, some sub-systems at different stages in the cycle.  However, the whole system is so inextricably bound up that, as we approach the resource-constrained, increasingly fractious, late phase of global MTI civilization (characterized by increasing belligerence, corruption, institutional incompetence, fragility, etc., and loss of popular confidence in and support for the elites/governments) the whole system is likely to go down at once (Best case = slow painful descent driven by climate change, eco-catastrophe and geopolitical turmoil; worst case = rapid implosion from nuclear war and subsequent nuclear winter. Of course, there are a lot of variation in between).  In any event, one way or another, humanity is going to run its course, driven by all of its animal instincts, fears, and desires. [Today we expansionist form of humans have created.... Our form is not remotely sustainable other than as a persistent, non-evolvable pathology of the world system. We are proximally dirven by our belief-based ways of putative 'knowing' which are a house of conceptual social constructs that reference other constructs in a house of mirrors we mistake for knowing. Our worldview is not the world, but a foundation of aledged knowing, on error, ignorance, and illusion. Althernatively, a K-strategist form of civilization would be based on not knowing, on a condition of endeavoring to listen to Nature (Mother) who has all the answers we human can at best iterate towards knowing. If we know ourselves to be a pathological form of short-term MPP disipative structure, like cancer, then renormalizing becomes alternative to dissipating (extinction) which the abscence of this understanding locks in.]

Bill

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 4/25/23

Jeremy Lent started a Deep Transformation Network last year and I joined in June, read a hundred or so comments to measure members, and occasionally get emails. One last week was on population, as in:

The Population Issue: How Should We Think About It—and Talk About It?

The critical topic for our next DTN live monthly meeting on May 2, 2023

To not have members wait, Jeremy offered a number of papers to read. So I read them all and took notes. Best guess is that no one who is part of the Deep Transformation Network, other than someone on the margins like me, could find any of my notes to self (and posterity) of interest.

My thoughts are not part of any consensus narrative, so I could only tell most humans what they wanted to Like and Share by accident/chance. But I could be wrong, so I'll post this note on Medium just because.

I have one reader who will likely read this. A few others will by chance and circumstance, but maybe one in three of them will read all, and almost none will read any of my other offerings. I just read an article on the 10 ways with write successfully, but doing so would have to begin by fooling myself, the easiest person on the planet to fool (“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman) and then progress to fooling others (telling them what they want to hear). If I became ‘truly’ successful, they would pay me to fool them. In seeking to hear what Nature is trying to tell us, nothing fails like popular success.

Jeremy Lent's intro: https://deeptransformation.network/posts/the-population-issue-how-should-we-think-about-it-and-talk-about-it

My comment:

Having been encouraged by Jeremy, I read the offerings. My notes are my fault, offered in hope of being corrected.

Scientists' Warning on Population Crist et al., 2022
     "The problem...", agreed, so next. The solution: "Our first action call is a direct, global appeal to all women and men to choose none or at most one child." It is politically acceptable to call upon all humans to... by choosing to..., but we've been doing as much since, as I recall, before Earth Day 1970, and meanwhile "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed" [David Suzuki note to supporters on his 80th birthday]. Sorry, there are no political solutions. The sentence, to reference a real solution, could read: "Our first action call is to degrow the population by rapid (50 years) birth-off faster than we contract the global economy to mitigate die-off." The next paragraph would clarify that to restore Earth's biodiversity, end the Anthropocene mass extinction, and allow new species to evolve to replace those already lost, the population will be reduced by rapid birth-off to a global population of 35 million with additional reduction to a population (range of 35 to 7 million) such as evidence-based studies (e.g. Fowler, Charles W., Systemic Management: Sustainable Human Interactions with Ecosystems and the Biosphere 2009) will determine (i.e. humans don't get to vote on whether their population is still too many or too few).

Discussing the Silence and Denial around Population Growth and Its Environmental Impact. How Do We Find Ways Forward?, Haydn Washington and Helen Kopnina
     "The issue of population growth was highlighted in William Catton’s seminal book Overshoot " (read as free PDF/summary) which gave expression to what many scientists knew (enough to slam on the brakes) and wanted everyone else who would rather know than believe what they wanted to to know. But about 1980 humanity hung a 'DO NOT DISTURB' sign on its doors of perception and wasn't listening as evidenced by continuing to not listen when the 1992 World Scientists' Warning was offered.  Sixty years of scientists' warnings and meanwhile "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed." "The term ‘neo-Malthusian’, regarding those who advocate population control, has in some circles now become derogatory." How could this travesty of inquiry have happened? "Modern industrial society is addicted to ‘growthism’, which is the underlying assumption of the growth economy, as well as advocacy for a growing population." Do you know what money is? Value it? Likely have some? Then you are of and serve the monetary culture, aka the modern techno-industrial form of civilization. "As Collins (p. 32) concludes: ‘… we have become the most acute moral issue that we face’". The cited work is 'The Depopulation Imperative' which is unthinkable to all Anthropocene enthusiasts, and the short of it is: "Our demands are already making a massive impact on the earth. Global warming, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, these are all symptoms of a bigger problem [the meta-problem of overshoot], human numbers and excessive consumption. Given our impact on earth now we have to reduce our numbers rapidly [i.e. 50 years]. We don't have time to wait until 2100 for numbers to decrease gradually [UN guess is climax will be in 2086 at 10.431 billion with a decrease to 10.349 billion in 2100, 82 million less, i.e. very 'gradual', though 8.2 billion less by 2100 may be a better guess]." "‘Rights’ are a confused and polarized issue. Collins believes that at the core of the population problem is a conflict of rights: the right of the individual to reproduce, and the right of other species [and posterity] to continue to exist."

Population and the Great Transition: Opening essay for GTI Forum The Population Debate Revisited, Ian Lowe, Revized 2022
     Essay mentions a current population of 7.7 billion, which happened in 2019, so the original essay dates from about then. I am serious about achieving a Great Transition, Great Simplification, Great Selection, Great Contraction... that corrects for the Great Acceleration, the condition of degrowth that will come anyway. Failure of an intentional decent could involve human extinction or worse. Quibbles, but why mention them? As an agronomist by training I would mention that about 90% of increased food production (still in excess) is achieved by turning fossil fuels (directly and indirectly) into food, and that doing so "to feed hungry humans" is the number one driver of loss of biodiversity/species extinction. Not turning fossil fuels into food (Green Revolution ends) is a condition that will come anyway (as will a 90+% involuntary or voluntary depopulation), but people would rather believe than know, so you can believe what you want and choose your own future..., right? Agreeing to a Great Transition could be a good first step that could be followed by some realization of how great a transition from an expansionist form of human to a renormalized K-strategist form of human would be, but I suppose I quibble.

The Population Debate Revisited, the three panels and 26 papers, August 2022

Panel 1: The Case for Action

I'm slow on the uptake. Initial slide doesn't link to a paper. You have to select a slide and then click on it to read the paper.

1. Less Is More: Contribution to GTI Forum The Population Debate Revisited, Eileen Crist
        The first is that of the Scientists' Warning on Population lead author, which seeks to uncontentiously demonstrate that ending demographic growth and gradually reducing our numbers serves the long-term well-being of all. Depoliticizing the topic of population isn't the problem as depoliticizing humans is.
2. Reflections on Population, Herman Daly
         Definitions and history vital. "It is laissez-faire reproduction, along with laissez-faire production, that is anti-life." No quibbles.
3. The Beauty of Degrowth, John de Graaf
         Anti-overconsumption filmmaker and author (Affluenza) now adds population to IPAT view for a better balance.
4. Ecology and Empowerment, Céline Delacroix
   We don't have a population problem per se, we have a failure to achieve full reproductive rights, gender equality, autonomy, justice [for humans] and "empowering all to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children would thus not only fulfill an internationally recognized reproductive right, but would also help human beings achieve a better balance with the environment." All organisms who may fail to persist through the Anthropocene mass extinction event may differ. Human populations, unlike those of all other organisms, are viewed as independent of hyperabundant food post Green Revolution. Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply, Russell Hopfenberg, David Pimentel
5. The Right to Family Planning, Riane Eisler
          Worldwide, women want to limit the number of their children. Providing adequate family planning to women is a human right opposed by patriarchal religion/society.
6. Justice in a World of Limits, Aaron Karp
          Our ecological crises demand economic and cultural transformation, and modern techno-industrialized humans have justice concerns, if not existential concerns for their continued existence unless some transformation, perhaps unimaginable to them, is forthcoming. "We often underestimate the extent to which society must change in order to become sustainable and the significant limits that we will need to place on our consumption at least during the transition, if not on a permanent basis." A great transition to a viable form of civilization would be a potentially persistent basis for our continued evolution.
7. Empower Women, Protect Earth, David Korten
          "Humanity is awakening to a simple truth. There will be no winners on a dead Earth because there will be no people. The human species is currently on a path to self-extinction." I am unaware of even a small group (20-50) who are "awakening," let alone "humanity." Fine words obfuscate error, ignorance, and illusion, distracting us from meeting the enemy as Pogo advised.
8. In Defense of Family Planning, Jane O'Sullivan
          It is self-evident that family planning is to enable. Whether by each family, is questionable. What if all agree that underpopulation is the greatest existential threat to humanity (they believe Elon Musk) and that minimally any woman meriting social approbation must have 10 children, as all plan to have when they marry by age 15 to maximize their total fertility.
9. Evolution and Overshoot, William Rees
        "Humans have an innate propensity to consume available resources—often to depletion—and a parallel drive to invade and colonize all accessible habitats. (Even indigenous peoples seem to have reached harmonic equilibrium with their ecosystems only after depleting or exterminating readily harvested prey species.) Earth is to Homo sapiens as a nutrient-rich Petri dish is to colonizing bacteria. The difference is that humans are better than bacteria or any other species at expressing both survival strategies." Bill is correct if before each use of "human" you add "expansionist" as a qualifier. Before about 50k years ago, our ancestors, like all hominins, were adaptable and evolvable K-strategists who, like the San and Hadza (only remnant populations of non-expansionist humans that remain), lived within limits (per GAS, General Adaptation Syndrome) as carefully monitored to avoid exceeding carrying capacity (doing so causes stress and reduced fertility). So, yes, the modern form of expansionist humans have an innate propensity to consume available resources—often to depletion—and a parallel drive to invade and colonize, as an invasive species, all accessible habitats. (Even indigenous peoples, apart from the San and Hadza, who as expansionist humans after an area was taken, who were forced to somewhat renormalize as K-strategist peoples, e.g. the Tikopians, who seem to have reached harmonic equilibrium with their ecosystems after depleting resources or exterminating competitors, including all other hominins as an invasive species.) Earth is to the expansionist form of Homo sapiens as a nutrient-rich Petri dish is to colonizing bacteria. The difference is that expansionist humans with technology are better than bacteria or any other species at being an invasive species. We MTIed form of expansionist humans are a pathological, non-evolvable form, a dissipative structure of empire building metastatic expansionists selecting for our own demise. If some MTIed humans could come to know themselves, to renormalize and evolve, persistence may be possible.
10. Enlightened Anthropocentrism, David Samways
         So, both "population growth and size cannot be ignored as factors in achieving an environmentally sustainable good life for all" and "a recent study suggests that a good life for all within planetary boundaries might be enjoyed by no more than 7 billion" (guesses of 1 to 3 billion are not "particularly helpful" if true and the 2018 source cited merely stated that "humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes" which is not a claim that humanity will). "...nobody contributing to this debate is, in fact, a Malthusian" (actually I know one of them is).

Panel 2: Why It's a Distraction

1. A Slippery Slope to Ecofascism, Manisha Anantharaman
        First sentence: "By centering population, well-meaning environmentalists are playing into the hands of eco-fascists." What follows is remorselessly human centric.
2. The Other Population Bomb, Guy Dauncey
        "...history tells us that whenever people organize to end the power of their nation’s elites, enabling progressive parties to achieve women’s rights, education for all, easily available contraception, and secure systems of welfare, the desire by parents to have numerous babies falls dramatically." Nature (Gaia) tells us a different story, but not listening.
3. The Real Elephant in the Room, Robert Fletcher
        "...a focus on “overpopulation” distracts attention away from what is the most serious issue to be confronted right now: overconsumption of natural resources fueled by an economic system that demands continual growth, not in order to sustain the global population so much as to accumulate tremendous wealth in the hands of the very few."
4. Challenging Scarcity, Wendy Harcourt
         "We need to shift from population to complex questions around property rights, labor obligations, and a governance of environmental resources that has led to global inequalities and scarcity. The problem lies not so much in scarcity itself but in how scarcity is socially generated: in other words, the problem of access is due to a range of complex historical and political conditions." Remorselessly human centric.  “When this god of scarcity meets the devil of racism, the result is the greening of hate.”  "As a feminist political ecologist, I would argue that our focus needs to be squarely on the lives of people...." Gaia does not seem to be listening to primate prattle. The last hominin standing (you don't want to know why), isn't listening to Gaia. One will persist longer than the other.
5. Resist Malthusian Coercion, Betsy Hartmann
        "I believe Malthusianism has little basis in fact and serves primarily to obscure capitalist and colonialist relations of production and exchange, deep inequalities in wealth and power, racism and sexism, wars and militarism, and the economic and political stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry. These are the primary drivers of poverty, environmental degradation, violence, and climate change."
6. Against Population Alarmism, Lyla Mehta
        "...the scare of scarcity and overpopulation remain a means of diverting attention away from the causes of poverty and inequality that may implicate the politically powerful. ...rather than talking about population growth, let us focus our attention on moving towards achieving gender equality, climate justice, just processes of resource allocation and distribution, and development processes that are sustainable and socially/gender just across both the Global North and South. These are what really matter and would go a long way toward enhancing human and planetary well-being that will allow all beings (human and non-human) to flourish and thrive."
7. An Obstacle to Radical Consciousness, Brian Murphy
         "The focus on overpopulation and, in particular, the need for concerted population control measures as a primary imperative—for that is the implication of this discussion, however couched—is a block to developing the radical consciousness and popular momentum to embrace the transformative political will that is required to achieve anything like the Great Transition."
8. Focus on Human Security, Peter Sterling, Michael Platt
         "The rate of population growth peaked in 1968, the very year that Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin justifiably freaked out." Correlation or causation? Wikipedia claims that human population growth rate peaked in 1968 at 2.1%, but all other sources seem to claim that peak population growth rate was 2.3% in 1963 when 69 million more humans were added to the planet, including the graphic used by the author from Our World In Data. Total fertility rate peaked in 1963 at 5.32 children per average global woman and has declined since to 2.32 (still above replacement). In 1963 FEWER humans were being added annually to the planet than 2021 and all years in between. 2022 may have been the first year to have added less due to increased death rate. What percentage of highly educated humans know this?

https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/images/world-population-1700-2100.gif

