WEDNESDAY, DEC 25, 2019: NOTE TO FILE
The Solutionatique
Towards real solutions, adaptable trade-offs
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: UNTHINKABLE, FROM THE WIRES, THE LIMITS TO KNOWING
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. —M. King Hubbert
Abstract: Our problems, the human trajectory/predicament, our 'problematique' is not so great as our failure to use what we know. The solution, however, is not to surmount our failure to use what we already know (or could know if we would know), but to understand why all normal humans, who are part of and products of a complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic we do not understand, cannot but fail. Why we must fail, as long as we remain part of the dynamic, may have something to do with the imperative of short-term self interest that keeps us keeping on. We humans, with perhaps an insignificant number of exceptions like Hubbert, H.T. Odum, or a Donella Meadows, cannot see the implications of what is in front of our blindered face as we can always flinch, look away, or use any of our many slieght-of-mind tricks to not follow what is implied. Maybe you can see the implications of the exponential function, but still 'the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function'. Many can listen to Al Bartlett's Arithmetic, Population, and Energy: Sustainability 101 lecture, take and easily pass a test afterwards, and clever apes can manage a score of 95+ percent, then prosperously live a life of service to a socio-politico-economic system that is not remotely sustainable, which defines idiocy, 'our inability to understand'. 'Understand or die.' —Ludwig Wittgenstein.
COOS BAY (A-P) — So I am reading Eileen Crist's book Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization 2018, and finally got around to listening, 12/24/2019, to an audio interview of Eileen by Jeremy Lent I had downloaded over three months ago with Crist summarizing the book. Crist, Lent, Ugo Bardi, Nate Hagens, Paul Ehrlich, Nafeez Ahmed, and other public intellectuals can see problems with 20/20 vision, speak and write at book-length about our problematique, even envision a eudaimonic endpoint to our global endgame (e.g. an ecological civilization on an abundant Earth), but when it comes to solutions (transitioning towards adaptable trade-offs) they may as well dress as harlequins and dance with a bear on the public stage while blowing bubbles, as the only solutions offered for public consideration must be politically thinkable by we the public such that we will Like and Share them. This is a severe constraint.
All leaders or would-be leaders (local citizens of 'good repute' to globally known public intellectuals) can only think within the constraint. No one imposes the constraint as it is self-imposed, selected for by the contingencies of reinforcement. Normal humans value the social approbation that all 'sane' humans must have and by having appear sane.
Speak or think outside the Overton window of your intended and you falter and fail, 'you're straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain'. Unfaltering instinct among 'normals' or the 'sane' avoids such a fate, and so real solutions become unthinkable to all who care about what other people (within one's cohort) think. Telling people what they want to hear or may be willing to hear ultimately involves not listening to Nature, who 'has all the answers'. All public intellectuals/leaders must flinch to maintain their current position/status/livelihood/approbation.
Our informational predicament is that our best and brightest, they who may actually know enough to have an opinion, whose few who endeavor to listen to Nature and to inform humanity, who step up to the plate—are batting 2 out of 3. (1) The problematique? Check. (2) The endpoint (ecological civilization)? Check. (3) Real 'solutions' that might actually work to iterate towards the endpoint?
Well, let me tell you a story about organic agriculture, free bioregions, development of personal talent/power, educating all girls to become educated and empowered women, sex education, the importance of leadership, a slow economy, ending capitalism, everyone lives like Europeans (not like Americans), we protect and restore the natural world, eat better foods to honor our bodies, voluntarily move away from eating too many animal products (especially bushmeat), and generally scaling down consumption in the consumer world, particularly in the developed world that has too much infrastructure (we'll build more in the Global South), voluntarily, of course, all within a human rights framework (and meanwhile 'the pace of planetary destruction...').
Batting 2/3 is way better than the 0/3 all politicians and virtually all public intellectuals proudly achieve, but I'm concerned that at least some humans need go for 3/3 if any are to 'win' the global endgame we are all playing (to pass through the bottleneck) whether we want to or not.
Both Jeremy and I discovered Eileen Crist by reading a guest essay in Science, 'Reimagining the human', which Jeremy refers to, so start by reading her essay. She also wrote the Afterword to Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, a 12" x 13" picture book that opens to some 12"x24" pictures, which I feature in Lord Man.
No reputable human who values whatever status they may have will give unpopularizable claims 'a careful hearing'. Any expectation or hope that proposed 'real solutions' may be considered, seems misdirected. Basically, no public intellectual, from the local homeless guy waiting in line with me on up to the emeritus ones, can touch unthinkable thoughts with a ten-foot conceptual pole and survive or prosper among fellow hu-mans. But I could be wrong.
I didn't get much out of the audio, which just keeps on coming unless you pause it, and I didn't. I did get the impression that the claims made are perhaps near the apex of those we hu-mans of NIMH should be considering, such that spending five days (about 35 hours) making a transcript might be worthwhile. Making a transcript involves giving the thoughts expressed 'a careful hearing', so everyone should listen to the above and transcribe it. Or slackers can read mine, which serves as my review [with comments].
0:02 Jeremy Lent
This is Jeremy Lent... and I'm excited to have this opportunity to talk with you today, Eileen. Eileen has had an illustrious career working and writing primarily on the interaction between the living earth and human society, and early in her career she spent some time studying Gaia theory with the legendary Lynn Margulis. And she's been teaching now for over two decades at Virginia Tech. So... Eileen recently came out with a new book. 'Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization' published in 2018 [Dec 24] by the University of Chicago Press and we're here today to talk about her book, which I recently finished and found very impressive.
00:51 Eileen Crist
Thank you. I just want to say thank you very much for having me and it's a great pleasure to be here.
00:56 I'm really really happy that we have the chance to dialogue today, so Eileen, I found your book to be incredibly powerful and just filled with passion that really came through in the writing, and I'd say the book not only documents a wholesale destruction of nature that's going on, but I love the way it lays out the underlying drivers of this assault, where it comes from, and offers a vision for how we can turn things around and so perhaps for starters, for listeners who don't know the book, would you like to begin just by kind of summarizing for them what the book is about?
01:32 Yeah, certainly, so my focus is on the crisis of life on the planet, and my motive is to deepen awareness of that crisis. So I spend quite a lot of time discussing the drivers of biodiversity destruction and looking at these drivers at the different levels at which they have been described, and also trying to present them in a way, present the picture of what's happening with biodiversity in a comprehensive manner so that people get a sense of the systemic scale of the problem. So I spend a lot of time focusing on what the environmental and science literature calls the direct and ultimate causes. [And well done, Eileen.]
02:24 The direct ones have been known for a while, they are 'habitat destruction'. Mostly, this is a stand-in for agriculture which is the biggest human land use. Also another big direct cause that has emerged recently in recent decades is the killing of animals. And then of course there is pollution, different kinds of pollution, and more recently climate change has emerged as a factor. Now on this point of climate change, I want to note that many people, it seems, are under the impression that climate change is really the major force behind life's destruction, and it's really important, I think, to clarify and understand that it is not, at least not yet. So agriculture and killing wild animals are the two main factors.
03:20 Another thing that's really important to note, and that's kind of a signal event of our time, is the synergies between different destructive causes. Biologists often refer to this as the one-two punch, or the or the one-two-three punch. For example, one recent study that found that 80% of the threatened species that they looked at were afflicted by more than one cause. So this is a picture what's happening. Species and places are coming under extreme pressures, and most of the time for more than one pressures.
03:57 So the direct clauses, and then of course behind those are what environmental analysts call the ultimate causes or the bigger forces, and those are an over producing global economy. That is, it's just taking too much and using up too much from the earth in terms of land, in terms of fresh water, in terms of fish, timber and so on, and is putting out too much waste into the earth, more waste than the earth can absorb and recycle. So [#1] an over producing economy [fossil fuel empowered, which has enabled population growth for 300 years].
04:30 Another piece of the picture is population, a large and growing human population. But most especially a large and growing global middle [affluent consumer] class that I focus on quite a bit in the book. And then the other, the other big force is the constant expansion of infrastructure over the face of the earth so roads and highways and pipelines, etc. And in fact right now, we are in the midst of an explosive development on that front. So if we think about these direct and big drivers, we can summarize them in two words: human expansionism.
