Some thoughts on "solutions"

[GliderGuider]

I wrote the following as an email response to an enviro-blogger who asked me to contribute material to a discussion on environmental solutions. I thought I'd throw it up here for comments, because it contains the first seeds of the new way I'm starting to think about the future of humanity. It's radically different from the standard approach of most environmentalists right now. That's largely due to the influence of my newly developing "deep ecological" perspective on the problem.

When you start talking about "solutions" you need to be very clear what outcome you're trying to achieve. Is it "Stopping global warming"? Is it "Maintenance of business as usual"? Is it "Making the transition into a low-carbon civilization more gradual to enable us to adapt"? Is it "Making sure that individuals, families and communities have as much opportunity as possible to protect themselves from the coming changes"? Basically, what are the problems you're trying to solve, what is the the outcome you want to achieve, and is the outcome in fact achievable? If the big problem isn't solvable, are there smaller subsets of it that might be?

Here's my position on this. We will not stop global warming. We will not stop oil and gas depletion. Trying to achieve either of those objectives through carbon conservation or efficiency improvements will fail because too many nations have demonstrated their unwillingness to sacrifice anything to those ends. This isn't surprising, because the tenets of deep ecology (humanity is an element of the natural world little different from any other living organism) and evolutionary psychology (consumption and population growth are largely genetic imperatives) means that we will not be able to effect the wholesale behavioral changes needed to prevent the calamity.

However, there are achievable solutions to a different but related problem.Given that humanity as a species will come through the bottleneck and emerge into a less populous but severely resource-depleted world, how do we ensure that the right cultural structures are in place (recognizing the constraints of evolutionary psychology) to enable a truly sustainable civilization to reconstitute itself? This will require the survival of sufficient people in the right circumstances with the right kinds of knowledge and the right value systems. All these things can be promoted right now.

Talking about creating a new sort of civilization sounds very difficult - certainly harder to do than building solar panels. Paradoxically, I think the progress toward this goal is already well under way. The mechanism is what I talk about in the "I" of I HELP: the distributed, resilient global movement of local environmental and social justice groups. I have become convinced that they are the key - the launching pad of the next civilization. All the needed qualities exist already in this movement: - the resilience, the concerns about sustainability, the eco-consciousness, the social awareness, the gathering and promotion of the right sorts of knowledge, the rejection of centralized power structures. Plus they seem to have in their hands the key to the whole ball of wax for a sustainable civilization: an orientation towards matriarchy.

I'm going to be writing a major work about this over then next six months to a year, because I have come to believe this understanding is crucial. The process is already under way. Without any leaders, conscious direction or even a global agreement on the nature of the problem, humanity seems to be giving birth to exactly what it needs to heal the biosphere and move forward into a sustainable future. I know this all sounds radically prophetic and science-fictionish, but when faced with the probability of a singularity such as we could get from massive resource depletion, global warming and a population crash, the only sure bet is that life on the other side of it will unfold by different rules than we operate under now.

I have no way of knowing if my spidey-sense is telling me the truth about the shape of that future or the vehicle that will take us there, but that really doesn't matter. A civilization with a healthy dose of ecological sensibility, an orientation towards sustainability and a sense of justice for all living creatures including our fellow humans can't be a bad thing. And what better mechanism to inoculate a civilization with those qualities than 3 million disconnected groups? Think of them as antibodies swimming in humanity's bloodstream, called forth by our planet's dis-ease...

All comments are welcome.

[kestrel91316]

1. For ideas on scaled-down society with drastically less fossil fuel

and industrial dependence, look to the Amish.

They will come through this mess largely intact, I suspect.

[GliderGuider]

2. And look to Kerala as well

It looks like another guidepost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala

[bananas]

10. and The Farm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_%28Tennessee%29

[phantom power]

3. If you want to codify values in a manner "hardened" agaist calamity,

religion suggests itself. A friend of mine once observed that Mormonism would appear to be a religion specifically engineered to keep its followers safe from some kind of cataclysm, with their practice of keeping a year's supply of food, large families, high female-to-male families, etc.

That, of course, is a very Straussian idea. I hate Straussianism, and I hate religion. But I don't know of any other proven method of codifying behviors for masses of people, that is long-lasting.

We need a Hari Seldon for the 21st century.

[GliderGuider]

5. Certainly a spiritual sense is required

I'd like to promote paganism as the official religion of post-apocalyptic man. It has two key attributes - a reverence for nature and a matriarchal foundation.

It may sound like I'm kidding, but I'm as serious as a heart attack about this.

[phantom power]

7. I think it would also be valuable to preserve some kind of living science.

I'm guessing that nobody will be building any particle accelerators or moon-launches for some time after the Bottleneck. But it seems like a reasonable goal to preserve the ingredients of the enlightenment. Off the top of my head:

the scientific method
germ theory
anatomy
mathematics, at least through calculus
atomic theory
evolution
the printing press
numerical analysis

I don't know. The core insights about the natural world that we've worked so hard to obtain over the last 500 years. It will be so easy to lose it. Hell, we're losing a lot of it now in America, and things haven't even gotten bad yet.

I don't know. I'd love to believe, but really I'm dubious about attempts at social engineering. Likely as not, we'll end up like The Scientific People, dancing around a 200 year old Bunsen burner and chanting "Quant Suff! Quant Suff! Quant Suff..."

[GliderGuider]

8. Yes, I've been thinking about knowledge retention too.

Having recently re-read "A Canticle for Liebowitz" the importance of this is at the front of my mind. I think there are already some knowledge retention projects going on around the world. What I worry about is whether their repositories will be decentralized enough to be survivable and re-findable (by accident if necessary). It would be a whole lot easier to lose one great big building than to lose 100,000 smaller caches of information. A lot of small stashes would be much better for civilization, even if none of them held a complete copy of all the useful stuff.

[hunter]

9. James Lovelock, of the Gaia Hypothesis, talks about that...

... putting together a basic book of medicine, science, and technology, and making it the most widely distributed book in the world.

[GeorgeGist]

4. Problems are solved by a pessimists ...

Challenges are solved by optimists.

[GliderGuider]

6. A challenge by definition has a solution

All problems don't necessarily have solutions. The question is, how do you tell the difference? If there are solvable challenges embedded in a fundamentally insoluble problem how do you identify them and keep yourself from chewing your teeth off on the problem?