Panel 3: Questions and Complexities

1. What Developing Countries Need, Biko Agozino
        "Malthus’s belief that population always increases at a geometrical ratio has been discredited by the demographic transition theory." John B. Calhoun's work also discredits Malthus's belief that population always increases. The demographic transition is an observation, not a theory, as was Calhoun's observation of declining fertility after 8 to 12 generations within high density social settings.
2. The Root Cause: Patriarchal Capitalism, Gwendolyn Hallsmith
        "...the question needs to be what drives population growth, rather than assuming it is an independent variable that drives environmental problems." Yes, available food is the independent variable, e.g. when reindeer were introduced to an island covered in their favorite food (lichen), their population grew. "...Donella Meadows's ranking of effective leverage points, population would be at the bottom of the list; the mindsets that create the system goals are at the top." Yes, e.g. the modern techno-industrial worldview/culture/form of civilization paradigm is at the top. Change it (e.g. patriarchy, expansionist human centrism/exceptionalism), and everything else changes.
3. Toward Policy Specificity, Giorgos Kallis
        "What has worked well, and what not? Why and how would fathers and mothers in the Global North be convinced to have one child? What policies do Global South countries themselves consider? What demands are coming from social or feminist movements in the Global South or North that speak to these questions?" These are questions, seemingly in short supply when there is a longage of demand for certainty. "Without such specifics, I am afraid that a general discussion about “over”-population risks always the danger of turning into a game of othering, even under the best of intentions." A political domain of discourse selects for othering, etc., which in an evidence-based system of inquiry would be pathological.
4. Ethics on a Crowded Planet, Alexander Lautensach
        "Obviously, those requirements could be met for a population of a few million people in extreme comfort, or several billion in less comfort." Yes, a few million is to consider, and several billion may be possible for a time if all environmental productivity of the planet, insofar as possible without fossil fuels, is diverted to humans, crops, livestock, and pets. "Much learning and unlearning will be required, at the levels of the individual and of collectives, to move towards greater frugality and to change procreative behavior. At the heart of that learning lies value change, without which no lasting change of behavior can be achieved." Change, e.g. from humancentric to naturcentric, from expansionist culture to K-strategist culture.
5. Global Migration: The Next Phase, Gustave Massiah
        "...a central issue that is directly linked to the question of world population: the question of migration. It seems to me that we are in a period of bifurcation in the long history of migrations."
6. Economic Impacts of Population Reduction, Heikki Patomäki
        "The aim of a steady state or decreasing economy poses fundamental challenges to economic theory and policy. How do we avoid vicious cycles in macroeconomic developments if the aim is a systematically decreasing world population?" If we are not in overshoot (or extinct), a steady state is the condition that would come anyway, whether intended or not. As we are well into overshoot, socioeconomic-political contraction is the condition that will come anyway, the one we should seek out now.
7. A Fraught History, Gus Speth
        In countries whose population can grow only due to immigration, "forging a constructive, environmentally aware approach to population in the United States will require forging a constructive approach to immigration, and that in turn would seem to require transcending the culture wars."
8. Farewell to Patriarchy, Martha Van Der Bly
        "Mother Earth cannot speak. But if she would, what would she say? Listen to how she speaks in actions." Some humans endeavor to listen to Nature who "has all the answers" [H.T. Odum], e.g. some scientists and poets. All may consider what those who devote their time and attention to listening (to the sweet nothings of data), have to say of what Nature (Gaia, the world system) is saying to them. Nature is the source, not the words pointing to what may or may not be "out there." "We are living in a painful ending. Perhaps what we are witnessing—and we are lucky enough to be explicitly part of it—is a new beginning. A new era." No laws of the universe would be broken if humans were to renormalize as evolvable subsystems of Gaia. Final words to maybe persist by: "And with the power of love and of imagination, the possibilities of creating the future are infinite—even on a finite planet."

Response to Panelists, Ian Lowe
     "We are forced inevitably to accept the conclusion that our predominantly national forms of governance cannot cope with the problems we now face [there are no political solution for political animals]. Even in the most affluent countries, elected leaders promise further growth, when it is clear that material demands in those nations need to be curbed to have any chance of a civilized future." The modern techno-industrial expansionist form of human has become a political animal able to select for what is perceived as in their short-term self interest. Rapidly contracting our population and economy cannot be chosen by expansionistic political animals constrained by the contingencies of short-term self interest. "As Karp says, we 'underestimate the extent to which society must change in order to be sustainable and the significant limits that we’ll need to place on our consumption.' That is the inescapable conclusion of the population debate." In fewer words, there are no political solutions. The extent to which society must change involves ending patriarchy, i.e. extinction of the political animal (which may be viewed by posterity as better than human species extinction).

Challenging Pronatalism Is Key to Advancing Reproductive Rights and a Sustainable Population, Nandita Bajaj and Kirsten Stade
     "Social and environmental justice organisations have silenced discourse on human overpopulation due to fear of any association with reproductive coercion, but in doing so they have failed to acknowledge the oppressive role of pronatalism in undermining reproductive autonomy. Pronatalism, which comprises cultural and institutional forces that compel reproduction, is far more widespread, and as damaging to individual liberties as attempts to limit reproduction. The failure to recognise the enormity of pronatalism has led to the wholesale abandonment of voluntary, rights-based efforts toward a sustainable population despite widespread scientific agreement that population growth is a major driver of multiple cascading environmental crises. We examine the full range of patriarchal, cultural, familial, religious, economic and political pronatalist pressures, and argue that the reluctance to address population as a driver of the ecological crisis serves the very pronatalist forces that undermine reproductive autonomy. We posit that addressing overpopulation, and the pronatalism that drives it, must be central to international conservation and development efforts to elevate reproductive rights while also promoting planetary health." If overpopulation, then pronatalism bad, which is the flip-side to the growing 'if underpopulation, then pronatalism good' faction's ideology that must contend unto death. As noted, if there are no political solutions, for and against thinking is a distraction to thinking about real solutions, which may involve the extinction of political animals (you will go extinct as a political animal the moment you can no longer believe in politics, politicians, or political solutions).

Are 8 Billion People Too Many — Or Too Few? By Bryan Walsh
     "He [Malthus] has thus far been proven wrong — even with a global population more than 7 billion people larger today than in Malthus’s time, life is a whole lot better and longer on average...." Absolutely proven wrong in thinking negative feedbacks ('positive checks', e.g. war, famine, and disease) would be forthcoming in his lifetime to check the population growth that was evident, for the first time in human history, over the course of one person's lifetime. He failed to realize that turning fossil fuels into farm implements and then mobile steam engines, and then fertilizers..., and so on could turn fossil fuel into food faster than the population could grow. The Ehrlich's' agricultural experts they consulted also failed to inform them that the Green Revolution, by selecting cultivars that could turn more fossil fuels into food faster (if irrigated, cultivated, fertilized optimally, sprayed with agrochemicals...) would continue to increase food availability faster (the average bite of likely processed food on the end of your fork has likely traveled 1,500 miles to get there, but not by stork or horse) than population could grow, and almost no one today realizes that food production increases are now being 'achieved' by turning (using fossil fuels) vast tracts of marginal lands, forests (e.g. Amazon, Indonesia) and grass/scrublands into arable (mostly by irrigation) lands for a time (meaning unsustainably). Agriculture is the number one driver of biodiversity loss and species extinction. That population can grow exponentially (geometrically) and that food production can too for a time if a planetary larder of fossil fuel is turned into food/crops, hence people, livestock and pets has not been proved wrong. Not good news for 10 year olds. Sorry about that. 

And the next day I shared added information:

Relevant information published 4/24/23 Phys.org and supportive findings from William Rees, The Human Eco-predicament: Overshoot and the population conundrum 2023

"The human enterprise is in overshoot, depleting essential ecosystems faster thanthey can regenerate and polluting the ecosphere beyond nature’s assimilativecapacity. Overshoot is a meta-problem that is the cause of most symptoms ofeco-crisis, including climate change, landscape degradation and biodiversity loss.The proximate driver of overshoot is excessive energy and material ‘throughput’to serve the global economy. Both rising incomes (consumption) and populationgrowth contribute to the growing human eco-footprint, but increasing throughputdue to population growth is the larger factor at the margin. (Egregious andwidening inequality is a separate socio-political problem.) Mainstream approachesto alleviating various symptoms of overshoot merely reinforce the status quo.This is counter-productive, as overshoot is ultimately a terminal condition. The continuity of civilisation will require a cooperative, planned contraction of both the material economy and human populations, beginning with a personal to civilisational transformation of the fundamental values, beliefs, assumptions and attitudes underpinning neoliberal/capitalist industrial society"

Population growth is the main driver of increased carbon emissions, study finds

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-population-growth-main-driver-carbon.html

'A dominant narrative in the climate change debate is that addressing population is not relevant for mitigation. This is because the population is only growing in the poorest countries, whose contribution to global carbon emissions is negligible, the reasoning goes. The largest emissions come instead from rich countries where the population no longer grows.

"This way of reasoning is not correct. Our thorough analysis suggests that climate change mitigation strategies should address population along with per capita consumption and technological innovation. A comprehensive approach to the problem is needed," says Giangiacomo Bravo, professor at Linnaeus University.'

'The basis for Giangiacomo Bravo's statement is the analysis of 30 years of emission data for all the world's countries that he and two research colleagues have carried out. By splitting the countries into four income groups according to the World Bank's standard classification, the researchers were able to confirm that the contribution of low-income countries to emission increase is indeed limited. However, they also found that:

• Population is growing in all four income groups.
• The largest contribution to global carbon emissions comes from the upper-middle group.
• Population growth is the main driver of increased emissions in all income groups except the upper-middle one.
• The successful reduction in per capita emissions that occurred in high-income countries was nullified by the parallel increase in population in the same group.

"Our analysis does not support the widespread belief that increased affluence is the main driver of increased carbon emissions at the global level. It is definitely an important factor, but neglecting population growth leads to a skewed and misleading vision of reality."

"Developed nations with stable or declining populations should hence quit fighting these trends and instead embrace them. Just as a small population growth in rich countries can drive big emission increases, a population decrease in rich countries could have big emission-related benefits going forward," says Giangiacomo Bravo.'

[I'll guess both posts will be ignored, but will be pleased to admit I'm wrong again, maybe. Bill puts numbers on our overshoot situation: about 80% on poputaltion increase and so about 20% on increased consumption to the increase in the EF (ecological footprint) of our species. Those who care about climate change would support Americans immigrating to Sudan and Somalia, but absolutely no immigration to high consuming countries. Only racists would allow the poor to live like Americans are forced to.]

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 4/28/23

The New Age of Tragedy -
Great-power rivalry, resource scarcity and the crumbling of the liberal rules-based order.

Twenty-first-century conflicts reflect two kinds of scarcity, both on a global scale. The first is a zero-sum contest for the material resources of a finite planet, the second a type of value scarcity in which all the available options involve loss. The combination makes geopolitics inescapably tragic.

Faith that creative human agency can triumph over nature’s limits has been a central feature of most modern political projects, not least liberalism. Missing the fact that technology cannot create energy, this conviction has long proved overly sanguine. Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human will have never before had to bet so much on technology over energy as the driver of our material advancement.

We are now a long way removed from the revolutionary hopes of the 19th and 20th centuries that the transformation of collective life would mean the complete development of all natural resources and an end to scarcity.

Clear-eyed realism about the available options and their respective human costs is essential. Denial of our tragic age will only lead to more suffering. But we are far from being helpless sleepwalkers in our collective human plight. Resource-driven geopolitics is riven with inescapable dangers. But it will only be an apocalyptic struggle if governments make it so by refusing to recognise the restraint required by coexistence in the face of the limits nature imposes.

If there is hope, it is in recognising this fact. Global disaster could still be averted by reality-based diplomacy. It will be unfortunate if, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s failed escapee, our leaders cannot bring themselves to go through the door.

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/04/new-age-tragedy-china-food-europe-energy-robert-kaplan-helen-thompson-john-gray

Well worth the full read. Might need to sign up to read 3 free articles.

Pretty much sums up all the interrelated observations on this list with ample coverage of Nature's limits, overpopulation and Malthusian logic.

Realist community organising at all levels seems key which may be epigenetically difficult in the face of decades of amygdala driven individualism, amygdala driven political discrimination and amygdala driven social sorting.

Steve G

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 5/21/23

The world should be weaning off fossil fuels (FF) , but have groups like this really thought through what they are asking? 

The economy runs on energy and there are no quantitative substitutes for FF which still accounts for  80% of global primary energy consumption.  FF even still generates about 60% of electricity globally, compared to only ~10% from (not green, not renewable) wind turbines and solar installations.  Since electricity is only ~19% of final consumption, wind and solar give the world only about 2% of consumer energy.  

Are people who say wind and solar can be expanded to replace the entire contribution from FF by 2030 or 2050 serious? (even with non-existent CCS and heat-pumps, etc.)  BTW, hydrogen is another non-starter except in niche applications.

So, to the extent that disinvesting in FF reduces energy supplies (including the FF needed to build out wind, solar and hydrogen) it will reduce energy supplies and tank the economy.  

From the perspective of the real problem, overshoot, this is a good thing but can you name a disinvestment advocacy group or government that is planning for a smooth contraction?

Just askin'

Bill

 

Bill, you are asking profound questions which MTI cultures as functioning entities do not yet understand.  As MTI cultures we have worked very hard for 500+ years to teach ourselves that reality is comprised of primordial standalone bits and pieces which can safely be handled each in its own small silo.  Most people do not think of religion and ontology, but the words of “Jesus bids US Shine” include “you in your small corner and in mine.”   All else, we have been told over and over again, are externalities which can be safely ignored.  It follows that it will be almost impossible to teach folks formed in and by MTI cultures to know, see, understand, think and act as if reality is a mess of living relational systems.  And, what is more, that we are conscious and unconscious agents in the mess.  The underlying presuppositions of the ways we still organize and operate our major institutions – the academy, our churches, our governments  and corporations – are still classically those which assume that the grasp on MTI cultures on reality is God’s truth.  To make things worse, in our engineering dominated MTI cultures, few senior folks with real influence could talk sensibly about the underlying presuppositions of our culture for even 7 minutes.  (Time to drink one beer.)  Most optimistic folks do not understand what this post is about.

Ruben

 

Between Ruben and Bill, they have laid out the the physical and social map of the human predicament.  From that map we should be able to see the difference between collective behaviors of 8 billion people that transition to a viable community and behaviors of subgroups which do not.  I think what Ruben and Bill said is central. 

Jack Alpert

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 5/22/23

The Way It Is

Yes, Arthur, this is the way it is...
And I feel compelled to add, "this is the way it is in MTI cultures." "But
it is not the way things are in Indigenous cultures, at least not in those
which have not yet been wholly corrupted by modernity."
Let me explain.

MTI cultures are dominated by nouns -- things, specifically, material things
we can easily measure and be sure of. So for us, we focus in the products
of thinking, namely "knowledge." We create it, we trade it, we store it, as
we do with many other things. Truth, for us, is if truly true, is
unchanging and universal. So in MTI cultures one can "deliver" knowledge to
folks but not make them think. We get the picture you shared. (By the way,
English has a greater capacity to nominalize verbs -- turn dynamic actions
into static states of affairs -- than any language on Earth.)

In Indigenous cultures life is understood as activity - verbs. Dynamic
relationships, not static things, are at the core of living well. The focus
is on becoming and be-ing, not stuff. So the issue is not leaning to
receive and handle static true knowledge, but learning to know and live
reliably. This is a deeply personal/communal activity which can always be
better or worse, but never perfect. Knowing is always personal/communal and
dynamic. So in these cultures if you learn how to know, then by definition
you are learning how to know, imagine, see, think and act. An indigenous
person who has not encountered modern folks would be puzzled by the picture.
It would not make sense of her/his world.

One of the tragedies of our situation as MTI persons in MTI cultures in 2023
is that we have almost no conscious awareness that the deepest source of our
troubles is our own MTI ways of knowing and responding to reality and,
therefore, our ways of being in our own skins and being in the world.
Virtually all sustainability work, is devoted to making the MTI world
sustainable without having to face the insight that the price we must pay
for sustainability is to transcend, to outgrow, our own formation and the
form of civilization which formed us as MTI persons.

Or so it has come to appear to me after 60+ years of chewing on these
things.

Ruben

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I rarely disagree with Ruben, but it happens and I am left to ponder the fact that we can't both be right. That I'm 'not even wrong' is likely, but until I grok my error, it remains. For brevity's sake I'll not mention points of agreement (or cite evidence why), which leaves "But it is not the way things are in Indigenous cultures, at least not in those which have not yet been wholly corrupted by modernity."