05:05 The human factor is swelling and everything else is shrinking or becoming impoverished or disappearing. So what I do in the book has been asked, 'Okay, so why are we now helping human expansionism? And that really leads me to focus on on the world view, or the ideological component, of the ecological crisis which puts human expansionism above questioning, makes it appear normal. And that is the shared world view of human supremacy that I discuss. [This is Crist's main contribution to our collective endeavor to think about the ecological crisis.]
05:37 Lent
Yes, exactly, and that seems so special. That you're really focusing on these kind of deep underlying drivers which I think a lot of the time people miss. They're looking more at those kind of more incremental layers and then they miss this kind of deep underlying ideology as you call it. And then towards the end of the book you then give a vision for what's possible. You want to just give a little summary of that? [So up to the end of the book, mostly agreed upon facts of the matter, the consensus view among those scientists who 'know enough to have an opinion'. The vision of solutions is what everything up to the vision is offered as support, but what is supported is that some solution or response to our problematique should be forthcoming to increase the probability that humans and the biosphere will pass through the foreseeable 'bottleneck', or 'Great Simplification' to come.]
06:01 Crist
Yeah, so what I discussed, when I come to the last part of the book to discuss is solutions, directions forward. And I summarized them as scaling down the human enterprise and pulling back from Nature. So I try to summarize them in a way that is memorable and in a way that is comprehensive. So scaling down really means reducing human consumption and reducing waste output, stepping these down immensely.
06:37 So, how do we do this? One important component is to move in the direction of lowering our numbers and doing this within a human rights framework in the direction, I argue for two billion.
[Emphasis added. Note the passing from a science-based 'universe of discourse' to one of potentially thinkable thoughts as determined by the target audience of the podcast--humancentric popular enviro-culture, that includes 'human rights' as conceptual Tar-Baby. This is a likely unconscious sleight-of-mind trick that is easy to miss. Once you pass from science-speak (this is what's happening, this is the matter-energy what-is, this is what might work) to ask 'how do we (via democratic demands on leaders) do this?' then you've entered into the ideology of Tar-Baby discourse that enables the very trajectory you seek to divert by communicating with the public as a public intellectual.]
[You enter the collective Overton window, a subset of reality-speak, that may preclude thinking about real solutions, 'real' as in solutions that might actually work as determined by the nature of things (not voters). To get the public to agree, to believe, you end up lying to them by omission or commission, knowingly or not. To get humans to 'just say no' to human supremacy, don't speak their politicized language. If you do, you loose.]
[This is the point where leadership fails. Technocracy offered a different vision, one which the public, before 1931, was utterly unable to think about. All the 'what-is' detailed up to the last chapter supports unthinkable solutions, unmentioned in the book, that are not yet thinkable. The failure to think about real solutions now is the driver for existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere, and neither the public, nor their current intelligentsia, will think them.]
06:53 That [2 billion] is the number, you know, there's no, of course, absolute number and maybe we'll get to discussing that piece. There's no ideal absolute number. It's a good start because it's a number of people that can be sustained by an organic and diversified agriculture [maybe], but also an agriculture that has been scaled down so that it is a modest subsystem of the earth system, also part of scaling down [by 80%?]. So that is one piece of it, but not the only piece of it. Part of scaling down is changing our economies. One way that we can think about this is through the motto of 'reduce, reuse, recycle', creating economies that really embody that motto. So what does that look like?
07:37 Well one piece of it is creating what ecological economists call slow economies. This really means scaling down production output a lot, especially output of the superfluous stuff and the throwaway stuff and the luxury stuff. Especially output of constantly new models and new lines, right? So that's one piece of it, slowing down the economy and the other piece of it is really changing how the economy operates so that it makes stuff, we make products that are durable, that are made to last, that are fixable when they break, but are recyclable when they can't be fixed anymore and that are biodegradable. So that's another piece of it, simply changing the economy, and a third piece of scaling down means really becoming mindful about this constant technological and infrastructural expansionism over the earth, this constant building of roads and highways, and cell towers and power lines wherever and everywhere.
08:43 Infrastructure in itself is of course, not a bad thing, but we really want to be mindful about it and we want to err towards the minimal when it comes to infrastructure because it is very damaging for the natural world. So that's the feeling down, it has to do with the vision of the human enterprise and how we really need to sort of reduce our presence and reduce our numbers and reduce how we do our economies and how we inhabit.
09:12 To come to the other component of this last part of the book, is connected with it, and I refer to it as pulling back. This means really moving in the direction of protecting the natural world on a vast scale, both the seas and the land. Upward of 50 percent of the earth as free nature as protected areas that are reconnected so as to allow for the resurging of life, has allowed for the flow of genes, of populations to allow for the continuation, of migrations to exist. Also along with protecting we need to become involved in ecological restoration. So now why do we need these things? Well, first of all, we need them kind of immediately because protection and restoration are needed to avert a mass extinction. They will also, by protecting the land and the sea on a vast scale, we'll be able to soften the blow of climate change. We're not going to be able to stop climate change, but we can certainly soften its blows because all that green will absorb the carbon, much of the carbon, and also by moving in this direction of protecting and restoring the natural world. We can start to move over the course of the next decades and centuries toward humanity inhabiting a world of abundant life where the title of the book is coming from. So that's this sort of a kind of vision and direction that I talk about, what needs to be done.
10:45 Lent
Yes. Yes, thank you for for describing that so well and yeah it's really an inspiring vision and it's one that I'd like to make sure, and maybe a little bit later on in our conversation we go into in some more depth, you know, of course this whole podcast space is looking at this notion of ecological civilization and I just find that such a powerful way of thinking about what's possible and I'd love to explore that more with you very soon. So one of the things about your book and about that description is it's unusually comprehensive. I think compared to so many other books on this topic, of looking at so broadly of what's going on and also looking so deeply at the underlying drivers in order to look at solutions that aren't just incremental, but that really really get to the root problems. So it'd like to... cut in on just a few of the things you said from the outset.
11:43 First off is you mentioned this idea that our climate change, or whatever we might call it, the climate emergency, a climate break down we're looking at, that is really, if anything, I'm getting a sense from you like a symptom of something else. Well, at least that's the way that I've been seeing it. So I'm in such agreement with you on this. I feel in a way the climate emergency we're dealing with has been a wake-up call to so many people and it's this great way for mainstream people to realize what an emergency we're at, but there is this danger that people get to feel like, well, if we can get down to, you know, 350 parts per million of CO2, renewables will save us, all this kind of stuff. That they're missing this deepest systemic way in which really the climate breakdown is kind of just one symptom of what is so much greater and so much bigger. So do you find yourself getting involved in conversations with people who are in the activist community about how they need to go deeper than just looking at climate solutions. Is that something that you find yourself in the middle of sometimes?
12:53 Crist
You know, I think that that is happening more and more. For example, if you look at this emergent movement of Extinction Rebellion, they're not just talking about climate change, but they're also talking about extinction and mass extinction. So I think that's increasingly beginning to happen. And especially after this latest UN study that came out and talked about extinction, I think it's increasingly sort of becoming apparent that it is as paramount as climate change.
13:21 It's important, however, to realize I think that the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, while they are entirely linked, and they will become more and more increasingly linked, and if we let them both go, eventually they will become one crisis, while they are linked, they are also distinct. So one way to put it kind of strongly: Let's imagine that the climate was not changing, that we didn't have a climate crisis. Imagine that as a sort of a thought experiment. We would still be in the midst of a mass extinction. We would still have a biodiversity crisis because the two main causes are the ways that we're expanding and taking over the land, and the expansion of agriculture, and the expansion of the livestock sector, and at the same time this killing of wild animals that is occurring, and the movement into natural areas for agriculture, or to take whatever resources are deemed that people want, to take these are the fundamental drivers right now of biodiversity destruction.
14:21 Climate change is entering the picture and working synergistically with that and making things much worse and ultimately climate change is poised to really take the reigns and deliver the final blow to biodiversity. But it's important to realize that they're not the same. So exactly, going to your point, if we solve climate crisis somehow, let's just imagine there's a technological invention and takes the carbon out of the air. Or there's a massive move towards different kinds of renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, we have not solved the ecological crisis.