This narrative invites us to view Indigenous cultures as different in kind from the modern techno-industrial expansionist form of human and its complex society (form of civilization). I could agree that such may be true for the San and Hadza, the only remaining non-expansionist forager cultures remaining on the planet (claim based on archaeogenetic data). All other Indigenous cultures derive from the expansionist form that spread within and out of Africa (e.g. Bantu, Austronesians, Indo-Europeans, Polynesians) 50k to 60k years ago.

 

 

The expansionist culture works, but only on the leading edge of expansion (e.g. Māori who were patriarchal, ecocidal, invasive species expansionists extraordinaire before Indo-European contact). Once an island or region is taken, the expansionist culture selects for failure, and so everywhere the descendants of expansionists (the ones left behind) have had to renormalize somewhat to persist. A possibly remarkable thing about the Tikopians and Moriori is that they (perhaps starting with one leader who changed the culture) attempted to renormalize in a conscious, intentional, meta-reflexive way, with partial success, enough to persist (avoid dissolution/local extinction). The typical pattern has been to renormalize somewhat, minimally, while retaining as much of one's expansionist culture for as long as possible.

The first Tikopians, Melanesian expansionists, were forced to live like renormalizing K-strategists for 2k years until conquered by Polynesian expansionists 1k years ago who were in turn forced to renormalize enough to persist, but who again expanded when the possibility arose, such that following the coming of Indo-European expansionists in 1606, there are now six times more Tikopians than there were in the early 20th century, though 5/6ths live off of Tikopia on other islands where it is easier to import foods.

But this is not a narrative we moderns like to tell. My interpretation of the data is that indigenous cultures are all, with noted exceptions, descendants of a common expansionist ancestor that all MTIed humans share. The MTI expansion was by agro-wood-wind empowered post-Roman-dissolution Indo-Europeans who happen to be the first to exploit a planetary larder of fossil fuels to extract/produce/consume all other low-hanging fruits of Gaia.

Some indigenous cultures were forced to renormalize more than others, but with the exception of the Tairona and Muisca cultures, none consciously disavowed their expansionist form of culture such that when expansion again became possible, they refused. Compared to us modern expansionists, they may appear to be vastly less expansionistic, but this is an illusion in that they never effectively renormalized. The San (the few not yet assimilated) may have never been culturally denormalized, and the Kogi may be the only former expansionists to have conscientiously by intent renormalized such that when the opportunity to become expansionists presented itself, they refused to embrace their former ways.

But this is not a narrative we moderns like..., so where's that latte I ordered? That's what I want to know.

And the visual meme that started this. I altered it as I am wont to do.

 

--------------------------

5/24/2023

All cultures - or rather, populations - have "expansist" tendencies, even those of hunter-gatherers like Hadza and Khoisan. Population growth varies, but the average, before the invention of vaccines, antibiotics, water treatment, etc was about 0.04 - 0.06%.year. Current data on hunter-gatherers suggest population growth rates averaging 0.04 to 0.05% a year – relatively higher than that of archaic Homo sapiens (estimated at 0.01%). Even increasing it to this modest rate produces a doubling time of roughly 1400 years. From a starting point somewhere in the eastern African coast, and even starting with very low numbers of people involved in the initial group(s) that trickled into Eurasia, this is sufficient to reach Australia within 15,000 years, purely as a function of normal population growth along the coast. It is astonishing to realize that people likely did not have a goal of “leaving Africa”; rather, in the process of doubling every 1400 years would still fill up the world,  NO ONE need ever have moved more than a few hundred miles, in a whole lifetime.
Try the calculation.

a) Assume a SE African culture area of hunter-gatherers who occupied the savanna and coastal region. Around, let us say, 90,000 years ago, a small daughter colony of this coastal culture has been established here and there “outside of Africa” – 1000 people scattered in 40 camps along the eastern Mediterranean coast, 1000 people scattered in 40 camps in the southern Arabian peninsula. There is some archaeological evidence of this, although at a slightly later date.

Note: I am assuming a set of demographic units that range over a territory of about 8,000 to 12,000 square km, a pretty average figure for a mobile hunter-gatherer group of about a thousand. Since they have a riparian, lacustrine, or coastal adaptation with some inland hunting, one can imagine an elongated territory stretching 200 kilometres along the lake shore, the coast, or the river, augmented by gathering and hunting resources perhaps 50 kilometres inland. Both of these would be, in our OOA model, derived from one of the northernmost groups of the chain of African cultures which appear to have had this dual ecosystem adaptation – using the aquatic as well as terrestrial resources, as well as the rich mixture of both represented by river deltas.

 (Doubling time is calculated by the formula: Td = log(2) / log(1 + r) Where: Td = doubling time and r = a constant growth rate)

b) So we assume a starting population in the Middle East and along the south coast of Arabia of 2000 people. Now let us calculate how many there would be, at the modest rate of 0.05% increase per year, after 10 to 12,000 years.

After 1400 years, it is 4000, after another 1400 years, it is 8000, then 16,000, then 32,000, then 64,000, then 128,000, then 256,000, then 512,000, then 1,024,000 – and it is only 67,400 years ago.

c) Over a million people in Eurasia within about 12,000 years. Even if we assume all kinds of setbacks through diseases and adverse climatic events, and double that time, there could still be nearly a million Homo sapiens in Eurasia within a very short time. Does this make the genetic data that supports the idea of “out of Africa” more plausible? I doubt it was as neat as this, but the exponential function is relentless. One way or another, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were pretty successful, not just in Africa, but all over the world.

We could change the starting date.. make it 100,000 or 50,000 years ago. But the main point here is that, no matter when we start the clock, there would still be over a million modern Homo sapiens in Eurasia within 12,000 years, for example, and it would be two million 1400 years later.

Given the shorter doubling times that prevail in modern Homo sapiens (at least until the annual rate of population increases was further raised by improved sanitation, medical care, antibiotics, vaccines, and so on) it really did not take repeated “waves of migration” out of Africa to populate the world.

A little squirt across the Red Sea, mission accomplished. Nor did the ancestral population of anatomically modern people ever need have been large even in Africa. It was obviously a longer roll call – the population remaining in Africa was likely at least ten times larger: most genetic variation was left behind. But we can easily derive various calculations, from a starting population as small as 20,000 or 30,000, and fill up all of Africa remarkably quickly, and test the plausibility of how modern humans enveloped and absorbed, both genetically and culturally, most of the “archaic” populations they encountered in the process.

See: Prehistoric hunter–gatherer population growth rates rival those of agriculturalists | PNAS

Also: Two centuries of rapid global population growth will come to an end - Our World in Data  and World Population Growth - Our World in Data

What changed with the development of horticulture and livestock herding economies was the unlikely to have been expansion tendencies. Such economies existed side-be-side with hunter-gatherers for most of the Holocene. What changed the whole ball-game was the development of state level systems that supported cities and elites by wrecking the commons... they had to keep taking over the commons of their neighbours - this was "territorial expansion" rather than just population growth - and it tended to spread the ring of ecological destruction outward from the centre of the "civilization".

It is likely that current very high rates (up to 3% a year) of population growth (still seen in some parts of the world), will continue to drop in future, and they will drop fastest in places where women's rights over their own fertility become recognized.  There likely will be continuing conflicts between groups over land, localized overshoot of resources, and success for any given group, measured in its expanding population, may involve extinguishing or (more likely)  incorporating neighbouring groups. 

A lot may depend on whether or not we keep the electrical grid and the internet - and other systems of communication - up and running. The larger the pool of information being shared, the more likely human communities are to grasp the reality that led to collapse and to try to incorporate some corrections into their future ways of doing things.

So hang on to this thought: If we DO find a new energy source that allows us to keep alive all the humans currently on the planet and keep our economy growing, that will ultimately destroy not only our own species but lay waste to the entire

planet.

Sure, we are facing a steep decline in certain resources like oil.  But just because we are at, for example, "Peak Oil", now and about to slide down that long descent, we must not delude ourselves thinking that we need to "fix" the problem of Peak Oil.  Peak Oil IS the "fix" for the problem of humanity on life-support... it takes that life support away and lets the bulk of humanity die. Humanity cannot "fix" nature's solution to our own stupidity. We can only hope to become less stupid in the future.

Several days later...

I have thought it through again. I want to make it clearer that there are some opportunities for good outcomes of the crisis we are facing. There are reasons to be optimistic despite the horrible fix humanity is in. For one thing, I agree with Frances Lappe - there is no real reason to believe that the problem lies in human nature - we are not born to be selfish hermits or arrogant megalomaniacs. We evolved in small mutually dependent communities with a great deal of sharing and cooperative behaviour at the core of our adaptation. Our brains, even today, bear this out.

Neurological Roots of Compassion Run Deep | Wired Science | Wired.com

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/neurocompassion/

(RESEARCH REVEALS BRAIN AREAS FOR TYPES OF DECISION-MAKING,

SHOWS HOW A BRAIN CHEMICAL UNDERPINS SOCIAL INTERACTION

http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=news_110407a

The nature of human altruism

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6960/abs/nature02043.html

Altruistic helping in human infants and young chim... [Science. 2006] - PubMed

result

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16513986

Activity in the amygdala elicited by unfair divisions predicts social value

orientation : Article : Nature Neuroscience

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2468.html

see also: http://www.physorg.com/news175522198.html

How a simple mathematic formula is starting to explain the bizarre prevalence of

altruism in society http://www.physorg.com/news135580478.html

Study: Brains Want to Cooperate

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2002/07/53945?currentPage=all

http://www.physorg.com/news166337233.html

Seeking the roots of collective cooperation

http://www.physorg.com/news134909857.html

Hunter-gatherers: Marshall Sahlins- The Original Affluent Society

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

Impulsive Behavior May Be Relict Of Hunter-gatherer Past

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041206191407.htm

Cooperative Behavior Meshes With Evolutionary Theory

http://richarddawkins.net/article,3719,Cooperative-Behavior-Meshes-With-Evolutio\

nary-Theory,ScienceDaily

http://www.physorg.com/news153150016.html

http://www.physorg.com/news111145481.html 

Revising the fundamentals: insights of neuro-economics for economic foundations

of performance related pay in management (Utz Helmuth)

http://www.transformations.khf.vu.lt/16/articles/ge16.pdf) 

Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080711080957.htm 

We also evolved -biologically- to use culture as our survival strategy. Hence the big brain - we are hardwired to learn a language and a culture. We also appear to be hardwired to feel good when we are fairly treated and to resent injustice and inequality - even though we like and accept that men and women will behave a bit differently, we still need powerful cultural programming to justify treating the sexes as unequal in terms of rights to fair treatment. 

Getting Smart with Differences in Women and Men

http://www.drlindaklaitz.com/viewarticle.asp?ID=9 

The Sunny Side of Fairness

Preference for Fairness Activates Reward Circuitry (and

Disregarding Unfairness Activates Self-Control Circuitry)

http://sds.hss.cmu.edu/media/pdfs/tabibnia/sunny-side-fairness.pdf

Gender biases in leadership selection during competitions within and between

groups http://www.physorg.com/news144587356.html

Researchers study the pleasure of punishment - Imposing a penalty for unfair behavior activates a pleasure point in brain

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5820379/ 

revenge: neural basis of altruistic punishment

http://straddle3.net/context/03/en/2004_09_10.html 

BONOBO LAND

No-one Gets Left Behind

http://bonoboathome.blogspot.com/2003_10_05_archive.html 

The Genetics of Politics

http://primatediaries.blogspot.com/2007/10/genetics-of-politics.html 

Your Brain on Schadenfreude . . . Or Not

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2009/02/12/your-brain-on-schaden\freude-or-not.aspx

We also all evolved a neural capacity for experiencing awe and transcendence -especially in the presence of lovemaking, beautiful sunsets and a contemplation of the miracles of life in this vast universe.

Helga Vierich

--------------------------------------------------

5/25/2023

I haven't read all of Helga's 28 links yet, but this morning I added to one graphic from the 2012 paper The Great Human Expansion, which is the second link I added to the graphic (the first being to a 2009 paper). The '45Kya' above Australia is from the 2012 paper which at the time was short for "at least 45Kya or maybe earlier" as the best guess answer to when did modern humans take Australia? Currently the consensus is "by at least 50Kya or maybe earlier". Pre-expansionist forms of humans/hominins had left Africa before the Great Expansion and may have slowly reached Australia before 50k years ago, but all were 'displaced' by the expansionist form if they did along with all other hominins on the planet, some of whom persist only as bits of DNA within the modern human genome.

The last expansion, the final taking of the planet, started early 14th century in New Zealand with a founding population of about 400 Polynesians whose population had grown to a very low density of about 2k by the early to mid-15th century by which time they yet managed to overhunt Moa (nine species) to extinction (turn them into babies). My guess is that if 400 San had been transported by an alien experimental anthropologist to New Zealand 1300 years before, in 1 AD, that they would have adapted and grown their population as K-strategists are wont to do while maintaining and maximizing (it's an MPP/MePP thing) the environmental productivity of the habitat they and the plants and animals depend on. And when those who would call themselves Māori came, they would all have been displaced. Conjecture: the culture of the expansionist form was (needed to be) antithetical in key elements of their worldview to those of K-strategist hominins (their K-culture, so maybe call the expansionist form of modern human culture, r-culture (r for maximum reproduction/growth, e.g. of energy slaves).

By the time of the Indo-European coming in the early 17th century, the taking of Zealandia was nearing completion by pre-fossil-fueled-techno-industrial standards and the population was estimated to be 100k (875,300 is a current estimate of current population of Māori, the indigenous takers whose pre-colonial patriarchal and genocidal (e.g. the Chatham Islands) enthusiasm rivaled that of the MTI ones whom they were not corrupted by) which is to note that prior to European contact their population was growing at 1.6%, well above the usual slow expansion of hominins including pre-expansionist humans (32x faster hence the Great Expansion). If the early out of Africa expansionists were a mere 10x faster, then they could easily have arrived in Australia in 1500 years and the Levant in 500 years where they displaced the Neanderthals who had displaced the pre-expansionist form of our species 90k years ago who had been living in the Levant for 60k years . 

Per sources (archaeogenetic) I won't cite here, H. sapiens heidelbergensis left Africa about 700k BP to Europe to evolve into H. sapiens neanderthalensis and in Asia to become H. sapiens. denisova. We evolved from the East African population of Heidelbergensis (Homo sapiens) about 375k years ago to spread (expand) within Africa as a subspecies, H. sapiens sapiens, who in it's expansionist form, became the last hominin standing. Before that, we had spread into the Levant 150k years ago and beyond before being pushed back byH. sapiens neanderthalensis in the Levant before what I now think of as modern humans (MTI humans being the current expression) rapidly 'displaced' them 50k BP. The rest of the history of the Levant is all about competing expansionist factions contending, which I view as a distraction, including today's news.

Humans (likely K-strategists) reached Madagascar in the 9th century BCE with no evident megafauna extinctions  for 16 hundred years (hence they may have been like my hypothetical San in New Zealand) until the arrival of expansionist others. The megafauna extinctions began due to climate change (a common story moderns like to tell) that just happened to have been when Austronesian and then Bantu (200 years later) expansionists with cattle and dogs (and started burning forest to make pasture) arrived to politely ask the original human inhabitants to kindly move somewhere else. 