15:02 So I think it's really really important to note that, and another important difference between them, which has also kind of led me to really be very focused on this issue of mass extinction, and to face it with the urgency with which it deserves, is that climate change has technological solutions. It has, to some extent at least, it has technological solutions. Mass extinction does not. If we allow mass extinction to run its course, it's final. This is the earth that we are bequeathing to human generations, and to me this is a really urgent issue to focus on.
15:44 Lent
Yeah, and I'm in such agreement with you and I really applaud you for raising these issues because I don't think enough people are because, you know, like I sometimes have a scenario in my mind where, like if you imagine some of the people heading up the big transnational corporations or involved in some of the major institutional frameworks that continue this kind of wealth based growth based civilization that we are in right now. They're very likely looking at the situation, going, we need to solve climate change because they're getting to be aware that the very underpinnings, the very structure of this civilization is at stake. But of course what they want to do is solve it in a way where they can continue this human expansionism and continue to essentially destroy the living earth that you are planning out so clearly, and so I have this fear that those kinds of solutions may end up actually becoming successful enough that your civilizational collapse is averted, temporarily, but meanwhile the rest of the living earth just gets destroyed even more extensively.
16:58 Crist
So I'd like you to comment on that because I agree with you fully. For me the poster case is The Economist Magazine. The Economist has been on top of climate change for a really long time. You know they know what's happening and they know exactly the danger, that this is a danger to growth, and it's a danger to capitalism.
17:26 Lent
I'm so with you, in fact I'm a subscriber of The Economist. I read it each week, just to keep an understanding of, yeah, I could almost see that from the quotes that you used, I think you and I probably have the same experience each weekend. You know, you read these articles, you go ahah, because here are sort of relatively more, sort of, enlightened people like who are, within their framework, they're thoughtful, they're understanding, they're not driven by populist politics and all that stuff, and yet they can't think outside of this framework of this belief in this kind of neoliberal globalized system that they think brings benefits for all, and just seem utterly blind to the destruction they're causing. So yeah, I totally get you on that. So maybe we can turn our attention to this big theme in your book, which of course, as you know, is one that I have studied quite extensively myself in my book The Patterning Instinct, is these kind of underlying ideology that is driven, this sense of the naturalness of human expansionism, and you refer to it as human supremacy, and I also want to really applaud you by the way. In fact the way that I first discovered your name was in a article in Science Journal which, as most listeners probably know, is one of the main stream high prestige weekly science magazines that millions of people around the world read, and I was just so thrilled to see you actually getting an article in Science, actually talking about these issues of human super supremacy. So I'd love to hear you describe a little bit more. What you mean by that and how we can become aware of that as the underlying driver?
19:16 Crist
Yes, well, my studies on how began by really delving into the literature on anthropocentrism and seeing that as the sort of the deepest cause, a layer of the ecological crisis, this sole focus on the human but also the portrayal of the human as above the natural world and entitled, rightfully entitled, to the natural world. But then I became a little bit disillusioned with the term anthropocentrism because I think I find it to be kind of confusing. It's steeped in various debates. It really isn't entirely clear what it means. A lot of times people will say, well anthropocentrism, you know, human centeredness, well, how can we have anything but other than a human perspective, right? We are humans in a human body with human senses, so because it's not really entirely clear that what we are talking about here is hierarchy. So that led me to prefer this term of human supremacy, which others have used in the literature, like environmental thinker Val Plumwood and Derrick Jensen, so it has been in the literature and I think that the virtue of this term is that its meaning is just simply directly available. People hear it and they know what it means because they're able to map it onto something like white supremacy or male supremacy. So people understand that it's really about power. So I spent quite a lot of time, you know, discussing this belief system. I describe it as a diffusely shared belief system of human prerogative that, essentially, what it is about is entitlement. Human entitlement to kill, use, take over, convert places at will, to go wherever we please and build infrastructures, wherever we please, and so on. It is also in our time scaled up into something bigger. This kind of unspoken, unstated sense that Earth belongs to humanity, that Earth is the planet of [the] humans.
21:26 Along with it goes the idea that nonhumans are resources, and terms that refer to nonhumans as resources, that they are somehow lesser or beneath, that they are not morally considerable or very little morally considerable. So ultimately it really comes down to, that human supremacy is holding absolute power of life and death over nonhumans, both domestic and wild, and absolute decision-making power over all geographical space. So it's a worldview because in fact it covers that much territory and as I describe it, it's like once you see it, there's nowhere where it really cannot be seen. And human supremacy is really, we could think about it as a metaphor, either the deepest causal layer or hub of the wheel of growth, of human expansionism. The sense of sort of the rightfulness to keep growing our numbers, our economies, our infrastructure, global trade.... It's an ideology that really gives permission to growth, to be and to stay on course. It makes human expansionism seem normal, and seem deserved, and seem destined.
22:47 Lent
Exactly. And do you see this kind of ideology of human supremacy as being cross-cultural? Do you see it as something that other cultures beyond our Western dominant culture right now have had and do you see it as existing historically or particular to current globally dominant culture.
23:11 Crist
In the book I focus on Western civilization, one, because human supremacy as a worldview has had I think the longest continuous history in in Western civilization. So it really begins to emerge with classical antiquity and with the first political theories and and philosophizing that ask the question 'what is the human difference?' How is the human separate, unique, above.... When those questions began to be posed and began to be theorized, so it has its genesis in classical antiquity, then it was carried forward, and you would do a really nice description of this in your book. It's carried forward through the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, is carried forward into Christianity and then that is further carried forward with, and in particular with Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, and becomes the world as Natural Resources. So the way that I describe this worldview, it's almost like a baton that has been handed down to different traditions and different and really vast historical watersheds, but then, there is the question, is this solely a Western thing? And my hunch about that is that it is not necessarily solely a Western thing.
24:27 For one thing we know that it's infectious, right? It's transmitted and it co-opts other people, and in fact, in the moment, we can say that it's a reigning ideology in the world, although of course, it's also contested, but it's a reigning ideology, but at the same time my hunch is that it's very much a kind of worldview that is connected with Empire. But it's connected with social stratification. That at the moment there is this aggrandizement and movement toward wealth and power, that is really the other face of it, is regarding the natural world [which is the basic source of wealth and power], you have to objectify put it beneath you so that, and then with that movement what happens [is] you have to have classes of people that are doing the grunt work, you know, to get the resources, and you have to ask classes of people that go to war. So I think that that worldview is very much tied with with Empire. But here, in my book, I focused mostly on Western civilization, right?
25:33 Lent
I hear you about that and I think you use the phrase at one point in a book, this phrase of something like the 'occupation of nature' and I really like that because it's a kind of a fresh way of really driving that point home, that it's not necessarily natural. But, like in just the same way that we realize that a military force occupies another country, and that can be illegitimate, so similarly this thing that is generally assumed to be normal is also this occupation. And I like that, and I'm sure you've come across, I have too, there's a very common theme that comes out when these kind of discussions take place, people will say things like 'well, yeah it is human nature' and in fact there was like a viral video that I was just enjoying and passing on just yesterday that is talking about how the problem is with human nature. We need to like change what we're doing and all this kind of stuff. And I'm curious, how you respond to this kind of approach, like if the problem is human nature itself, then what are the implications of that, and if it's not human nature, then how did we get on this path to begin with and what is an alternative worldview that could be as natural or maybe even more natural for human beings to have?
26:54 Crist
Yeah, I do. I do think that this is a really really important point because so many people, whether they articulate it in a very coherent fashion, or whether they simply have a sort of vague notion of about it, tend to see human nature as the culprit, human nature as the problem and the cause of the ecological crisis. And I see this idea as a very dangerous point of view, so I devote a chapter really to deconstructing that and looking at it in in detail, because I do not believe that there is anything Intrinsically problematic about human nature that is leading to the ecological crisis, but rather it's really tied with socialization and especially socialization into a particular human identity into an idea of a human identity as separate and above, and so I described this notion that human nature is the problem as a Discursive Not, which is a way of thinking or a sort of widespread idea that really blocked the human imagination from opening toward alternative pathways other than the business-as-usual. Or toward alternative sort of ideas of the future that are very radically different from the status quo, and I think that this idea that human nature is a problem is such a Discursive Not, and this notion has a lot of different faces.