It could have happened that way and what do I know? Nothing, and that is why the indigenous (to the Austronesian/Bantu) DNA was not notably passed on to today's population that has grown 75 fold since the coming of Indo-European expansionists. It can be called the Great Expansion for some in-our-face reasons. The San are not Great by MTI standards (but I would beg to differ). If we're going to save humanity, learning from the few remaining pre-"Man the Hunter" types are the key (and any former expansionists who may have renormalized, e.g. Kogi.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/15/23

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/30/23

Why do people like H-D [Homer-Dixon] who know what's up back off of population or say that renewables can play some role in the future, or we need more nuclear power (sych as peak oil 2005 DOE report author Robert Hirsch)?  Is it because they want to be invited to conferences, have a paid seat at the table when all hell breaks loose, can't bear the terror and disappointment of students, audience members, friends?   So many who know better have gotten on the hopium train.  Maybe it is because nothing can be done, so why not let people have their illusions? And perhaps behave better when times get hard, with the hopium that rescue is on the way, and making sacrifices to reduce climate change is noble and all that. --Alice

----------------------------------

Two reasons I can think of:

1) Many people, including HD I suspect, actually believe in the approaches they are taking or at least assume that trying is better than doing nothing.

2) Some grow tired of being vilified.  I've been hustled off a podium for arguing that so called modern green renewable energy sources are neither green nor renewable and cannot quantitatively substitute for fossil fuels (fortunately.)  I'm also known in some circles (and in popular media) as a eco-facist, eugenicist and racist for arguing that excess population is a problem being worsened by continued population growth. 

In the post-modern, post-truth era, people believe exactly what they want to believe and counter-evidence is irrelevant ("That's just your opinion!") or a conspiracy by old white guys.  

Bill

--------------------------

It seems to me [Ruben] that Bill’s 2 reasons do account for the fact that most folks, at least to date, are unwilling to dig deeply into exploring the actual reasons we are in the mess of complex, living, wicked messes in which we now find ourselves.  We need to hear and digest his voice.

I would add a third reason:  As a species we are relational (culturally conditioned) animals.  This means we take cues from others about how to read our situation, about how to conduct ourselves in it well enough to be accepted, and about what can, and cannot, be said or done, etc. 

When this insight is applied to MTI cultures – cultures which are inherently and incessantly optimistic – it turns out that it is unacceptable in most MTI settings to express insights which lead to a deep, as opposed to superficial, pessimism.  For example, I have had the person who chaired the meeting at which I had just spoken open the conversation by saying, “Well, I am more optimistic than Ruben.”  This was a clear signal to all present whose lives and fortunes he can influence that they had best line up with his conclusion:  Those who invited me, made a mistake.  Soon the session will be over.  The time wasted with Ruben is just to be written off as a mistake.  The discussion was predictably limp.

I would add another feature of MTI cultures to deepen our own pessimism:  by their nature, MTI cultures want adults to stop maturing at a late adolescent stage.  Classically, we have nurtured boys to become men who are about 22 years old forever – old enough to carry some responsibility independently, but immature enough to be unquestionably beholden to those in authority.  And yes, some of us manage to be rebellious.  But that is not the same as becoming mature.  A small minority even grow into deeply mature adults.  Sadly, this makes them truly independent of the MTI cultures which have formed them.  Happily, from the culture’s point of view, truly mature persons are a small enough minority that they cannot upset or challenge the heart of MTI cultures.  Put another way, MTI cultures do not offer us an inherent basis for self-limitation at any scale – from unique persons to whole cultures.  A culture without an internet basis for self-limitation, of course, is doomed on this planet.  Overshoot, biophysical and civilizational, is just a matter of time.  It appears that about 800 years is enough in our case.  As Bill rightly reminds us, our time is almost up.  Becoming self-limiting, of course, is a required characteristic of truly mature persons and groups.

And, I must put in a good word for TH-D.  When challenged about population, that it does not appear to be central to his current work, I have heard him remind the questioner that his early work centred on population; that he has said nothing to take back any of what he has learned; that his whole body of work must be considered and not merely his most recent pieces.   On this basis, I suggest we get off Tad’s back about population, especially when he is not here to respond to the ways he is characterized.

Ruben   

------------------------

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 7/3/2023

Patriarchy is....

"Others have chimed in who are in accord with my view that species biological traits and other physical drivers which apply to all life like MPP are the root drivers of behavior."

"Yeah, I don't feel comfortable with overriding causes, especially a single overriding cause."

"Patriarchy is vehicle of the MPP/2nd Law that make it so that the human enterprise is such that it always tries to expand."

"Growth is the ideology of life itself, almost the definition of life. It's at the core of the MPP. The only difference with human life is we can understand the implications (even if we do little about it)."

"We do little about it because we can't, we're not programmed to not attempt using resources around us to make our lives less painful/more enjoyable. Globally, using less resources doesn't lead to a better life. Ask sub-Saharan Africans, Indians, Pakistanis. Billions around the world. And more in wealthy countries than some would think."

"Capitalism, patriarchy etc. are just means by ways overshoot operate. The causes of overshoot are to be found in the MPP/the second Law, the absence of predators and abundant resource availability enabling the human enterprise to grow."

"Overshoot is, has always been and will always be, out of human 'control'."

"All successful species tend to overshoot their habitats, all plants and animals, blackberries, rabbits, locusts, wolves, algae in a lake."

"Patriarchy appears as a common trait among many mammals, not all, and can define a style of community growth and overshoot in some cases, but not a cause."

"The 'why' of overshoot is the very nature of growth in all known species, a feature of evolution."

"There are myriad causes. Each contributes a small effect. You have to fix, or alter, many of them to generate a noticeable change in society."

The above quotes come from six different know-a-lots reacting to the question of could patriarchy be the distal cause of our overpopulation and overconsumption (overshoot) condition? The six made other claims, but all the above are highly questionable to obviously false. To get highly educated and intelligent humans to make such facepalming claims takes (not religion, but) reactivity, i.e. amygdala hijacking of the prefrontal cortex.

That the idea that a patrifocal culture is a pre-condition for the expansionist r-culture form of human that defines modernity (the last 50k years), may exceed the tolerance of modern Anthropocene enthusiasts' ability to think unthinkable (to them) thoughts. We moderns have met the enemy and we must deny that he is us (even if a cartoon possum can amuse by thinking as much).

I prefer to read, as best I can, the tea leaves of evidence (i.e. I'd rather iterate towards knowing than believe anything). As Ashley Montagu pointed out in five editions of The Natural Superiority of Women, women are clearly the first gender (e.g. some species are parthenogenetic and are doing just fine, e.g. some lizards and snakes, even if less evolvable than those who reproduce sexually). A society of men reproducing parthenogenetically is not possible (i.e. males are naturally inferior and exist to serve the better half). Some feminist ideologues liked Montagu's evidence-based claims, but they are not examples of the natural superiority of women (e.g. mothers who are not ideologues). Some women are not at all superior (but my wife clearly is in part because she has no interest in thinking she is).

Oh, but the gaiapc experts don't like this story, so... the above statements are uttered/typed.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 7/30/2023

A Doomster rant:

Luis -

You continue to think and write as if you are dealing with a rational species whose various clans acknowledge the nature of the problem and carefully and cooperatively plan a system of checks and balances to engineer an equitable, global soft landing.  

What on Earth encourages you to think this can happen?  

The human enterprise is far into overshoot: The planet is burning and flooding at the same time; there are over 900 wild-fires, most out of control in Canada alone; southern Europe is also ablaze  and, along with parts of the southern US, Australia and Asia, may become uninhabitable in the coming decade(s); thousands of people are displaced or dying because of 'unusual weather' in many countries;  we can't even agree that these problems are at least partially anthropogenic; people who can afford to are flocking in droves to purchase EVs to which are more climate- and ecologically-damaging than the ICE vehicles they replace; as ocean temperatures exceed 38 degrees in some places, fish populations are killed off or migrate and coral reefs are bleached to extinction; China refuses to limit its expansion of coal-fired electricity generation (even as its own citizens broil in the streets); there is an illegal war in Europe partially because of historically wounded pride and because nation states cannot stick to simple agreements on territorial expansion --  tens of thousands of people are dying; humans are waging  several more wars in Africa -- tens of thousands more are dying;  India is restricting rice exports in anticipation of climate-induced agricultural failure and food shortages (this is a real 'yellow flag' for things to come); populations, already scientifically illiterate, are further confused by the rise of denial culture, fake news, post-truth politics and post-modern subjectivism (there is no objective or scientific reality);  it remains verboten to discuss consumer lifestyles or population as proximate causes of overshoot;  many governments are plagued by scandal and corruption; monied elites really call the shots in their own interests, the rest of humans and the ecosphere be damned; the US is about to vote on a presidential candidate weighed down by three criminal indictments; etc.,  etc., etc., etc.  

You get the point, no?
Bill

 

 

Yes, current events are a distraction (to facepalm over and rant about..., or view as a distraction), as is climate change and calls for Degrowth NOW! or a Real Green New Deal or Vote Green Party, etc. When humanity's 'teachable moment' comes, and I am made world dictator (or Klaatu returns), the BAU (business-as-usual) gravy train to hell will stop (a critical mass of humans will no longer be able to believe in the BAU consensus narrative of, Quoth the Raven, EVERMORE!!, just as the week before the unpredicted tipping point, they couldn't NOT believe in BAU).

When humans (those who imagine they are running the show, e.g. the American public) look from their climactic heights (with that deer in the headlights look) at the chaotic collapse (downslope) to come within what they consider the near future (pre-retirement in New Zealand or in a gated community on the Kona coast with Praetorian Guards)...., when they realize they DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO$&#?, I'll tell them (or the Demagogue-of-the-day will).

I will be dead and gone, so my dictates will clearly not be to serve my short-term self interests. (And, no, I'm not going to detail my dictates as I already have and no one, because the coming headlights are not shining in their eyes, has considered them..., yet, but they will, O ye who may live long enough.)

My first dictate: Read Sustainable Energy - without the hot air Illustrated Edition, a 2009 best seller, so there are many used copies (US$7.50 including shipping) if your library won't provide. Realize that puffing or huffing more hot air isn't going to mitigate posterity's ghastly future. Then guess, bitches, how many will likely die a ghastly death, leaving a likely non-viable remnant population to maraud on until they can't (secondary to extinction after they consume the non-marauders).

So, how many/when/who dies a ghastly death? Your best guess being__________, and then what? What are you going to choicelessly do? Being posterity blind enables us to continue our unsustainable behaviors (i.e. do nothing other than tweak the margins of the remoseless system that is not remotely sustainable).

The population will contract to <1 billion (so including those yet to be born, about 13.4 billion, plus or minus a few billion, will die a Malthusian death. When I am made world dictator, the population of humans will soon (<100 years, be in the 7 to 35 million range and, per all efforts to follow my dictates, no one will die a Malthusian death insofar as possible (I cannot decree that pandemics end). Rapid population and economic contraction is the condition that will (likely as in how could it not?) come anyway.

And so, my children, some few will:

Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere's handmaiden anew.' —Howard T. Odum, Energy, Ecology, & Economics, 1973

So, make me world dictator. Or not.

Being dead, I won't care, and Nature won't care either, so why should I even if I do live longer than expected? The Anthropocene is a condition that will end anyway. Sooner being better, I could end it this century. Make me world dictator, or a pox on all your houses (and not because I decree it).

One of my first decrees will be that those who believe in MPP/MePP (as distinct from understand it), be sent to a reeducation camp or put to death should they beg to differ (sorry, but real solutions may be ghastly, just not as ghastly as Gaia's revenge). As Dave Pollard notes:

As Peirce notes, a paradigm change in beliefs changes a form of civilization, culture, worldview, values, assumptions, opinions… changes behavior (not free will, choice, agency). Collapse of a worldview enables its replacement by another, whether crafted by a demagogue to serve short-term self interests, or by system ecologists and systemic managers who listen to Nature who has all the answers about what works to persist (humans don’t get a vote, so down with democracy).

As David Suzuki notes, "We don't even know enough to know that it is too late." Chance favors the prepared... something or other. Chance opportunities are especially likely during climax of the WSS (World Socioeconomic-political System) and early chaotic descent. So, come up with one or more potentially viable pathways to a condition of persistence as a renormalized evolvable species.

Will all of posterity, in a century or few, die a ghastly death (go extinct)? I won't know, but it is hard to die a ghastly death and not know you are so dying one. Posterity will only know. I will likely die quietly in my sleep, unlike my children and grandchildren (and cohorts). But the condition of my dying quietly (or living on in quiet desperation) seems overrated.

Understanding what a viable form of civilization might look like and iterating towards multiple expressions of best-guess viability, i.e. acting (to allow Nature to select what works), may be to consider by those pre-horde ones who have the leisure time to consider posterity's endgame strategy (you can 'understand or die', and that's all you need to know to act).

Acting by non-acting (wu wei)..., e.g. build three hydro-powered megacities on the foundations of a new social contract, one Hobbes never could have considered (nor could any of today's Anthropocene enthusiasts), that preserves information packages, the highest value (transformity) product (flower and fruit) of our non-viable civilization, if acting out of insight and understanding, becomes choiceless.  Freedom becomes the recognition of necessity.

 

NOTE TO FILE 8/3/2023

Of possible historical interest, Jack Alpert's post of 7/31/2023

Dear Steve,  cc Don Chisholm,  Rob Mielcarski 

 

Jack, 

------------------------

So, having talked with Jack by phone about his suggestion that a new group be started, I started one, as Steve K suggested, as a subgroup of Blue Planet Club with I started in 2020, own, and pay for. I made Don co-owner. I did not post and while the group has some members, it remains inactive. The proposed new group is closed, by invitation only, not viewable to members of the Blue Planet Club (BPC), but would share the URL and appear as a subgroup associated with BPC.

By email sent to Don, Marjorie, and I:

As it stands there are 3 groups existing. I think that’s a bad idea. Two should be all. I don’t care about precise names.

Steve

Don agrees. Steve owns the GaiaPC group and Don owns the BPC group. The new group, to be unassociated, with be a subgroup of a group I started three years ago that is inactive (i.e. new, no members). Like BPC, it is open to allowing new member to self-select into the group, is not closed, so the proposed new group, with Ruben as only active member so far (I am qualified to provide webmaster services and my wife, Sue, is qualified to private message members should any moderation be required).

My view is that if Jack does not want to join, that if viable mass and joule concerns are not included, that no viable future for humanity is possible. With Ruben, I also view getting "form of civilization" issues correct (which involves changing the current form) as needed if humans are to have a viable future. I would expect all potential members to have existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere, or to boil it down to one word, posterity. The focus of the proposed group would be a viable future for posterity, which implies concerns that the current trajectory of humanity is not viable long term.

The new group is identical. The URL is different. It is a subgroup of Existenial Concerns for the Biosphere and Humanity.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/4/2023

I suspect that the reason for the current methodology used by GFN [Global Footprint Network] is normative practicality. The human population probably went into overshoot around the sixteenth century or earlier, but promulgating that kind of knowledge would have minimal effect on modern sensibilities because it relegates 95% of the population to an early death. If you're trying to get people to move in the right direction the destination has to seem reasonably close and allow a moderate chance of getting there. 1.7 earths seems far more easy to deal with than 20 earths; we might have a chance at swimming across a lake, but swimming the Atlantic is too big an ask.

Even so, despite the positive value of promoting the concept of overshoot by the GFN, the effect of the EF metric on the larger economy has been negligible. Considering the politics of the countries that are deepest into overshoot, like the US, it's possible that nothing will have any effect on resolving overshoot except resource depletion and environmental blowback. And even when the time comes that those forces are felling large swathes of the population, I suspect most people will still deny that it's due to overshoot.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/11/2023

About a week or two ago there was a very interesting perspective posed on this list. In a word it’s called : Denial. Humans appear to be the only mammals that know, at some level, that they will die.
But we have devised a number of ways to blur this fact. Consider a social technology called religion. By concentrating on “doing good” etc humans can avoid the end stage and effectively deny their end. Ditto with the various negative behaviours that possibly or probably will lead to global calamity. Well we deal with this in a variety of ways that to some degree echo the empty religious behaviour. Re-cycling, EV cars, light bulb change etc etc. This makes us feel like we are doing something to stave off planetary death.