28:28 One is that we are by nature aggressive and selfish and power mongering, or another face of that human nature view is that we are over technological, we overreach with our technology, with our technology right now. This is a dangerous view because if human nature is the problem, then fundamental change, the immediate implicit inference is that fundamental change is really not possible. It's innate in our nature to destroy. Why bother to even try to change or why bother to imagine a different world?
29:02 So it leads to complacency, and it leads to cynicism, and it leads to giving up now. So what I do is I really take this idea head-on and I argue that human nature is not the problem. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with us. First of all, if we look at human history there have been cultures, indigenous cultures in particular, that have celebrated the natural world and that have sustained reciprocity with a natural world in some cases over millennia. Oftentimes, of course, if the indigenous people did have impacts, but they were nothing by comparison, nowhere close to the kind of impact the colonialists, human supremacist cultures, had. So that's the first point.
29:52 The second point which I think a lot of people kind of sidestep is to really recognize that the power of socialization and enculturation, that when we look at societies we can see that people pretty much will embody and will behave according to the principles and the values and the norms that they learn from their societies. This is what people do. We are social. And so we absorb these norms and we act accordingly. We absorb the ideas of values and we reflect, accordingly. At one point I make, and this issue of socialization can be further unpacked because I think that human supremacy is socialized into people and in socializing the people from a very young age.
30:35 But you know another point to notice is that if human nature were the culprit and that's just who we are, then why is the ecological crisis so deeply problematic for so many people? Why are so many people grieving and devastated, and many many people are by mass extinction, and this decimation of nonhumans, because human nature is no simple thing. And within us there is also connection to the natural world. There is deep love, there's alignment there, there is affinity. Those things are there too, so what I do in that chapter is I really want to look very closely at how people are socialized into this worldview that teaches us that we are separate and that we are unique in the sense of being above, because all species of course are unique, and that we are entitled and that we in fact are planet owners, so I spent some time really looking at that, at that socialization.
31:36 Lent
Yeah, of course, I'm totally with you on that, and in many ways this sort of core theme of my book, The Patterning Instinct, is how exactly, your point, how actually it's culture that shapes how people see the world and that actually shapes our values and shapes how history has developed, and I guess speaking to that, going to the other extreme, if we sort of look at human nature as one question. On the other side, I wonder to what extent looking at this current system of sort of global transnational corporations really dominating so much of the way that almost every human being in the world gets to sort of make sense of the world right from Internet to TV to everything they see around them, right from the outset as they begin to, almost as soon as they begin to learn language. To what extent do you think and we need to identify the structure of those transnational cooperations of structure of our global economy and this kind of growth based infrastructure as something that has to be fundamentally altered versus the, on one hand, there's this deep layer of human supremacy as an ideology, on the other hand if we could change some of the fundamental ways in which this growth based sort of corporate mind conditioning takes place. And do you think that leads to something we need to be more focused on?
33:01 Crist
Yes, I think that we need to be focused, and this is part of the sort of urgency of the matter, on all these different levels, but certainly the capitalist global economy is really the main engine right now that is destroying the world. It gobbles up the world after turning it, representing it, and turning it into resources, and it's oriented toward profit for shareholders, and it's oriented toward opulence for those who are at the helm, and It's fully grounded in consumerism, so really getting people to want more and more and to want what they don't need, and it's also oriented in terms of expanding markets, and it expands markets both horizontally in terms of pulling more and more people into the global economy, and it also expands markets vertically by polluting the minds of children, so it's very clear that capitalism has to go.
33:59 What is not clear is how this is going to happen. It's very hard to predict this, so one of the things that I argue in my book, that we could go into, is that I think that what we need to do is start to exit the status quo and to sort of work in the direction of imploding it [destroy technoindustrial society], because it seems so very difficult to try to face this beast. Yes, but I think another aspect of this which is often missed in people who are single-mindedly focused on neoliberalism and the neoliberal global economy, Is that capitalism is not a simple beast. It's sort of a beast with many heads. It has a lot of different constituents to it. So one of those constituents that is really fundamental, and that I discussed in the book, Is that it rests on the conceptual foundation of turning the world into resources, 'natural' resources which unfortunately is a term that is just overused, people just use it without really looking at it critically and looking at the kind of implications and innuendos that it carries, which is basically that the world is made for people, but this is part of the conceptual foundation of capitalism that Earth's living and nonliving components are resources [for the taking], that the metals, the land, the oil, the gas, coal, whatever, the fisheries that we can just go into, all of that is resources, can be availed of and extracted, and then processed into commodities and then have people buy those commodities.
35:35 That's one thing that we need to question. It's a component, but we should not see that as a piece of what capitalism is, its internal to its structure, it's part of its ideological fate, there is no 'natural resources' and so we need to question that concept as part of questioning capitalism itself. Another piece of capitalism is that it's very much in its mode of operation. It rests on distancing and invisibility.
36:10 This is, you know, most of the commodities that consumers use, the global middle class uses, in particular. We have no idea. People have no idea where they come from, the vast majority of the stuff we have, we have no idea where it came from, and at what cost it was made for. in terms of nature or in terms of people. So this is another component of capitalism that we need to look at, is the distance and visibility that is built into its mode of operation.
36:39 There are more pieces of it and this is what makes it a complex thing so, you know, of course global trade is entirely tied up with distance and invisibility. And global trade is all about this sort of immense movement of stuff around the world 24/7. Much of this stuff is really superfluous. And this level of global trade is incredibly destructive and waste producing, so another piece of sort of looking at capitalism is that we need to question global trade, and of course one of the core ideologies of capitalism today is global trade and where they call it free trade. We don't need to abolish global trade. Trade is not a bad thing intrinsically. It's actually a good thing and people have always traded. It's a good way to sort of change. I change ideas and, ideally, to have peaceful relations. It's a good way to have neighborly support, but global trade today is out of all proportions, so we really need to vastly reduce it now.
37:34 But moreover capitalism is also tied to mass production, which is tied to mass consumption, and the two fueling one another, and mass consumption is really entirely tied up to population growth, and it's tied up with the growth of the global middle class so, population, which is often a lot of times when people are looking at capitalism, they don't want to look at the population question, as if the population question has nothing to do with it. But actually the growth of the population very much fuels mass production and mass consumption, and If we look at the industries that are the most profitable industries in the world today, they are industries that have a vast clientele, hundreds of millions of people: the high-tech industry, the oil industry, the retail industry. These are industries that have huge amounts of people supporting their products.
38:32 And let's talk about one more aspect of capitalism that also often goes unmentioned, and I think is really very much tied to it today, and that is the nation-state, the institution of the nation-state. So the nation-state, it facilitates capitalism, is really kind of the handmaiden of capitalism. The two things work together. The nation-state, for one, it carves up national territory and then delivers that territory to industries. But, for example, by giving access to fossil fuel industries, giving access of forests to timber industries, giving access of land to the livestock industry, giving access of the oceans, of fisheries, all these things are facilitated. Industries and corporations are facilitated by the nation-state and supported by the nation-state, moreover the nation-state makes all the infrastructure that enables all this stuff to be moving around, and it makes all the laws that enable the the movement of capital around, and it also hands out, as we know, vast subsidies to industries.
39:47 So where I'm going with this is that, of course, we need to be questioning economic growth and more generally to human expansionism. But the capitalism which is the sort of the engine the economic engine of growth, is not a simple thing. It has these different facets and I think that this is part of the reason that it's just so entrenched. It's got roots into all these different places. It's got strong conceptual foundations that are inside the language.
40:16 You know it has strong roots into a way of life, a consumers way of life, that people have bought into. It's tied up with population growth that is occurring. It's entirely sort of dependent on the infrastructure that is being built by nation-states and facilitated in other ways by nation-states. So I think you know a lot of times, when people focus on capitalism, I think that that complexity is really not there. So we sort of get a kind of subtext that if only we were to tax the CEOs and drop their bonuses, then we would be on the way to the solution and by all means, you know, yeah, let's tax the super-rich.
40:53 I'm all for that, you know, and regulate them and cap their bonuses. But this isn't necessarily going to address the ecological crisis [but make it worse?]. We really need to actually focus in on all those different pieces of it and change both, right?
41:08 Lent
Yeah, thank you for that. I mean that's a really really well described structural sense of this kind of systemic interactions between these different aspects of this kind of multi-headed Hydra, or whatever, and it's almost as if this whole notion of human supremacy comes out in the way that you just described in the system we're living in right now. So that was really helpful. Thanks.
41:30 And so just had a couple more questions, actually, coming from what you just described there, and then I'd like to make sure we get to spend at least a few minutes before we close on this hopeful inspirational view of the ecological civilization that you talk so well about in the book. But I wonder, just a couple of things there from what you'd raised, one of the best things that I enjoyed so much in your book was really looking at the way language is used in enabling so much of this human expansionism that we talk about as being natural.
42:10 This notion of valuing nature's resources, or ecosystem services, and all these phrases that we've both seen are used not just by the capitalists, but we see environmental activists, people who really care about living Earth, if wanting to engage with this predominant capitalist model, with this ethos that says if we can only speak to them in their language, if we can show them that this ecosystem is so valuable because, look at these services it brings to the human community around all, then we can get people to see the language of dollars and cents, that mean something to them, and then we'll get them to change their behavior based on that. And then I think this is so key because this is actually a lot of major drivers in the environmental movement talk in that language and I'd love you to just see more about what you think of the dangers of that, any benefit to it too, because these are people sometimes who really have the best intentions and wanting to really make a difference right now .
43:15 Crist
Well, let me just start out by saying in general that that language, and I think this is a point that we very much agree on, is incredibly important and it often is assumed that some of the language that we use, especially when it's used conventionally, is just neutral, or it's just descriptive and it's kind of innocent, but language is very much a lens. It can be a lens through which we look at the world. And so it comes with good baggage, about how we see the world, how we see our relationship with the world, our emotional connection with the world. Language carries all that, and relieves it, and often and especially when we use language without thinking too much about it without critical awareness.
44:07 We are taken in by those innuendos. So I do focus a lot on language, especially what I refer to as the master concept of Natural Resources, and Natural Resources is simply a way of couching, calling the world (first of all notice that the notion of Natural Resources how broad it is), and it has this capacity that you can just slap it on to anything because it has this elasticity in it, right? It's just about what we can take and then 're'source. 'Re' that word, 're' that what we can keep taking, just so the notion of taking is actually built into Natural Resources, and the fact that the word is so, it appears, so innocuous and so conventional, it builds in the rightfulness of that taking, but I also focus on some terms that are kind of spin offs. There are more specific to areas and spin off of the notion of natural resources.
45:03 So fisheries is an example of that, and you're totally right, many people use the word fisheries, including environmentalists and environmental analysts, and they also use the notion of fish stock. But let's look at those words and let's look at how those words are painting the world what they are making us think about the world, and one of the things that they are doing is that they are stating that they are objectively describing something out there which is really not something that is out there.. Right? I mean what is in the ocean is fish, not fisheries.
45:37 At the moment that you call something a fishery, it's there for the taking, so fishery, the notion of fishery, or fish-stock, is internally connected with industrial fishing, which is one of the most destructive activities that has ever been produced. It's an incredibly destructive activity of just going out there and scooping up enormous quantities of creatures. It means taking food out of the mouths of other creatures. It's incredibly destructive in terms of habitat when we look at what trawlers do to continental shelves and to sea mounts. It is destructive in terms of what is simply called bycatch, which are all these creatures that are then thrown back into the sea, dead or dying, but when we have a concept like fisheries or fish stock, it kind of lends an air of normality to this whole activity of industrial fishing which, if we were to look at with a clear eye, we would see is not normal, and if we saw it is not normal, it doesn't necessarily mean we don't eat fish. It simply means we have to tread much lighter on the oceans.
46:52 It simply means we have to prefer artisanal fishing and subsistence fishing over this sort of wholesale destruction of industrial fishing. Now with respect to ecosystem services and natural capital, I think that these are also very much spin-offs of natural resources. It's sort of like dressing the world and representing the world in terms of what it does for humans, which is reinforcing the message that the world is made for humans. Which has been a message that has been around for way too long. So it's just simply reinforcing that message. So it's kind of like shooting our own foot, I mean, that's what we want to get away from. We want to awaken people from that idea. So when we keep using terms of that nature, I think that we really don't make progress. Of course, I don't use those terms, I think of them as kind of a little bit soporific. It's much more important, I think, to sort of get to the place where we speak to the love that people have for the point, and we we awaken that love which is there but we bring that love to the fore. Yeah, I think these kinds of terms are not doing that work.
48:03 Lent
Yes, thank you so much. I think that is incredibly important and it does feel to me that when people speak to the sort of mainstream establishment on their own terms, it's as if we sort of lost the battle before we even begin it, because as soon you use their language, it's all over. So yeah, thank you for that. So with the last few minutes we have I'd like to shift our attention to this: hope, for what's possible out there, the sense of the ecological civilization, and as we look at the scenario that you paint out, certainly one big question I had and I'd like to just go into in a little more depth, you have this notion that to get to that place we do need to get human population down by, seemed almost like about seventy five percent, from seven and a half billion or so where it is now, and of course it's heading upwards, to as little as two billion, and one question I had for you, this surprised me a little bit and I know you've done a lot more research on it than I have, so I'd love to understand this a bit more.
49:11 I had got, I had had the sense from studies, from places, say like the Rodale Institute and other places, that agroecology [The Odum brothers understood 'agroecology' and didn't think that organic agriculture enthusiasts did, so don't use the word without reading about the history of concept and perhaps understanding H.T. Odum's 'better view'], if implemented really skillfully, could actually be just as productive, if not more productive, if you look at the total system, including what is sort of the externalized costs, as this whole industrial ag pesticide, fossil fuel based agriculture that we have now. But it sounds like you were saying in the book that actually, even if we do practice agroecology on a real basis, we'd have to accept it would be less productive, and so we'd have to bring down the human population to make it sustainable. So perhaps you can just describe that in a little more detail to help me and others understand that.
49:56 Crist
No, I don't. I don't believe that organic agriculture is less productive. This is something that the spokespeople of an industrial agriculture state. It's not less productive. But what I argue is that we don't simply want to replace industrial food production with organic diversified food production. We also want to scale down the proportion of land that it takes now. Agriculture takes enormous amounts of land [and energy] the figure that I use in the book is 40% Earth's ice-free land is devoted to agriculture, which the biggest piece is devoted to animal agriculture and actually a figure that I saw just today hit my inbox from a new study, it's that now they're calling it 50% of the Earth's ice-free land. So we want to do two things.
50:50 Yes, we want to convert from industrial agriculture to agroecological food production, but we also want to scale down that proportion so that food production is a modest subsystem of the earth and this doesn't take up the lion's share, now that having been said, I think that the kind of work that the Rodale Institute is doing is incredible work to support the organic food movement. Because what they're showing, and they're showing it empirically, and through research, is that organic food production can produce equivalent yields to conventional or industrial. Yes, that's what I understand. Of course those kind of comparisons you actually have to look specifically at crops and you have to look specifically at places, and you need to look specifically at conditions, but generally speaking it's a generalization that holds that organic can produce equivalent yields and sometimes even better and not only is it kind of on a par on the yield front but on top of that organic farming comes with incredible benefits, beautiful benefits actually, it preserves the soil.
52:02 It preserves and even builds the topsoil. It uses fewer fossil fuels [as embodied in fertilizer/pesticides] and it takes the poisons out of the equation [kills fewer competitors], the synthetic pesticides, and the fertilizers and the pollution that is coming from these agricultural chemicals is a huge problem. So for example recently, just in the last few years, we've seen frightening drops of pollinators and insects more broadly in good part because of the pesticides and of course fertilizers produce dead zones in the world's estuaries. They're made from fossil fuels and they actually put out pollution in streams and rivers and they put out greenhouse gases.