Do we deal with overpopulation? No. Do we deal with limits to growth? No. Do we deal with loss of topsoil? No.

We keep on doing a range of activities that taken together spell out: Denial.
I think that the MPP is alive and well and with its twin, Denial there is little hope that we can avoid the inevitable.

Arthur

-----------------------------

Arthur,

You’ve nailed it in my opinion.

Steve

----------------------------

Steve is listserv owner. I could beg to differ, but only for a time. If I did, the likely outcome, based on numerous prior beggings, would be my post would be ignored. If I provoked a response, it would be reactive and without consideration of points offered. This is a closed group. I have twice attempted to clarify the group's belief-based view of MPP and MORT-based denial as not precluding, long term (post collapse), a viable outcome for humanity and the biosphere, but zero responce, i.e. claims ignored, not within the consensus narrative.

That we cannot avoid the inevitable is doomer speak for nothing to do, other than note the evidence that I'm right. So where's that latte I ordered?

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/2/2023

A couple of quick hits:

·         I agree that our MTI form of civilization and the MTI cultures which exemplify it have no long term future.  Not much fun making this point over and over.

·         However, in my mind, discussion of any (all) of these topics is still useful if only to test and see if we have sound and agreed responses to these questions:

o   What are the root presuppositions of MTI cultures; the foundations on which all else rests and which determine its key features?  (I want to get away from simply saying we need a future that transforms Modernity.  Without a sound understanding of what MTI is we will never know when we have truly escaped its influences and when we are inadvertently reinforcing them.  For example, as I see it, MTI cultures are the most “solutions” oriented cultures on earth.  For that reason I stay away from the language of solutions.  Better MTI cultures cannot deal with the mess of complex living messes in which we find ourselves.  What we have cannot be “fixed”, only transcended.)

[In 1975, Charles Hall pubished his first paper on big overview thinking in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The editors featured a quote, "The future well-being of man requires intelligent management of the biosphere using limited inputs from the industriosphere" Wrong, it seems, on two accounts. Our viable future (ability to persist) may not require intelligence, such as too clever by half clothed apes possess, to manage the biosphere. What seems lacking is an ability to stand down from our hubris heights and realize, in the same way as sticking your hand in fire burns, that we primates cannot, full stop, manage the biosphere, whether as biotic, industrial, or climatic subsystems. There is hope in that such limitations as don't go away because ignored can be realized by some, e.g. Charles Fowler in Systemic Management 2009. What we may be able to do to persist is realize our nature as subsystems of Gaia. This worldview would determine that we seek only to manage (govern) our demands per capita, and manage our numbers, to remain well within the carrying capacity of whatever watershed or subwatershed area that enables us to persist, as our K-strategist ancesors did as evidenced by their persistence, by listening to Nature, whether with our genes or memes, who has all the answers. Managing human demands on Nature's resources would be the axis about which all behavior and thougt would have to revolve, i.e. the MTI form, remorselessly humancentric, would end, either by extinction or being replaced by a naturcentric form of civilization, e.g. the Kogi. All presuppositions would be sujected to the flames of an all consuming doubt to see if any viable memes persist, memes (elements of culture/worldview) that select for persistence. Nature as system determines what works to persist. Humans get no vote, but must choicelessly listen to Mother.]

o   What are the key moves that would nudge us beyond our formation as MTI persons, groups, cultures?

[In a word, failure. When the global economy faultered with the Great Depression, paradigm shifting change became possible, (e.g. Technocracy, which would eliminate nation states and politics, the monetary culture of political animals, among other changes). Such change, e.g. formation of a naturocracy, is currently unthinkable, per all evidence. When our collective belief in, consensus narrative about, ourselves as MTIed ones, collapses, an alternative narrative, worldview, could be considered by some, perhaps enough, if the alt worldview (antithetical to MTI worldview) could be envisioned now, before climax and descent. We, the MTI system, must fail, sooner being better. Persistence of humans may depend on the preopared mind, on minds able to change now by seeking out conditions that will come anyway.]

o   How is being an critically-minded, but unreflexive, MTI person different from becoming/being a person who is consciously seeking to transcend her/his/their own MTI formation?

[MTIed humans traffic in belief-based certitudes/presuppositions, such as a belief in agency/free will. A concept may have utility, but the belief in the things of mind may select for failure. Alternative would be to not believe in belief as a cultural norm, such that if any believing mind were to arise, cognitive therapy/containment would be the responce. A culture could include the meme that there are no true memes, concepts, or models, that while some models have value, they are not the thing modeled, e.g. a climate model is not the climate. We humans, nor our AI, can know any complex system, anymore than a dog can understand calculus. Our limitations approach infinity. The story, told by the storytelling animal, that there are no true stories, would enable metareflexivity and perhaps persistence of a viable form of naturcentric human.]

A worldview based on "are wrong" would be different, would select for a different outcome.

o   What kind of work is entailed in learning to move beyond one’s own formation?  How long does it take to get good at it?  How much progress can one expect in a lifetime?

[Intentionally standing down from our hubris heights would be the height of hubris. We can fall down and tell a story about this being the best thing that could happen to us (not remotely viable form of hu-man as evidenced, not believed) HUbris-MAN Swarm. Humilitas is the condition that will come anyway. Accepting our place as subsystems, one of millions, is one form of standing/falling down. Muttering under our breath before death is another (non-viable) coming too late. Underestimating the difficulty of renormalizing will have our dissolution as outcome. A guess is that if each generation focus on recovery, is a product of a transitional form of civilization that focuses on renormalized per a life-driven purpose to persist, that in 8 to 20 generations, with each generation measureable more functional that the last, that the transistional form of hu-mans of NIMH could give raise to a form of naturcentric civilization/culture that selects, metareflexively, for what works by listening to Nature, to the contengincies of what works to persist. Per prior collapse of complex societies, extinction can be expected if recovery/transistion takes more than 200 to 500 years. A transitioned form of civilization would have to iterate towards a form that monitors for a reemergence of MTI pathologies and successfully contain them, just as a viable organism's body must contain a metastatic form of itself.]

o   How might we help good people who through no fault of their own are trapped in their formation as MTI persons, in MTI families, in MTI cultures begin to understand that much (most?) of the “sustainability” action today is still trying to save Modernity, not transcend it; that most of what official bodies are up to is well-intended, but ill-directed?

[From Spinoza I acquired some insight into potential change, i.e. that to understand a pathological condition, e.g. MTI society, is to be delivered from the condition. I am a product of and serve the MTI system. I differ in that as my understanding has changed, my enthusiasum for serving it has diminished such that walking away is thinkable. Ursula K. Le Guin intuited the alternitive to her BAU world, i.e. when one's 'understanding' of one's trapped condition as a domesticant comes, that understanding is the source of one's choicelessly walking away form Omelas (MTIndustiosphere) into what can only be an unknown because unknowable way of life to MTIed ones. All the people living in Omelas, the most perfected society we MTIed ones could envision, were all as good as they could be, but such isn't good enough to persist. Unlike the people of Omelas, we are empowered, not by the suffering of one unfortunate child, the away to which we could through of misery, but we do depend on our energy slaves whose service is destroying a planetary life-support system, and and instead of merely on unforutunate child in our present, our present freedom and prosperty is based on the futre suffering of billions, or our posterity to may come who will pay our overshoot debt we have and most still are, enthusiastically incurring. Our 300 years of exponential growth is nearing climax and descent, is incomplatible with MTI promiseds. The MTI worldview will collapse. Will there be a viable one to offer those few who walk away from our Omelas? I don't, and you don't either. Know, however, with some high degree of probability, that going down with one's ship of state will have a non-viable outcome, whether in 50, 500, or 5,000 years. Understand or die.]

Of course, I am open to the questions posed by others as topics on which we might chew together.

Ruben

 

9/16/2023 SUBNOTE TO FILE (ignored)

I had just realize I needed to share this morning's epiphany to add to last night's prattle. Steve sent a copy of his response as I get the Daily Digest and usually don't get around to looking at it until late in the day (often night) to allow others to add to the latest buzz. So post-epiphany, the first thing I read after screenrise was Steve's email. Short reply: agreed.

As for what at the moment looks like an epiphany, which may seem the starkest madness tomorrow. I read Odum in 1971 by chance and realized about 45 years later, after reading an offering from Brown's Emergy Society, that I was an Odumite, that my worldview had been spawned in substantial part by memes that came together in his mind's eye. 

At about the same time I realized that the other source of my worldview/mindset was my reading of Limits to Growth in 1972, and that Donella Meadows, lead writer, was the other source of memes that mattered. I have long been puzzled as to why the two had seemingly not met, had not intellectually come together in "a marriage of true minds." 

Charlie's latest offering, together with co-author Timothy McWhirter who is the likely source, included the note that Friedrich Nietzsche's "will to power" was recognition of MPP at work. The bigger idea was that Nietzsche was the 19th century's "cultural physician." Nietzsche recognized that modernity was in need of diagnosis and treatment which required a "revaluation of all values," an essential idea I got from him, thank you Friedrich.

The new to me idea was the connection to Odum, the view of Odum as the 20th century's "cultural physician," who corrected for missing elements Nietzsche could not, being a pre-systems science thinker, offer, i.e. Odum's "better view"

 "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

H.T. failed, but perhaps he was merely ahead of his time, and by the end of this century his better view will be better known or better, be common knowledge, which it would be when the current education (schooling) system is replaced. Otherwise, his failure will also be humanity's.

Donella was in the same boat, but seemingly never the twain met. There was some impediment. This leads, as it commonly does, to Shakespeare: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments." This morning I realized that the 20th century had not one, but two cultural physicians that together could offer a worldview/mindset the rest of us other would-be if we could-be cultural physicians, who range from Ruben to Jack, a better view we can be guided by. If posterity is to have a viable future, perhaps the extremes can find a common ground in an Odum-Donella marriage of true minds. We need to do the work of not admitting impediments, distractions.

For years I've realized that Odum's "better view" was accessible to too few, but that Donella's expression was perhaps accessible to enough to allow for a paradigm shift from our non-viable r-culture back to (sankofa) a viable form of K-culture for enough (0.001% to 0.1% could be enough?) to allow for a long term viable outcome, e.g. to Lovelock's "human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly." 



We Anthropocene enthusiasts (some less enthusiastic, such as myself, than others) cannot understand nor live with the planet (Gaia) long term per MPP, so we must mutate or die. My point (and Odum's) is that MPP in an evolvable system selects for a different outcome than in a dissipative structure (George Mobus' words even though hurricanes are systems, they are not evolvable, a major distinction, so I tend to use 'dissipative structure', e.g. the MTI form of civilization vs 'evolvable system', i.e. a form of civilization that listens to Nature). If we don't understand our wicked dynamic, then as Garvin Boyle noted, "we are doomed to go with it, right to the final curtain." If we remain wed to empire building as dissipative structure, then posterity is doomed even if I die sipping my latte or even if after the crash of the global overcomplex empire there is recovery but only to repeat the pattern.

My best guess is that only we have the potential to understand our wicked dynamic as evidenced by posterity being delivered from it. If we don't go extinct this go-round, and recovery begins with no literate, numerate, and ecolate humans having passed trough the bottleneck, then repeating the patterning will have no viable outcome. Extinction will just take longer and life on Earth will be degraded further. Or as E.O. Wilson noted, "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...".

 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/25/2023

Degrowth: Consumption per capita degrowth and population degrowth are 2 different things

Concerning https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-09-24/stephanie-roza-philosopher-being-in-favor-of-degrowth-is-anti-progressive-there-are-countries-that-need-to-grow.html

At the stage humanity is at now, no country needs to grow its population. [by births>deaths and immigration, but most developed countries are to increase per capita consumption/grow the economy]

Per capita consumption sure, some countries need to grow that but population? No. [Nor consumption, they need to degrow population faster to increase per capita consumption to enough without increasing total consumption.]

Of course, some people having their brain stuck in the last 2 centuries will conflate population degrowth and per capita consumption GDP degrowth and bring in anachronic left/right debates. [Some? As in all conventional economists, political, business and thought leaders?]

She doesn't need to worry about enforced degrowth. Degrowth will happen but not voluntarily. The reasons can be found in the MPP/2nd Law of thermodynamics. [agree, MPP=4th Law]

******
Life is essentially an entropy-increasing process

Humans are entropy-increasing bots like everything else. They can talk degrowth as much as they can, they can't go do it because of the way they're wired. [All organisms and metastatic cancers are entropy-increasing bots, but some bots are selected for long term and others, dissipative structures, are not. Modern techno-industrial society is a non-evolvable dissipative structure as is a supercell or cancer.]

They will use all resources at their disposal, consume them and/or use some of them to get access to even more resources. [Expansionist r-culture does, but K-strategists, for over 500 million years, have evolved to live within limits, like somatic cells have as long as they remain non-carcinogenic.]

The way humans would describe this is that they use resources to reduce their suffering or increase their wellbeing. [K-culture humans use resources within limits by adjusting population, while we r-culture humans do not. This is as much a difference as between a normal somatic cell and a cancer cell, which viewed under a microscope are identical unless viewed over time. 'Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell' and modern humans including those who pretend to be degrowth, as a belief-based affectation, for political advantage. If your mortal political enemy is pro-growth, then you can virtue-signal by being degrowth and making claims about how much better degrowth with prosperity will be.]

The way nature has ''this set up'' is that it ''wants'' conversion of concentrated energy into dispersed energy (aka heat). [2nd law.] 

So, to get humans (or other animals) to do what it ''wants'' them to do, it brings them relief when they convert energy into heat (that is when they consume them). [Behaviorally, humans and other animals have a capacity to be reinforced by gains and punished by losses. Individuals that maximize short-term self interest may prosper, and be lethal to the population, i.e. population and individuals go extinct. “What has survival value for the individual may be lethal for the population…” — Gregory Bateson]

*******
Would being conscious of the necessity to degrow modify behavior? 

Don't think so.
IMHO, it is an error to believe that if enough people came to understand let's say, Bill Rees' message, i.e that the only way out of overshoot requires degrowth policies, degrowth policies would be adopted, be enforced and work. [Believing Bill and understanding the dynamics of complex systems so far as humanly possible are different cognitive pathways that are incompatible. A viable culture cannot be founded on both, and one, which dominates r-culture, is non-viable.]

Even if a high number of people would understand and acknowledge that degrowth is the only way to avoid an abrupt collapse of standards of living, I'm not sure still that humans could really modify their behavior anyway. [There is no evidence organisms modify their own behavior as agents. The concept 'agent' is not 'out there' but is a social construct narrative some humans tell to serve their interests. Behavior is selected for by the 'rules of the game', the contingencies of reinforcement that are the system a subsystem or organism is embedded in.]

*****
It's not because I'm aware that I'm an entropy-increasing bot that this will make me stop being an entropy-increasing bot. [But last week I planted two 1 m redwoods under whose shade I will not sit. Understanding where best to plant them and how far apart alters future probabilities. Understanding what a viable form of human would look like and aiming for it may increase the probability of hitting what I aim for--long term persistence of my species and all other subsystems of the Gaian system our persistence depends on with all due competitive coevolution with pathogens and parasites. The idea of curing/ending death is profoundly insapient, inecolate, an anti-life absurdity our r-culture celebrates. Understanding that some entropy-increasing bots are selected for can choicelessly alter behavior, including cognitive.]