52:54 So we really, and this is something for the Rodale Institute needs to be applauded, we really need to get away from this idea, which is an absurd idea, that we need to poison the earth, that we need to poison our bodies in order to make nourishment, to make our food. So and then further organic and diversified farming is friendly to wildlife and it creates habitat for wildlife and it's more nutritious because the soil is healthier. So in other words, organically made food is not only compatible in terms of yields, but it also brings these additional extraordinary benefits with it over and above the industrial agriculture, but the point that I made in the beginning is that it's not a simple picture because when we talk about agroecology, we really, a fundamental piece of it, is bringing the animals back, the farm animals back to the land and taking in them out of these awful environments, which they are piled in order to make cheap meat.
54:00 Which is one of the most egregious aspects of the world we live in that we do this to animals, right? So we have to bring the farm animals back to the land, but if we bring these billions of animals, we put them on the land, we wouldn't have solved the problem that it takes over the world. So we need to bring down those numbers. It means that we need to change our diet in the direction of plant based, if not greatly plant based. But at the same time we really need to lower our numbers and food production is one there's only one piece of that there's a reason for that as I discussed in my book. The growth of the global middle class is another reason that people are converging toward a standard of living that has extraordinary impact.
54:42 People are converging toward a standard of living, of having electricity and all the things that go with electricity. So given this movement in that direction in that kind of standard of living, what we really want to do is we want to make that standard of living modest, right? Not American right, but kind of more along the lines of Europeans. We want to make it modest, we want to make it equitable, and we want to scale it down. That's a fundamental reason for moving in the direction of a smaller global population. And I spend a lot of time discussing how this can be done and the amazing thing that really it has to be emphasized is that it can be done through bringing certain fundamental human rights to people.
55:29 Bringing family planning, getting all girls and young women into schools and bringing a comprehensive sexuality education. As I discussed in the book, bringing these three things, it's going to have a huge impact, and then on top of that, of course, we need to have, we need this to be more of a public issue. We need more awareness about it. We need to break the silence about it, and we need to be directing a lot of resources, funding and so on toward family planning and education.
56:00 Lent
Right, and I thought that was a very very powerful part of your book as you showed the profound impacts that those really really positive developments could bring on that whole population issue and you know as you come towards the end of the book you paint just a beautiful and really well-defined picture of what an ecological civilization actually could look like and you focus a lot on this core concept of, I think you call, bioregionalism as a sort of core structural element of that so perhaps you'd like to, as we draw towards the course right now, just sort of paint that picture a little bit for listeners as to what you think could be possible for a flourishing human future on a flourishing Earth.
56:45 Crist
Yeah, you know, I present bioregionalism very much as a model of harmonious inhabitation to move towards, so I'm fully in line with other bioregionalists that it's a beautiful model, of course we're nowhere near that, so I very much presented as a kind of a vision to ignite the human imagination. We don't know what the future will look like and of course building a global ecological civilization is going to be the work of many generations [we don't have many generations], so we don't know exactly what it will look like, but kind of presenting a vision of co-flourishing of human and non-human beings. That's really the core of an ecological civilization. So the big picture is, the largest context, is that a human system, the human presence, the component, in particular settlements and food production, but take up most of the land.
57:38 We want to become a modest subsystem of the earth while free nature, or wilderness, becomes the sea within which human inhabitations and land uses are nestled. So it's kind of, the big picture is, really inverting what we have today, which is by means of human expansionism, humanity really has become that sea, we have taken over, and the Natural world has become, you know, free nature, wild nature have become pockets that in many, in most cases are just becoming increasingly and increasingly squeezed, so really to reverse that picture is to reverse that vision and allow the human imagination to be ignited by that image.
58:29 What would it be like to preserve a thriving planet? With abundant Earth, with its full diversity, and its complexity, and have human civilization nestled within that. You know, to present that vision. The question is, the issue is, like why do we want anything different than that? No, simply, you know expressing those ideas and putting them out there to allow people, to free people to see that there is a different way to be on Earth, right? I said we can, you can have all the things that we get from civilization that we enjoy, but that we really have to scale down the human enterprise quite a bit to allow for the flourishing of the rest of the world and so bioregionalism becomes an exercise to really investigate that, it's a very different model from the nation-state.
59:22 Yeah, nation states are fundamentally territorial. What nation states do and fundamentally human supremacists, in terms of the core of how they operate and how they're defined, they annex a portion of the earth as their territory, and in fact as their property, to do what they will with them and then the boundaries of different nation states are entirely contiguous. So what has happened when we look at it, at a map, at a geopolitical map, the earth has been divided among different nation states and then nation states in cooperation with industries do whatever they want to their natures, and when nation-states get enough power, economic and military, they can also do what they want to other people's nations. Right? A bioregional formation couldn't be more different than that. The bioregional formation as a model, as a vision, is not an imposition on the land.
1:00:18 But the idea is that peoples are going to fit within the land, so each bioregional society is going to be different because it's going to be in accordance with the soils that are there in the climate, geographical location. What are the animals and the plants there, the bodies of water? The particular food affordances of different people of different places.
1:00:41 Also bioregional formations, as a matter of their ethos or their ethic, they will include non-humans as co-citizens of place as integral with bioregional communities instead of abusing and exploiting and displacing them. We will honor nonhumans, now important piece of the bioregional vision is that the land, between the bioregional communities, is going to be free. That is to say it won't belong to anyone. So we move away from this model that we have these contiguous boundaries, right? There's a cookie cutter on the face of the earth of your ownership, but rather human inhabitations are nestled inside a free [wild] world, a world that has been free to create kind of abundance that it naturally creates when it is free. So this is very different, very different from a commons. Okay, commons means that it's generally human property, but this is not a vision of a commons. It's a vision of a free Nature that belongs to itself, the beings that co-create it. So again, it's sort of a model to think with. We don't know exactly what the future. of course. will look like, but it's a model to think. [Yes, and in a millennium we may degrow our population to 35 million.]
1:02:02 Lent
Yeah, that is a profound and radical vision and I so appreciate you putting it out there and describing it so well, and I agree with you that, and it's so important to have these visions of what's possible, even if it feels so far away from where we are now, because without it we know we won't ever get there. But with that vision it gives something that can sort of pull our activities towards, to at least aspire towards into the future.
1L02:28 Crist
Yeah, so it honors the human imagination and the power of the imagination, and power of the human mind.
1:02:35 Lent
And that is one of the great features of human ages, the power to be able to pursue our imagination, to have that imagination, and then act accordingly, so this has just been a great conversation, Eileen, and maybe just one final question. I'd like to close with as we hear both what is wrong with the world right now and where we could lead to. I think a key question, so many people ask, is what is it that I could be doing right now to be most effective to try to shift the direction our civilization is taking towards that positive future. Yeah, and so I'm very curious if you could just share your thinking on that for people who are listening.
1:03:20 Crist
Sure. Sure. Well, you know I think maybe two broad points, one is that we all have different kinds of talents and different things that we are good at in different ways that we can make a difference, so having clarity about what our personal power is with respect to making a difference, I think, is incredibly important.
1:03:44 The other thing that I would mention actually kind of more than two, is really the importance of leadership. That we need people in leadership positions in the political system, the economic system, education, faith-based NGOs, in all these spaces, entertainment, in all these spaces we need leadership. We need people who are not going to be hiding behind. Well, I'm just one person. I can't make a difference. We need people to really be stepping up and leading. Both in terms of making differences in terms of policy and in terms of shifting people's values, so I think that this is really very important that the issue of leadership, and another point that I would mention is that I think is really really fundamental, to actually reinforced, because it's happening already, is moving away from eating too many animal products and generally of course scaling down consumption in the consumer world, but in particular when we look at the developed world. We overeat the animal products and the effect of animal agriculture is quite devastating.
1:04:50 It may be the most destructive enterprise and many people have described it that way on the planet. So beginning to move in that direction, not only will be good for the earth, it will also be good for animals, but it will also be good for human health because the other thing that we're seeing is these emergent diseases of affluence, and the ways that they are spreading right now in the world, and how much suffering that is bringing to people, and what it means in terms of simply health care budgets, so this is another really big issue to sort of move in the direction of really honoring our bodies as complex ecology's in their own right. So that we treat our bodies with good food, food that is not made, as much as we can. Of course, it's not made with pesticides and fertilizers and that is not made through the suffering of animals, so I think this is this another thing that's really important. So I would mention those three things that come to mind that every person has a talent, so what is it that you can do, you know people have talent in different ways. The other thing is the issue of leadership and then in terms of moving the world forward in new directions, and then this third has to do with how we care for our bodies and moving more in the direction of really healthier eating and more plant-based eating.
1:06:07 Lent
Yeah, thank you so much and those are three powerful powerful steps that each of us can take, so thank you for sharing those with us today, Eileen, and thank you for just a really fascinating and profound and inspiring conversation, and so just to remind listeners, Eileen's book is Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization published by the University of Chicago Press and I highly recommend it. And thank you so much, Eileen, to the great conversation today.
The belief that organic agriculture is as productive as conventional was shared by Nafeez Ahmed in Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (2017), which is a claim I looked into, whose sources I vetted. I will more briefly repeat alternative sources and claims for the benefit of those who would rather know than believe.
Can organic agriculture feed the world? Of course it can and will (after rapid depopulation) when there are no fossil fuel inputs into the agroecosystem. For example, expect per hectare corn yields to decline seven to ten fold and to not plant the same field in corn more than one to three times every decade or three. So how many hectares will be farmed and at what level of productivity/ha will global agriculture be compared to current industrial agriculture that has been figuring out how to turn fossil fuel into food for nearly a century?
The current organic agriculture production system is specialized to serve a niche market of consumers who can and prefer to pay for the increased production costs. Currently only agrochemical fertilizers and biocides are excluded, which results in organic yields of individual crops that are on average 80% of conventional yields with evidence that the gap would likely increase if organic production were upscaled (a meta-data analysis of 362 studies, but another meta-analysis of 205 comparisons found only a 9 percent decrease on average; Nature found a 5 percent gap for some crops down to a 34 percent (76% average of conventional yields) lower organic methods yield 'when the conventional and organic systems are most comparable'), so about 80% compared to straight out no-inputs-spared conventional agriculture that currently 'feeds the world'. Sources such as the Rodale Institute offer conclusion-driven research results that if correct do not scale up. Energy blind 'research' is used to support the conclusion that organic agriculture produces as much or more than conventional poison-based agriculture. In a world, without fossil fuel inputs into the agroecological food production systems, will output be one-fifth or one-fifteenth what it is today? I don't know, but one-tenth may be optimistic. To repeat: don't use the word agroecology without reading about the history of the concept and perhaps understanding H.T. Odum's 'better view'.
Apart from industrial fertilizers (e.g. Haber nitrogen or mined) and biocides, current 'organic' farming allows all other direct and indirect fossil fuel inputs, which are not viewed as toxins, to be used to be turned into food. Without fossil-fuel inputs, vast areas will not be farmable and production per hectare in such dryland farming areas as allow agriculture will not be productive each year as green manure crops and fallow years ranging from 1 to 50 years will be required for sustainable production (e.g. swidden with maybe a 15-25 year fallow period, land in flood plains with annual flooding/deposition, rice paddy production with 'night soil' and animal manure inputs in water).
In the past eighty years the increase in the rate of food production (of turning fossil fuel into food) has been greater than population growth, which Malthus failed to foresee. The Ehrlich's (the ag experts they consulted) failed in 1968 to foresee the Green Revolution which selected cultivars that could thrive in the environment that fossil-fueled industrial agriculture could create (for a time). Without industrial inputs, the Green Revolution crops will not be used and heirloom crops will, so in areas that currently produce over 200 bushels of corn/maize, good farmers may again get 25 bushels average yield on non-fallowed rain irrigated land, or where alternative energy is available it can be turned into food, but not anywhere near on the scale that fossil fuels allowed for a time, and electricity is of higher transformity, too high to be turned into food, as there may be too little to support information technology.
To seek out the condition now that will come anyway, rapidly degrow the population via managed descent. Create pockets of sustainability within which the fertility rate is dramatically reduced initially, regions where individuals with foresight intelligence can self-select into. See Watershed Design Principles and Alternative Farming. The form of management that might actually work would follow natural system laws and so might be called a naturocracy, as humans don't determine what works.
So if organic agriculture is inevitable, as is depopulation, will bioregional government replace BAU government? I live in Cascadia (political 'bioregion'). I also live in the neartic ecozone and in West North America bioregion, or bio-geographic region, an ecologically and geographically defined area (apolitical).
I also live in the Coos Watershed, one of over 90 in the state of Oregon in the nation-state USA per early 21st century political reckoning. Optimum watershed management unit size is likely far smaller that a 'bioregion' as enthusiasts conceive, which could not persist, could not avoid conquest, without the protection of a United Federation of Watersheds, some global management system by whatever name, that also manages interwatershed trade based on emdollar evaluation and interferes in war endeavors such that none succeed.
As a political concept, bioregions have boundaries that may be more geo-bio based than nation-state lines, but the concept is otherwise a socio-politico-economic one. Cascadia was conceived within the environmental movement of the 1970s as a separatist nation-state (where recreational drug use is legal and LGBTTQQIAAP rights (and straight rights) are assured for all hu-mans of NIMH).
Cascadia still has supporters, but I've never met one or seen any signs of supporters other than online (the nearest chapter is over 200 miles away). I have been unable to find out what fraction of a percent of citizens have heard of, or know they can apply for a Cascadian passport or buy a flag to fly. But I'm guessing there are more Cascadians (or citizens of any other real or imaged country) than citizens who would vote to slow the economy.
Having far more support is the proposed state of Jefferson, whose supporters set up booths at local events. In terms of 'real' solutions these are extremely fringe alternative state or would-be nation-state visions of something. So far as I know, no bioregionalists have ever lived in a bioregion. I do know several anarchists (who don't believe in Dunbar's number) who can go on at book-length about how wonderful and environmentally beneficial it will be to live in the coming anarchy. Anarcho-primitivists are especially enthusiastic as they will just live wherever they want without being limited to a region.
The belief in political solutions is as universal now as was the belief in religious salvation in medieval Europe. If human supremacy is the common ground between the God's Mandate and Growth's Mandate worldviews, proposing an opposing belief or urging disbelief in human supremacy ideology is so BAU. Alternative, as in truly radical, would be to replace all believe-based ways of knowing with a matter-energy worldview, i.e. with systems thinking sans political prattle. Beliefs are as preferred, so any grasp of reality is soon lost. In the coming Federation, democracy may still flourish in some form, like monarchy in the UK, but it will only decide matters of taste, of preference, as in terms of what works long-term, humans don't get a vote.
'I think that is incredibly important and it does feel to me that when people speak to the sort of mainstream establishment on their own terms, it's as if we sort of lost the battle before we even begin it, because as soon you use their language, it's all over.' —Jeremy Lent
Stop trafficking in concept mongering, in the language of believers who speak of 'human nature, human rights, free choice (for humans), democracy (for humans),' whose words, words, words define alleged meaning. Awake up hu-mans.
'The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy [the systems worldview]; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.
'The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.
'Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.'
"Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture." Summary,
by M. King Hubbert, of a seminar he taught at MIT Energy Laboratory,
30 September 1981
The Two Cultures: The monetary and ecolate cultures delineated
Monetary (BAU/GND) Culture |
Ecolate (Systems Thinking) Culture |
| Would rather believe | Would rather know |
| Belief-based | Inquiry-based |
| Humancentric | Naturcentric |
| Know-a-lots, presumed certitude | Know-nothings, iterate towards maybe knowing |
| Democracy | Naturocracy |
| Takers | Leavers |
| See a planet for the taking | See a planetary life-support system for the serving |
| Growth is good, more is better | Steady-state is just so |
| All wants are also needs | Needs matter, as is knowing needs from wants |
| Purpose-driven life | Life-driven purpose |
| It's about money | It's about energy |
| Short-term self interest | Long-term systems service for posterity |
| Rights | Responsibilities |
| Humans are different in kind from other organisms | Hubris man subject to extinction |
| Patriarchy | De facto, non-ideological matriarchy |
| Self over system | System over self |
From Rethinking Economic Growth Theory from a Biophysical Perspective, 2014
I predict that most people, the majority of intelligentsia types and the public they misinform, will not switch horses until looking over the net energy cliff in horror (maybe ten years after climax), horrified to consider the possibility that they might be (might have been) wrong. All current political systems are utterly intertwined with monetary culture, hence there can be no political solutions.