****
Civilization is a heat-engine (no matter how you power it) -Tim Garrett

And if you take this up at the collective level, there is just no way the global organism that civilization is can put the breaks and go in reverse, i.e see the adoption of degrowth policies. Governments won't go there, businesses even less so of course and people neither. Again, they can talk about it but they can't do it. There is simply no break pedal let alone a reverse gear. [The modern techno-industrial expansionist r-culture dynamic is doomed to keep on keeping on as a metastatic cancer in a body is, and all who are products of it, who serve it, depend upon it, who remain a part of it, will dissipate. Knowing that you are an ant on a log, and knowing that the log has no viable future, could allow for the unthinkable thought of getting off.]

The other problem, of course, at the collective level, is that if someone, a country or even an entire continent (Europe) were to start voluntarily degrowing (which is impossible anyway), others would jump on the unconsumed resources. [Jevons.]

Degrowth is the only way out but it cannot take place voluntarily. [Social contracts, that all ants who get off the log agree to, i.e. the new 'rules of the game', can select for a different outcome (persistence) because no body gets a vote. Nature alone deterministically selects for what works to persist long term. Systemic management involves defining the rules that apply only to humans by listening to Nature who embodies what works long term, as humans cannot manage the Gaian system.]

There is just no way out. [for modern techno-industrial society, now global, nor any form of expansionist r-culture humans]

Collapse will happen at the moment it has always been set to happen, and no one individually or collectively has ever had or will ever have the possibility to modify the timing or the circumstances under which it will take place. [Quite so. That the log going down the river to the falls goes over is foreseeable. Whether any ants get off and renormalize is not. Currently there is no indication any will try. The would-try option may be more likely to have a viable outcome than not trying and going over the falls to the rocks of dissolution.]

Believing otherwise is a reflection of anthropocentrism IMO. [Conjecture: a capacity to believe in belief was a precondition for the arising of an r-culture expansionist form of human 50k to 60k years ago, one that was/is antithetical to 6 million years of K-culture hominins. K-culture = nature centric non-posterity-blind worldview/mindset; r-culture = human centric posterity-blind short-term self interest worldview/mindset that selects for its own termination, as metastatic cancer does.]

Only thing that can be done is to try to understand how collapse is likely to unfold and make predictions about the timing and circumstances of that unfolding. [When, where, how details may help to sidestep genocide, being a resourse for the taking and taken, on the downslope, aka the Great Selection. Persisting as a non-viable form of human is a distraction, irrelevant long term. Determine by best-guess what might work long term. We get maybe 25k small scale guesses. Test each and see what works and scale up to renormalize humans back to an evolvable form and globally organize them (Gaia governance=systemic management) into a minimally complex society that is able to detect the arising of expansionistic forms (metastatic) of humans (that foreseeably will arise) and contain/neutralize them. Failure of Gaia governance of humans will lead to a repetition of the last 5k-7k years of human regional empire building that will further degrade the Gaian system prior to human extinction, whether in 5k or 50k years.]

Trying to prevent it or even modify its course is pointless IMO. [Right. The log goes over. Human extinction? Remnant populations, after 500 years of environmental recovery, get back to empire building? A form of human that understands the planet and live with it properly (per Gaian rules) to become Agents of Earth so respecieation takes less than 10 million years instead of 10-20 million years?]

The 2nd Law, not humans, is pulling the strings. [Actually the 4th law, as proposed by H.T. Odum, pulls the strings: Nature selects for [through the process of trial and error] self-organizing, complex, open thermodynamic systems [including complex societies] that persist by maximizing empower [MEP, Odum's version of MPP] within a pulsing paradigm. K-strategists that overpulse to maximize short-term empower, that end up destroying/degrading the system that contains them, are selected against long term. Life on Earth is the outcome. Cancer and empire are short-term pathologies. Not all complex societies build empires. For industrial humans to persist in a viable form, they will have to understand their pathology and seek out the condition now that will come anyway, i.e. live as K-strategists by foundationally different rules of the game (a social contract) that select for behavior that works long term as Nature (who has all the answers) determines.]

*****
Purpose of life: As one of Nature's tools, it is to convert concentrated energy into dispersed energy. [Purposeful behavior of organisms that maximizes the empower of the world system (Gaia) is selected for by degrading concentrated energy into heat]

Life is about converting concentrated energy into dispersed energy (heat).

And humans will continue to do this more and more as much as they can until they are forced by resource depletion or too much pollution to do this less and less but even at that point, they will still try to do it as much as they can. That's the very nature of life and of the Universe as dictated by the 2nd Law. [And modern humans, all expansionist r-culture humans, will continue to do................................. 4th Law.]

Humans will continue to do this more and more, even if it causes their own extinction. [Per pass local human population extinction events, 80% chance of extinction, 20% chance of recovery to repeat the pattern. One example of renomalizing after collapse, by all modern humans would rather die first, and likely will.]

Here's a good video on entropy:

At 18min 15:

''...it has been suggested that life is a consequence of the 2nd law of thermodynamics...'

Well, yeah, I would think it should be more than a suggestion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA

Have a good night/day,

Philippe

And MPP/4th Law in 8:21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e2kRaARuhk

and Garvin Boyle in 24 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2luS33D4kEw

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE: 10/2/2023 The short of it

People have to eat. And that means that consumption has to be below ecological production after we burn through the stored reservoirs. 

But for people to eat, energy consumption also has to be below energy deliveries after we burn through stored reservoirs. 

If it turns out that energy delivery after reservoir exhaustion feeds less people than ecological production — then energy flows will ensure that global human footprint is below ecological production. 

Energy flows maybe a better indicator of overshoot.

What does an ecological civilization look like.? I have mutated that question to — what civilization design does not produce injury. That civilization fits inside energy deliveries after loss of crustal reservoir exhaustion and will consume ecological resources far below ecological production [is a given].

It won’t last forever but it might sneak the human experiment on earth through Catton’s bottleneck.

60 minutes ”A non-injury producing Civilization" https://youtu.be/dYR5Ix-1wMs

Jack Alpert

On Sun, Oct 1, 2023 at 06:42 PM, Alice Friedemann wrote:

I expect that future to look like the past

Our future will look nothing like our past, our climate and our ecosystems have already diverged significantly from past experience.  This divergence is set to continue at an exponential rate.  This Ecopoieses manifesto reflects the type of agonising waffle that you will witness in all the groups that I mentioned as 'evidence of the paradigm shift' that is currently underway.  I call this process 'intellectualising' the problem.  This is a delay tactic that is used by academics worldwide to avoid facing up to the key drivers of all our problems which are as follows:

• Our addiction to growing our Population, Affluence and Technology (I=PAT)
• Our addiction to growing our dependence on energy supplies (the Jevons paradox)

This intellectualisation has prevented us for years from challenging the cultural issues that drive these addictions.  We need to rethink Maslow's hierarchy of Needs, because the top levels are indulgences that we simply cannot afford until we return to 'safe' levels of global consumption.

Love B

And to rethink Maslow's relentlessly human centric hierarchy of needs:

 

Notes: 'system over self' is H.T. Odum from his '10 commandments of the energy ethic for survival of man in nature'. I mentioned to Mary Odum that I would sum up her father's 'better view' in these three words and she agreed. The quote in the sun is T.S. Eliot as we need to listen to all who endeavor the listen to the nature of things whether from the humanities or sciences. We start in the green and end in the green, to perhaps know the place for the first time. The 'Nature has all the answers...' is another Odum quote, and that 'we are the environment' is from Suzuki's farewell lecture. And 'love and understand', as in to love this earth and understand the things of the implicate order, the heart-mind unity of xin in Chinese philosophy (Taoism). Heart needs to love, and mind to understand. And that people don't 'know their needs from their wants' is my mother's frequent comment on modern peoples. The endeavor to understand is love and (Spinoza) 'deliverance'. The 'hundredth generation' is Jack Alpert. Without xin, we humans are dysfunctional, denormalized animals. Without Sol, there would be no biosphere, and energy is the wealth of species. More words, words, words. An omitted meme is 'understand or die'. Do we need to love and understand? To persist? No, 'Nature is unkind', Laozi/Mother.

 

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"Perhaps humanity's destiny is to die-off from non-reproduction."

Calhoun created mouse/rat biophysical utopias, in so far as possible, that were pathogen free, predator free, with illimitable food, water, bedding, and within the only limit of volume, nest boxes (which were almost never, if ever, in short supply). All iterations of his experiments involving domesticants (like us) had the same outcome—behavioral sink observable within a few generations ending in non-reproductive extinction within 8 to 12 generations due to overdensity population conditions.

His rats/mice didn't have pizza, Netflix, and video games to distract themselves, nor guns to kill each other or themselves, nor drugs to commit slow feel-good suicide, They where not nearly as advanced as we are and didn't even have mental health professionals to write Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals to treat humans of NIMH (National Institute of Menth Health), which have to be rewritten every generation or so to normalize those conditions the mental health professionals (and many others) are experiencing, which are now normal and so need to be removed from the DSM-6 (they are working on that version now).

Rats are different from humans. Our verbal behavior is more complex. On our downslope there will be scarcity. As history notes, marauding hordes will consume those who do not join them, then when the perhaps still viable ones, who did not join them, have been taken, the remaining pieces-of-work will turn on each other in a race to the bottom (extinction).

Imagine you're a normal human (e.g. San, Kogi). Consider what 8-20 generations on the MTI upslope hath wrought. Now note that without any recovery, the continued denormalization on the downslope will select for a host of pathologies we now consider to not be normal.

Regional collapse without outside conquest/intervention (e.g. Easter Island) has extinction as outcome (80% of cases). And worse, a 20% chance of recovery to then repeat the pattern. If a remnant but non-viable long-term population passes through Catton's bottleneck, extinction may take longer. Maybe 5k years. Maybe 50k years to degrade environmental productivity planet wide enough that no clever and resourceful expansionistic apes can persist.

The only viable outcome will be if a viable form of human passes through the bottleneck, renormalizes, AND prevents the expansionist form of human from persisting in any form, or rearising as it foreseeably will.

On the six hundred year downslope of the Indus Valley Civilization, no literate Harappan may have been able to pass on their literacy/numeracy beyond one or two generations, so no written record of their endgame. They declined to regional extinction. We can tell likely stories about what happen post climax to extinction, but that they left only ruins with clues (e.g. unburied human bodies in streets) is all we know. Working to make sure we leave a written record of the next 500 to 1000 years (global extinction may take longer) may be misplaced optimism.

Sidestepping the downslope and, as humans of NIMH endeavoring to renormalize, all while living within limits (environmental mass/joule, social complexity/density, loss of functional behavior...), is to consider (while some humans still have the leisure to), but only if a viable pathway is also envisioned and implemented.

"Houston, the planet has been taken. And now what?"
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE: 10/9/2023

Between games of solitaire I may find time to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing. So I have plenty to do to maybe serve posterity. That there are not 8 million others who agree is curious.

 

 

10/10/2023 SUBNOTE TO FILE

“In the early 21st Century, do we who are Modern TechnoIndustrial (MTI) peoples and cultures really know who we are and what we are doing?”

“Is our grasp on reality as surefooted as we assume it is?”

“Are the ways we identify the existential risks to our future, and to the future of so much we love about this planet, as reliable as we claim they are?”

“Or, is there a serious chance that we are kidding ourselves; that we are simply wrong about the superiority of the routine ways we present ourselves to, grasp and respond to reality; that today we are in a kind of trouble that is both far deeper and far different from that which we now claim it is?”

... What we allow ourselves to know as real is the key to seeing what needs to be done, thinking/feeling our way through it well enough to be able to get it done, all without having to be told what to know, see, think or do.

—Where are we in History? Reflections on the New Core Work of the 21st Century 2023

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 10/30/2023

Bill has nailed the most distinctive defining feature of MTI [Modern Techno-Industrial] cultures – we know, see, imagine, think and act as if reality was not relational, but piece meal – not a mess (system) of complex living systems with remarkable degrees of coherency.  This is a major shift from the underlying ontological and epistemological presuppositions (OEP) of pre-MTI agriculture-based cultures.

The following is a bit is from a piece I am now working on regarding the future of human civilization:

In order to understand the core shift at the OEP level and see where it has taken us, what it has given us and what awaits us, I have developed a fantasy centred on Thomas Aquinas, the great Roman Catholic theologian.  Note that Aquinas is not thought of or promoted by the Catholic Church as a father of our MTI world.  To the contrary, the church sees his systematic mind is seen as a bulwark against the evils of the fragmentation of life by modernity.  However, in my imagination we who are MTI persons in MTI cultures owe Thomas a debt of gratitude.  In the 13th Century, he added his voice and his authority to the legitimization of the fragmentation of reality. 

Picture Thomas Aquinas with his students at the University of Paris in the mid-13th Century.  As a relational systems thinker he has taught his students to observe patters of thought and not just individual details.  He has also taught them that it is permissible, but only to a limited degree, to think of the Earth without God, of nature without grace.  Picking up this thought, one of his students asks,

“Professor Aquinas, if it is permissible to think of nature without grace in limited matters, can we generalize this pattern of seeing and thinking about one thing without another?  Can we also see and think of theology without philosophy or of men without women, or of chemistry without physics, or of either of these without the history of chemistry or physics?  If we learn to do this systematically, could we even develop a culture in which reality is neither systemic nor relational, but fragmented and piece meal; a reality in which the timeless primordial God-given elements are not the whole system, but individual pieces of reality?  If so, how long would it take our culture to evolve into such a new form of civilization in which all cultures functionally assume an unchanging and piece meal reality?  What would such a culture be like?  Would such a culture be spiritually and psychologically satisfying?  Would it be sustainable?  Would it be able to know that it is not sustainable and deal with its condition before it disintegrated?” 

In time Aquinas replies:  “Such good questions.  They stretch our imagination, even if we already know that such a form of civilization is ungodly, if not impossible.  I shall take up you questions:  As I imagine things, it would take almost one thousand years for such a new form of civilization to emerge full blown.  It would look like a giant machine that is consuming the whole Earth and all life forms who inhabit the Earth, including us as persons.  In such a machine, people would be rewarded extrinsically, not intrinsically.  They would have to compete endlessly with each other for the reward of a place at the table.  No, as you can see, such a culture would not be psychologically and spiritually satisfying.  And, no, it would not be sustainable.  In time, it would not only exhaust the resources and life forms of the Earth, but worse, it would exhaust the spirit of the people.  Finally and tragically, because the cultures in such a world would be both context and culture-blind, the people in such a culture would not know that their cultures are destined to collapse out from under them and form within them.  The collapse of their form of civilization would blindside them because the collapse will be inconceivable to them.  They will accuse one another of doing this to them by stealth.  They will die without understanding why they are dying.  This is the worst kind of death.  We must dedicate our lives to ensure that such a tragedy never happens.”

And so, 770 years later, here we are.  Yes, it takes while for a change in the underlying logic of a culture to be worked out and acted upon with any degree of consistency.  It appears that 1,000 years is enough.  (You can see precursors of this imagination in some bits of the art, architecture, music and poetry of Europe since 1,000 CE.)  Since almost none of this understood today, even among most scientists, it is not surprising that lots of folks who have an inkling that systems need changing think that this can be done in a historical flash.  Sadly, this is not the case.