And then what? May we be prepared as Hubbert had endeavored to be in the early 1930s.
Adapted from Mark Brown, Beyond Growth: Economics as if the Planet Mattered, 2/5/2019.
"Monetary culture" vs matter-energy-li system worldview. —M. King Hubbert
'Li' is Chinese for the laws—organizing principles of the cosmos.
Technocracy and ecological economics were/are transitional.
The narrative of moneyed multiculturalism, society's current Overton window, excludes the unthinkable (most of alleged reality) as seen via the matter-energy-li worldview. Hubbert was not and could not have been a public intellectual in the current human centric belief system. If technocracy had replaced democracy, which would have been likely had there been a biophysical basis for the Great Depression, he would have become a major public intellectual. Within the narrative of Empire, he was ignored by the intelligentsia and came to speak to those with an interest in energy, whose concerns are dismissed by the energy blind, the temporal blind, and the posterity blind.
The matter-energy-li systems worldview emerged among the 'free, curious, and critical' Greeks, at least among some of them, and may have climaxed with Carneades, 10th head of Plato's Academy who, unlike Plato, was an evidentualist and thoroughgoing abeliever able to question everything. SYSTEM serving Neoplatonists preserved all of Plato's works, most of his student Aristotle's work, and we know of his teacher Socrates's teaching thereby, but most of the best of Greek thought was lost to fire or having their pages scraped to receive Christian verities. The later cast of characters, e.g. Galileo, Copernicus, Bruno... sought a 'better view' and their endeavor was largely ignored or opposed with extreme prejudice. The monetary BAU culture still largely ignores or opposes any 'better view' including most scientists (even ecologists) who were narrowly trained post-Sputnik to serve their respective empire-builders which have since coalesced into a single globe monetary culture with but a few peripheral hold-outs, e.g. North Korea and Iran who are yet being assimilated. Most scientists compartmentalize, with over sixty percent having a political identity with implied belief in political solutions with a lesser percent believing in religious salvation. The matter-energy-li sytems view is not belief based. I view H.T. Odum's endeavor to 'shock the scientific establishment into a better view' to be within the four hundred plus year tradition of marginalizing views not supportive of BAU empire-building and it's narrative of human supremacy, inclusive of technocracy and the coming naturocracy.
If Hubbert were still around, I'd ask what he thought of calling technocracy for the 21st century naturocracy. I'm wondering about the doomer dynamic, if the behavioral sink has progressed too far, such that there are no Hubberts, no candles in the Dark Decades to stand and deliver as he did in 1931, and so only a Great Simplification can be expected. Posterity only knows (or will).
And let Jeremy tell us about the next thirty years.
'If the habitability of Earth is to be preserved for all our descendants, we have no choice but to end and reverse population growth, limit our consumption of resources, replace damaging technologies with gentler ones, and attempt to design a better, more sustainable civilization.' —Anne H. Ehrlich, Paul R. Ehrlich, Too Many Rich Folks 1989
SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/6/2022
I suspect that consensus thinking may be the death of us, so better to beg to differ than seeking to cancel (with sometimes extreme prejudice as is increasingly common even within academies and among those who endeavor to listen to Nature, inclusive of scientists and poets). I assume I know nothing, and I've never been proved wrong yet. I find myself increasingly being reminded of William Rees' words that could well be chiseled on a memorial, a headstone for humanity, by the last human as a summing up of modern humanity: 'too clever by half and not nearly smart enough'.
Hu-man is short for hubris man.
To the claim that ‘keeping up the battle for degrowth is a good thing, but there had better be an organization of information for those who make it through the crash so they have a chance to avoid repeating history moving forward’ I would add a thought from the past, from systems ecologist H.T. Odum (I’m some sort of Odumite, it seems, though I try not to be a mindless follower):
‘If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing…. Seek out the condition now that will come anyway.’
About 60k years ago, the progenitors of almost all of us (genetically if not culturally), may have numbered 1k to 10k breeding pairs of humans in Africa. This does not mean that all humans except these few died off in a near extinction event. A genetic bottleneck could mean that those who became our ancestors were able to persist and displace other humans without interbreeding with them and eventually all other hominins (not saying good or bad) on the planet. The only humans whose ancestors predate the Great Human Expansion are the San, Hadza, and Pygmy.
There were humans who were morphologically Homo sapiens sapiens living out of Africa at the time who did not become our ancestors. Our ancestors left Africa a bit over 50k years ago to rapidly spread and displace all other humans and hominins (except San, Hadza, Pygmy). They could have been different in some way that gave them a competitive advantage, but such guesses must remain speculative, though their rapid expansionist behavior is not whether attributable to genetic and/or cultural mutations.
Perhaps they acquired an ability to live successfully in larger groups (so maybe only one change: their Dunbar’s number goes up to 150 while everyone else remains at 75 or less). This change would not show in the fossil record, but in competition or conflict, a larger group could win. Not an extraordinary claim, but speculative as we actually know nothing. Perhaps the change was not entirely genetic, but cultural (memetic).
My point, as if I had one, is that posterity, 50k years from now, may not be able to claim 8 billion humans of today as their genetic/memetic ancestors. They may have knowledge of us (maybe information is not lost but preserved/recovered) and they may be forced to acknowledge that they are genetic/memetic descendants of 2k to 20k humans (or 0.000025% to 0.00025% of today’s human population. This is not a story anyone tells (or could Like and Share on social media). It is not the solution we seek (we want to double down on Business As Usual or gimme that Green New Deal), but as an alternative to extinction, it is a possible future, i.e. a viable future in which humans persist and again become evolvable subsystems of Gaia.
As James Lovelock has guessed, what is implied is that someday, if humans do not go extinct, that ‘someday there will be a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly’. As is increasingly obvious, we modern techno-industrial humans, the 99.9+%, do not understand the planet and cannot live with it in such a way as to persist. The someday human Lovelock envisions may have to be different, at least memetically, from we who are ‘too clever by half and not nearly smart enough’ to persist and get right with Mother (Gaia).
As I also am thinking likely, we are at high risk of seriously (fatally) ‘underestimating the difficulty of avoiding a ghastly future’. The idea to perhaps consider is that we don’t have to envision saving the world (humanity) in any global sense. As few may agree (or none), we are not going to come up with a solutionatique that transitions 8 billion humans (via a prosperous way down a majority can agree to) to seek to rapidly degrow our population (via a managed birth-off to avoid a Malthusian die-off) to perhaps 7 to 35 million whose culture (based on foresight intelligence) would be unthinkable (e.g. no one has a car or smartphone) to 99.999+% of 2022 humans (though a ‘teachable moment’ could rapidly change what is thinkable).
Oh, but what if as many as 0.0001% where not only willing but able to transition to a viable complex society (after voting with their feet to auto-organize within pockets of potentially viable areas) able to persist as the millennia pass, and displace (not necessarily by force as they could merely not ‘go down with the ship’) those who were persisting only for a time by fighting to see who inherits the rubble? The probability of such change could be greater than coming up with another call to action (the right one, this time, unlike all prior ones) that 4.1 billion humans could vote for, one that could also actually work, and that the 4.1 billion are actually able to nudge the 3.9 billion to foundationally change to become more and more (rapidly of course) like the 4.1 billion who responded to the call to action (to if they can’t beat them, compete, to join them).
Or maybe someone could shift the paradigms of as many as 0.0001% of humans (more likely than 51%?) who come to define a pathway towards a potentially viable future and allow those able to self-select into an endeavor to change, to vote with their feet and…, is a plan that has a more likely chance (by maybe 5–6 orders of magnitude) of having a viable outcome leading to a human who understands the planet and can live properly with it (as distinct from believing that they can).