Ruben

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I confess I read Ruben's missives and even think about them. As evidence, this morning's SUBNOTE TO FILE:

Media vita in morte sumus, "In the midst of life we are in death." I will take such verities as I can consider as presented, even if the source is a medieval monk who makes questionable claims, e.g. the rest of the chant: "of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? O holy God, O holy and strong, O holy and merciful Saviour, deliver us not to bitter death." Of course I can update the monk via Spinoza and continue to sing along off-key. Instead of a merciful Saviour, I see a "Nature (Dao) is unkind," as Laozi has the better ring-of-truth view. Billions of humans are poised to "die without understanding why they are dying." How could they not so die? Hhow could they know why, being multi-generational products of MTI society, especially the highly educated?

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/10/2023

Exerpts from Feb. 2023 essay, Where are we in History? Reflections on the New Core Work of the 21st Century Ruben F. W. Nelson.

Make no mistake, we face an extraordinary, even historically unprecedented, challenge. The collapse of our MTI cultures is now guaranteed. Escaping the grip of our MTI formation is now required. Nevertheless, even these events are not the end of the game. While vitally important steps, they are only a moment of personal and cultural evolution in a much longer story. The heart of the story is our willingness to learn to undertake work which is utterly new in human history – to consciously and reflexively nurture into robust and resilient being persons, communities and whole cultures which transcend, out-grow, our MTI formation. Those who embrace this work will have good reasons to get out of bed every morning. May there be many, since the emergence of the next form of human civilization depends very much on us.

As you can see, this piece is directed primarily to those of us who are reasonably successful Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) persons who live within reasonably successful MTI cultures. It is directed to us because we who are successful MTI persons in successful MTI cultures are the ones who, largely unwittingly, have created the conditions which have made post-despair hope an unavoidable requirement for living well in the 21st Century. We who are MTI peoples and cultures bear the primary responsibility for creating the life-threatening mess of complex living messes in which almost eight billion people on planet Earth now find themselves enmeshed. Since our MTI cultures dominate the planet with increasing thoroughness, the extraordinary challenges we face are largely our doing. By our past and present actions we have forced all others to share our fate with us. Because of us, the long-term future of all humanity and much else that we love about this Earth is now in question. Given our dominance, if we who are MTI fail, the human experiment on this Earth may well fail. At the least, it will be so severely damaged that rebuilding flourishing MTI cultures will no longer be an option.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/15/2023 A SUMMARY OF MODERNITY, THE MONETARY CULTURE

Steven B Kurtz November 14, 2023

From the perspective of most governments of developed countries, GDP/capita isn’t important. All I know of have huge national debts which increase yearly. Politicians seek re-election, and rarely increase taxes. They depend upon more taxpayers feeding the beast. Contributions from businesses support growth policies as well. Managers are paid based upon profits. Unfortunately the general populace is increasingly undereducated about systemic thinking. They are suckers for the myth of the growth god. Individual well-being is not understood holistically. And the power elite have so far been largely able to insulate themselves as environmental and social conditions have been deteriorating, in my view for at least half a century.

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Just because, I added the full abstracts for each article and [with a few comments] turned it into another Medium offering.

Evolution and Sustainability: Gathering the Strands for an Anthropocene Synthesis

Philosophical Transactions of the The Royal Society, Volume 379, Issue 1893, 1 January 2024

 

Eric,

Thanks for sharing this. 

I have a question of clarification, if a short answer is possible.  (Don’t go to a lot of work.) 

I have not read the material as yet. 

I see that the assumption is “that global sustainability is possible for Modern Techno-Industrial society,”

Q.  Was it assumed by the folks involved that MTI cultures can become sustainable:

A. while remaining within the presuppositions that have framed and still frame MTI cultures, or

B. by evolving into cultures which are sustainable by some process of transitioning to a new set of cultural presuppositions, (and that such a transition is possible), or

            C. this matter is still under discussion, or

            D. this matter was not surfaced as a critical question, or

            E. none of the above, as a quite different angle of approach was taken.

 

Thanks again,

Ruben

 

Ruben,

Based on only reading the abstracts, my initial impression is most of the 79 authors were on the sustainability debate side and not the evolution/biology/systems ecology side, and I'm still reading one of the four I intend to read. But maybe someone knows someone who, as an exercise for the student, would assess the authors and read the articles, then answer your important-to-ask questions. This seriously should be done if the offerings are a fair zeitgeist of current educated thinking. I may feel compelled to it, if I run out of better things to do, as I'd like to take a close look at what these authors are thinking (without thinking good or bad). I'm guessing that some of the authors manage to quietly, briefly state, no all caps in boldface, what they really think, knowing it will be viewed as a confession of bias.

Eric

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/27/2023

"The future is not so much to be predicted as to be selected." --Donella Meadows

My reading of Donella was different, as in "to be selected by the system" as subsystems like us don't 'get a vote', don't get to choose outcomes, the future. If there is a missile to Shangri-La (recently discovered to be not on Earth but another planet) is about to take off, and Jack points out that there is not enough fuel onboard to reach escape velocity (it will arc back to Earth and all die--it's a mass joules thing), and you 'do the math' and are forced to agree, then you don't get onboard, i.e. you cannot choose to however much you may want to (the missile launches, reaches Shangri-La, and it turns out that the mass-fuel data had been faked so those who believe in science wouldn't get onboard). 

A belief in human choice or agency is part of our condition that will select for our dissolution. To understand the remorselessness of a socioeconomic-political dynamic results in a condition of choicelessness, which may be the way out of our impasse.

That "for every impasse there is a way out" (a quote I recall but cannot identify the source, best guess Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy) is not true, is not the usual outcome, but it is adaptive to assume, as otherwise no endeavor to find a way out will ensue. Our wicked meta-problem may require a wicked meta-solution such as choicelessly listening to Nature who has all the answers (which might come when enough humans realize that not doing so isn't working for them--Monbiot actually wakes up, writes another book, and...). When 'things fall apart', humans will listen to demagogues with solutions and pick one to follow, but no laws of the universe would be violated if some not entirely insignificant number felt compelled to listen to Gaia (the Gaian system) instead.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/7/2023

Jessie -- Influenced by social systems collapse (as in your examples), systems cave in, crumble, I think, when they fail to inspire joy in participation in their newer/more creative (less entrained) participants. With individuated participants the case is a failure of the whole to function smoothly because of the accumulation of many small physical insults in various parts, each interfering with the ability to respond gracefully to challenges. 

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/8/2023

To the eudaimonic image on the left, I had to add the one on the right. This would be the precondition for our renormalization (along with a rapid birth-off).

Lord Man replaced by Lord Panda (and Mouse, Sequoia, Cabbage, Diatom....). In 2024 I may have to change the far right guy.

I expect Klaatu to return by then to assemble all the putative world leaders, and have a talk with them.  After Klaatu has a talk with humanity about the New World Order, this will be the outcome.

 

Yes, all conditional future statements are true, even when they contradict each other.  Any statement about the future with a “could” or “may” in it is like that.

The burden of proof to detractors is to assert that such a thing is impossible.

--Bob

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 12/10/2023

"The burden of proof to detractors is to assert that such a thing is impossible." 

Not really in this context.*  Business as usual, the goal here, is a terminal condition for a system already in overshoot.  

Bill

* Unless, of course, the 'viability' of the system refers to it use as an energy source for a much smaller economy and population living well within the biocapacity of the ecosphere.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 11/15/2023

 

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/2/2024

A Systems Sci-Fi Short

“The roots of this [our being context blind] are in the deepest core of MTI [Modern Techno-Industrial] cultures” and may go back longer than imagined. The context may be the potential for systems pathologies to arise, e.g. one metastatic cancer cell may have more like unto itself.

The two cultures are the MTI r-culture (‘r’=reproductive/expansionist/growth culture) of the expansionist form of human whose worldview/mindset and monetary culture is antithetical to the K-culture of limits all prior K-strategist hominins knew and loved. 

The Great Human Expansion of 50k to 60k years ago (beginning somewhere within Africa perhaps 75k years ago — the first 15k–25k years were not “great”— would be the origin, likely within one band of 20 to 50 pre-expansionist K-culture humans (a metastatic cancer begins with one wild cell before it is noticeable). 

The worldview/mindset of r-acculturated humans had to arise as a mutation , and the originator would be the first r-culture storytelling animal who denied they were mere animals, and that anyone who agreed (truly believed them) wasn’t an animal either.

If the storyteller had access to those under seven years of age, then most members of the band would be true believers in the storyteller’s tales (verities) within a generation or two as the abelieving ones died off. This condition of a population of one band within which a belief in belief (equating one’s image, one’s narrative of the world with the world — previously viewed by all as insane), would be a memetic mutation, one everywhere present in MTI r-culture and all prior r-cultures (e.g. indigenous except San and Hadza) going back to Man the Hunter narratives.

Foundational to the r-culture narrative is human exceptionalism. At some point, perhaps centuries after the first r-culture storyteller arose to spread her (or his) memes among the first 20 to 50 bands, each having a chief storyteller, whose spread her tales of true beliefs to believers her band interacted with for mate and meme exchange, one storyteller began telling stories of the glory of conquest that united all the omniscient storytellers of almost all bands — stories of expansion, of rapacious taking.

When internal resources became scarce, the solution was obvious to all. The subhumans in the next valley, who don’t even know what the proper feathers to wear in their hair are, had to be civilized, and so all the bands join together under the command of one glorious leader (an atavistic alpha-male) who looked beyond the horizon to see a valley for the taking (vini vidi vici). 

The pattern repeated. Man the Hunter chiefdoms became settled agrarian chiefdoms that soon develop into nation-states (unless born on a transoceanic flight or ship, you were born in one). The succession of the expansionist form of human, a rogue primate, domesticated by technology and ideology, climaxes this century.

No modern human can Like or Share this story, especially if details are added at book length (all irrefutably solid/referenced) even among CACOR members (I'm guessing, and know nothing, can be wrong about everything or 'not even wrong'). But there may be some value in telling it. I could write a book that, before being tossed on a fire to keep warm, one of the last humans holds it back for a future fire to read it first, and thereby know why they are about to die.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/6/2024

It is clear that as a species we can construe the world in quite different ways and that unless one engages in deep and serious reflective work the way one construes the world fits the facts as we know them.

One outcome is that, when challenges, most folks defend their views against “them.”  In this the whole culture is at war over what is real, right, good and truthful.  We are now all down that path.

The response that is seldom made is to engage in non-trivial exhumation and examination of our taken-for-granted ways of knowing and construing reality, right down to the ontological and epistemological roots of our experience. This is the only work that will save us.  It will lead us to understand who we and those with whom we content have come to experience, settle into and defend what is taken as “common sense.”   Such a journey will also lead us to a far humbler stance; one that nudges us to understand the deep insight that “we know not what we do.”

Ruben

 

Some alpha-male types chaff at Ruben's missives, e.g.--

As usual, Ruben, passive aggressive is your modus operandi. It takes utmost hubris to continually attempt to fool the smart members of this list. Your allergy to atheists is incapable of being hidden. I still support your efforts on and off this list, because I believe you to be a net positive. However, after a quarter century of pro bono work as an ally of yours, determinism is evidenced by your behavior. Carry on and try to save Homo superstitious. You will fail, of course, but you believe in afterlife, so no sweat. Cheers on the downslope,

 

What have atheists to do with Joe’s point or mine? As far as I can see neither of us make any explicit or inferential reference that justifies your accusation. Steve, we both know that you and I disagree about the ontology and epistemology that is required today to help us make reliable sense of our situation and respond to it. Such differences are both somewhat common and fair game. Not all differences on deep and important issues need be resolved in order to work together on other issues. Mostly we do that reasonably well together. Let us make it so again.

Ruben

...you... are loathe to respond to my questions. By not responding, your messaging the list is that you have no sensible reply. That serves you badly. All I ask is an honest response to questions that I address to you. Luis admits to a leap of faith. You avoid addressing that. But that question has not been part of the last half dozen or so questions I’ve asked you. Avoidance is self-defeating. I hope you change your habit in the regard,

I have said on more than one occasion that I will not respond to what I see to be questions which presuppose a frame of reference I have said explicitly that I reject. This is normal conduct when frames of reference are in play. If I should not respond in the future, please assume this is my rationale. I note that your response to my question re Joe’s post did not address the question I asked.

Ruben

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This exchange is noted to show how the list owner and chief moderator uses his bully pulpit to maintain his command and control. I have always self-moderated and was recently put on moderated status, meaning that any post I make is delayed until the moderator approves it or not. I don't know why I was put on moderated status, so I will self-moderate by not posting. Posting a link to information I did not produce without commenting or context in exchange for information received is to consider. Being taken off moderated status will change nothing. I will not enter into any discussions until the increasingly toxic commander in chief moderator retires, stands down.

 

SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/7/2024

"What if we had to change who we are, worldwide, in order to survive?

https://www.terradaily.com/reports/Evolution_might_stop_humans_from_solving_climate_change_says_new_study_999.html

We’re really not very good at solving these kinds of problems."

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“not very good…”.  That is an overestimate.

Most folks don’t even understand that there are such things as meta-issues, meta-questions, meta-challenges, meta-insights at a species/civilizational scale.

As of today, no serious institution in the world if focussed on exploring, understanding and thinking through the meta-issues of human existence from civilizational frames of reference other than those which have formed them.  The many lists of existential issues facing humankind is evidence of this.  Look at them again and weep.  The truly serious and deeply disturbing work is still ahead of us.

As a species we have not begun to imagine the nature and depth of the trouble we have caused for our ourselves and all life on this Earth….

Ruben

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It seems to me that this paper [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/evolution-is-not-as-random-as-previously-thought] is mostly convoluted overcomplicated academic gobbledygook. 

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Perhaps I'm just getting too cynically critical or am regressing generally, but I don't see quite so much to be excited about here.  Perhaps this article describing the actual research is misleading.  In any case:

1) It's not evolution that is random.  It has always been gene mutation that is thought to be random. The biophysical environment then determines which mutations are advantageous, i.e., confer survival value -- this is natural selection.  To the extent that the environment determines what  mutations survive, subsequent evolution is not random but somewhat predictable.  Fish-like gills will not work in air for example, nor mammalian lungs under water. 

2) What is one to make of this sentence?: 

"The study...  challenges the long-standing belief about the unpredictability of evolution, and has found that the evolutionary trajectory of a genome may be influenced by its evolutionary history, rather than determined by numerous factors and historical accidents.

a) See point 1;

b) Has there ever been doubt that the evolutionary trajectory of a genome is influenced by its evolutionary history? It has long been called "path dependence". 

c) The statement is otherwise silly and contradictory.  It states that a genome's evolutionary trajectory is influenced by evolutionary history rather than by 'historical accidents'.  So what is evolutionary history if not a series of historical events (renamed 'accidents' here to reinforce the bias of this article) influenced  by numerous (environmental) factors -- i.e., natural selection. 

3) Consider this bit: 

""We found that some gene families never turned up in a genome when a particular other gene family was already there, and on other occasions, some genes were very much dependent on a different gene family being present.” In effect, the researchers discovered an invisible ecosystem where genes can cooperate or can be in conflict with one another."      
Two points: 
a) It has long been known that some genes are associated with others and that their functions are complementary. Such associations are known as 'gene complexes,' an assortment of genes whose functions in combination are necessary  to produce a particular quality or characteristic in a phenotype (individual organism). 
b)  Invisible ecosystem??!!  What kind of science writing is this?  There is no relationship whatever between the innards of the nucleus and the definition of an actually ecosystem (except that they are both 'systems'. 

Sorry, I hold my applause. 

Bill

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This is an important discussion.

Broadly, I agree with Bill.

A place we may differ, a difference which we are still exploring, is on the nature and roles of human culture, particularly the forms of civilization that have emerged in human history.  My work leads me to soften, or at least clarify, Bill’s statement “We cannot alter long-standing patterns of either bio- or cultural evolution…”

As I read human history our species has learned to organize its life, inner and outer, according to three quite different forms of civilization:  hunter-gatherers, settled agriculture-based and MTI.  The fact of these new forms is civilization imply that fundamentally new forms of civilization can emerge in human history.  There may be hope for us yet that a fourth form of civilization could emerge – a form of civilization able to understand, respect and live within the limits found on this Earth. [Our K-strategist pre-expansionist ancestors, the prior K-culture form of forager humans, are the context of the expansionist r-culture of our Man the Hunter, agrarian, and industrial forms. Any viable, low-energy industrial/agrarian form will again be a form of K-culture that could include the information content, the flower and fruit, of MTI (Modern Techno-Industrial) society.] 

However, it must be noted that in no case was the emergence of a new form of civilization a conscious and intention act/project undertaken by our species.  Rather, in every case, the transition to a new form of civilization was an unconscious process that was local/regional in scope.  Further, it was an optional process.  It was also a very long slow process – tens of thousands of years for hunter-gatherers, thousands of years for settled agriculture-based and centuries for MTI. [A long process, no progress implied, towards our dissolution. Our world (view) will end. Whether humans persist, and whether they preserve information of value, the next century to millennium will likely determine.]

In light of this, I would re-write Bill’s statement to read something like this:  “While long-standing patterns of cultural evolution have evolved over very long periods of time, the hope that we can consciously and successfully undertake such a project in the 21st Century appears to be illusory for several reasons.  First, as of today, there is no serious and organized effort dedicated to even exploring such a project, much less scoping it out.  It simply is not on the agenda of any serious and substantial group.  (The loose talk of a new “ecological civilization” is locked well within the MTI frames of reference.)  Second, as of today, the capacity to undertake such work does not exist in an institution in the world.  Worse, no institution aspires to develop capacities.  No analogue of the Manhattan Project is being developed.  Third, current research suggests we do not have even a century to get our act of evolutionary personal-to-civilizational adaptation together.  In short, as of today, it is the case that as Bill Rees says, “We cannot alter long-standing patterns of either bio- or cultural evolution…” [Plan A, e.g. Jack's, is to transition 8 billion and counting Anthropocene enthusiasts into their opposite form. This may be the only potentially viable plan (ask Jack why). There is no Planet B, but plans B (should plans A fail) is to consider. The question is, of 8 billion, are there 8 serious and substantial humans who could form one planning group? Optimum decision making group size has been empirically determined by experience to be in the 8-13 range. Could there be 20 groups of serious and substantial humans who maybe know enough to have an insight/evidenced-based opinion? The founder population of Maori that took New Zealand can be estimated by archaeogeneticists to have been about 400. So >400 or even less (Sentinel Island) may be considered a viable founding population provided it is a viable form of human able to persist beyond MTI dissolution and "replenish the Earth" as K-strategists organized enough to identify remnant r-cultures and cooperate to contain them.] 

What differences might be made if one or more of the Earth’s billionaire’s decided to commit to this work?  We simply do not know.  Today, no such person appears to exist.  But even if such a person emerged, we need to understand that the collapse/great simplification of MTI cultures is already baked into our future. [A failure of prepared minds to offer a viable alternative to demagogues-with-solutions before climax, before the downslope spiral to possible extinction, will be too little too late, and our overshoot debt will become an extinction debt.]

As a footnote:  Recasting our situation in this way means that the basic thesis of the piece which triggered this discussion – that we are hooped and can blame it on evolution – is false.  It is the kind of claim that we would expect MTI folks to make.  (It is part of the MTI make up that MTI is never to blame for any of our troubles.)  The insight we should be working on runs something like this:  As a species, we have got ourselves into a mess of living complex messes which we cannot even understand as long as we seek to understand with the eyes, minds and hearts of MTI persons in MTI cultures.  However, it may be possible to learn to transcend our formation as MTI persons and cultures and by doing so make reliable sense of the messes we are in, how and why we got here and our prospects for leading ourselves out of the Wittgensteinian fly bottle we are in.  (If you do not get the reference to Wittgenstein see a short video here.) [As a species, we have bifurcated into two forms: from a viable K-culture hominin living within limits we, the now 99.999%, split off as a non-viable (long term) r-culture expansionist 75k years in the developing (per graphic sent). Unlike a metastatic cancer that always destroys the body it depends on for growth, we MTIed ones will continue to degrade a planetary life-support system until we go extinct, whether in 50 or 50k years, or develop into a sustainable form of Borg-like expansionists. We cannot go back to living in bands of K-strategist foragers as only a more complex form of civilization can monitor for the reemergence of r-cultures that will, like metastatic cells, expand to repeat the pattern (not if but when). The level of complexity needs to prevent any repetition of empire building, and does not imply that the group size individuals live in be overcomplex. An organization above the band-size of 20-50 needs to exist, but also be minimal enough to be viable long term.  No one needs to "live in" the higher levels of complexity. The needed organization would be between groups of 20-50 communities of 20-50 community members, a condition that selects for trust. Each group of communities would then have to agree that no group of communities can invade/conquer another group of communities, and if any do, all groups will cooperate to depower the world-be empire builder/expansionist r-culture in the making. Yes, there are details, but this is enough, maybe. Humans don't get to choose what group size is viable.] 

Ruben

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As is his custom, Ruben pushes us beyond the boundaries of ‘casual’ discussion.  In particular, he suggests that he and I differ in some not-so-subtle respects, particularly in assessing the role of human culture (social construction of perceived reality) in determining the form of human civilization.

We agree that MTI culture is not working and that an alternative must emerge. We also agree (we’ve discussed this many times) that this will require an intentional ‘personal-to-civilizational’-level transformation of the fundamental beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours that characterize MTI societies.  

Ruben writes (my emphases added):
“…the hope that we can consciously and successfully undertake such a project in the 21st Century appears to be illusory for several reasons.  First, as of today, there is no serious and organized effort dedicated to even exploring such a project, much less scoping it out.  It simply is not on the agenda of any serious and substantial group.  (The loose talk of a new “ecological civilization” is locked well within the MTI frames of reference.)  Second, as of today, the capacity to undertake such work does not exist in an institution in the world.  Worse, no institution aspires to develop capacities.  No analogue of the Manhattan Project is being developed.  Third, current research suggests we do not have even a century to get our act of evolutionary personal-to-civilizational adaptation together.  In short, as of today, it is the case that as Bill Rees says, “We cannot alter long-standing patterns of either bio- or cultural evolution…” 

“…we cannot even understand as long as we seek to understand with the eyes, minds and hearts of MTI persons in MTI cultures.  However, it may be possible to learn to transcend our formation as MTI persons and cultures…”

So as matters stand, the difference between Ruben’s position and mine seems to rest on whether it is possible, consciously and deliberately, to alter long-standing [evolutionary] patterns and learn to transcend the forces that have heretofore dictated our formation as MTI persons and cultures. (Where is Wittgenstein when we really need him?)

So, my two-part question for us all is:
a) Assuming the cognitive ability exists to execute a global transition (taking into account the enormous material and geopolitically disparities raised by Steve), and given the stridently compelling nature of the evidence that we need to do so, why is it that there is no serious and organized effort dedicated [to doing so] and that no institution exists that aspires to develop the necessary capacities? 

Depending on our answers to the above question, we might then ask
b)  Is a transition actually possible and, if so, what are the practical  first steps that we captives of MTI sensibilities  might undertake to catalyse the process?

Any takers for part a) before we  move on?

Bill

 

More typing:

One question is, did Wittgenstein get out of the bottle, and if so, did he help one or more other humans to get out? If not, he did achieve the idea of getting out. How many humans today have even the idea of getting out (i.e. of actually walking away from Omelas)? If there are 8-13, have any come to notice the existence of any of the other 7-12?

If so, have they formed a Union of Concerned Elders to plot a pathway towards a viable outcome? So far as I know, if 8 is minimal, there are not enough humans on the planet having the potential to rethink/renormalize, such that someday there could be enough humans on the planet to love and understand it enough to live with it properly as evidenced by posterity's long-term persistence.

The form of r-cultural evolution cannot be fixed, turned into its opposite. It is incompatible with K-strategist living. Hubbert's matter-energy systems worldview is incompatible with the r-culture's monetary culture. The r-acculturated cannot even understand that they are not K-strategists, because the textbooks and all experts (including Bill) say humans are. This is the fly bottle.

Why is it that there is no serious and organized effort dedicated [to a viable transition] and that no institution exists that aspires to develop the necessary capacities? The r-acculturated human cannot go against the foundational presuppositions of their form of culture until they realize they are flies in a fly bottle (denormalized animals with no long-term future). 

To extend the fly-bottle analogy, imagine fruit flies, and a larger than one quart bottle. The initial larder of exploitable food (energy) takes multiple generations to extract and dissipate after the first few flies find their way into the jug. Ten generations (10 days each) on, and all the flies assume that everything is going great in this, the best of all possible worlds.

Some wonder about "other worlds" but no one thinks about how to "get out," nor has any understanding that normal, evolvable fruit flies don't live in bottles. That the larder will run out of food is one predicament. A cognitive failure to foresee this outcome (nor understand that one's condition is non-viable) is another. 

There are now over 8 billion flies in the bottle, i.e. Plato's cave. Some like to tell stories of getting out and can Like and Share the idea of an imagined enlightened few who seek to escape and maybe even do, but are thereby captured by this and other images (e.g. World Transformation Movement), and remain trapped in their social construct/narrative, cut off from Spinoza's God.

Oh, and is a transition/escape actually possible?

Yes, possible, as we hubris ones don't even know enough to know that some foresight enabled humans could not walk away, leaving their MTI baggage behind. Can the 99%...? No.

Could 0.0001%? Maybe. Could that be enough to replenish the Earth with K-strategist humans post contraction? I don't know, but I know how to find out—guess then test—and 25k tests would be better (more likely to work) than a not remotely viable one egg or even three potentially viable hydro powered megacities.

And if possible, what are the practical first steps that we captives of MTI sensibilities might undertake to catalyse the process? 

Practical steps we flies can take are:

1) Guess: form planning groups of 8-13 members to rapidly design a potentially viable community (e.g. of viable population size given long term human biological limits, i.e. 20-50, range 5-85, 28 average size). 

2) Identify potential locations for 20-50 communities (also an observed forager number of bands/camps/communities needed for exogamy and therefore also a needed want). 

3) When 20-50 compatible community designs can be detailed, publish them. 

4) If any of perhaps 3 billion potential adult heads of household can seriously consider "voting with their feet," take applications from would-be immigrants who self-select into agreeing with the "rules of the game."

1) Test: when 20-50 planning groups have potentially viable systemic designs with compatible limits, and there are 400-2500 potential citizens of a group of interacting communities that agree to test a design for both each community and a collection of interconnected communities that agree upon the rules of the game or social contract, then they liquidate all their MTI assets (used to buy a majority of property in an area) and relocate to an area (see step 2 above) that could support 20 to 50 potentially viable communities (total population size 400 to 2500) and auto-organize with input from the 8-13 designers of their community and 160-650 designers involved in designing the 20-50 communities who may or may not be among the citizens who will endeavor to make the group of interacting communities work. 

2) When there are another 400-2500 potential walkers-away, a new set of communities will locate next to the first (for mutual support/protection) or found another pioneer group of communities at another site. Doing the math, 25k groups of communities would have a likely population of 25k x 400 to 25k x 2500 or 10 to 62.5 million, likely 20 million. 

Maybe there will be 50 million in Jack's megacities. Maybe not. If enough food is stored within each group of communities to support 10x the long term sustainable population without fossil fuel inputs, then the initial population could be 200 million that would have to agree (which would likely exclude about 8 billion people who self-select out, i.e. would rather die than live like animals without cars or smartphones) to a rapid birth-off to avoid a die-off. 

Are there enough potentially viable humans out of 8 billion and counting to form even one group of 28 communities of 28 members (e.g. a watershed management unit, 784 people)?  There is no evidence that there are this many humans who could seriously consider trying to get out of the fly bottle (who, me in a fly bottle?).

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To extend Bill’s thought…

 And we are both committed to doing what we can to make reliable sense of our situation, to explain our sense to any who will listen, to keep learning with open minds and hearts, and responding with as much courage as we can muster.

 If you have to take an arduous journey, and we now do, best our travel with Bill and others with whom non-trivial friendships can be formed.  Then you are safe to live and die together.

Ruben

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SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/25/2024

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_competition

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Scramble competition is how humans treat 'common pool' resources -- everyone has access and those who benefit most are those who take the most.  Depletion follows, everybody loses. 

Contest competition is a good description of the enclosure movement;a few powerful individuals acquire a monopoly on productive assets -- land and resources -- and higher progeny survival rates, everyone else gets to be a slave labourer with malnourished sickly children.  Private property rights enshrined in law ensure perpetuation such of inequality.

Bill

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NOTE TO FILE 1/29/2024

Ruben unsubscribed from the main group without explaination. "Silence is an infinite statement."

 

NOTE TO FILE 4/12/2024

Greenpeace is declaring war on Big Oil by seeking donations. Like the David Suzuki Foundation, current leaders are systems-blind, energy-blind, context-blind, posterity-blind, time-blind, population-blind, collapse-blind, pending extinction-blind.... On his 80th birthday Suzuki sent out an email to supporters noting the marginal accomplishments of the Foundation, but as a man of science who would rather know than believe, he added that meanwhile "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed."

Below is Greenpeace historian Rex Weyler's comment on Greenpeace leadership whose only claim is that they are not money-blind. Not good news for 10 year olds.

I’ll be getting this in my mail today. Are they serious about stopping oil? And vilifying “Big Oil”? What’s the difference between small producers and big ones? The leadership of Environmental NGOs must be wet behind the ears, brainwashed, or outright liars if they understand system thinking and energy based economies.

Steve 

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True enough that the so-called "leaders" of these big NGOs don't really understand what is going on; they are systems-blind and energy-blind, and mostly focused on their own reputation ("brand") and on raising funds to support themselves and their giant bureaucracies. 

On the other hand, Chevron has filed a huge slap-suit against them, and others, and is attempting to intimidate any opposition with their billions-of-dollars legal power. I've been helping fight Chevron and their massive battalions of lawyers for a decade over their destruction of Northeast Ecuador and shameful treatment of the people who live there. 

Greenpeace fighting Chevron is a righteous fight, but of course the self-righteousness just also reinforces their blind spots. 

Chevron really is an evil force on Earth. The Greenpeace leadership is just naive. Big difference. 

The main difference between the big oil giants such as Chevron and most small producers is that Chevron has the financial power to commit vicious crimes -- violence, intimidation, rape, murder, land destruction, etc. all well documented from Ecuador to Nigeria -- and to get away with it using more intimidation and literally billions of dollars in legal muscle, private investigators, and public relations firms. 

It would be great if the average so-called "environmentalist" actually understood ecology, overshoot, living systems, and thermodynamics, but they don't because they are just average humans. A few people inside these large groups do understand these things, but they are severely out-numbered and dominated by the fund-raising "leaders."

One more reason why we have not made any significant ecological progress since Rachel Carson or the Limits to Growth. 

Rex. 

Note the last sentence is the same as Suzuki's. Dreams of destroying the growth hegemon are a distraction. The challenge is:

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called." —R. Buckminster Fuller

No one (modern human) will make the old one obsolete. It is obsolete, a blip in time that can only exist for a time. Some humans possessed of foresight intelligence could create a new model and make it work, maybe, but if the some are countable on one hand, they may be too few. The few are too idiosyncratic to find a common ground, to auto-organize. Not good news for 10 year olds.

 

NOTE TO FILE 4/17/2024

Statement made on a different group: "Socialism is no panacea.  Flawed human nature corrupts any system."

 

 

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