Earl's Myth

In the latest installment of a novel I'm writing in parts, a fictional industrialist named Earl recalls a myth he used to finance his nascent company. The myth was based on an ecological interpretation of businesses within an economy which in reality I made up while writing about it:

Economies functioned much like biomes, with companies acting like organisms, industries functioning as populations of species, and economic activity joining them in communities that, together with the physical resources such as people and materials that they collected and processed, functioned as ecosystems.

Of course, economies are artificial, but I wonder if most of us tend to expect similar things from both our artificial and natural environments. Evolution has shaped us to get what we need from natural environments if we follow certain instinctive behaviors, and to penalize us if we don't. Education serves a related function in relating to civilization by priming both our skills and our expectations so we can survive and thrive to the extent that we occupy useful niches within our artificial environment.

For the analogy to work, people must be equivalent to organisms in both types of environment, but there are many indications that it is no longer working. Perhaps the most obvious indication is the huge amount of wealth inequality in the world today, the equivalent of which would, I suspect, never occur in a natural system that wasn't about to include at least one population collapse. Instead, as Earl's myth described, we have organizations that are functioning as organisms, and people have been relegated to the role of "resources."

For the most part, the few people who have mastered control of the artificial organisms, through the acquiescence of their fellows and the illusion of embodied energy in money, still function as organisms themselves, and receive rewards commensurate with their occupation of the new niches demanded by the artificial world. The rest of us are simply used, then discarded, and perhaps recycled eventually (after extended periods of unemployment) while others are "consumed," all the while thinking that the work and personal degradation is an appropriate sacrifice for a better world created by the super-organisms (some of whom are still like us) that will eventually meet our wants and needs too.

Of course, the fact that our artificial organisms are using actual resources, and are crowding out the real organisms whose bodies and work enable our planet's habitability, means that the flesh-and-blood puppeteers of those organizations will also be part of the human population collapse facilitated by their efforts. Barring the success of fantastical efforts like that described in my book (a success we may not end up wanting), humanity will have to dispense with dangerous myths like Earl's and become reacquainted with Nature's reality just to survive.

Artificial Resistance

As I've mentioned elsewhere, most of us seem to have developed a relationship with our artificial world similar to what we might with a natural ecosystem. We pursue their self-interest as defined by their equivalent of a niche – characteristics and activities that efficiently use a subset of the resources available to the system. In the artificial world, we display the amazing adaptability of our species by differentiating ourselves as predators, prey, parasites, or grazers, depending on the situations we find ourselves in.

This observation may explain the resistance experienced by those of us who question the sustainability (and even validity) of the artificial world. People react as if we are questioning a natural law, which from their perspective we probably are. There is also a lot of investment to defend, and expectations that drive virtually every aspect of their behavior. Even many of us who have glimpsed the larger picture find it very easy to lapse into such thinking, especially where we remain embedded in the artificial world and depend on it for our survival and the survival of those we care the most about.

In previous discussions, I've focused on the raw consumption aspect of sustainability, and in a crude way, what that consumption supports: increasing “happiness” along with its proxy, life expectancy. Those discussions have mostly ignored the real experience of life in our society, the complexity of interactions and environments that both create our artificial world and are created by it. The abstractions have real and ultra-significant counterparts in what is the essence of many people's lives, of my life. It is therefore no surprise that they are viewed warily, at best as thought experiments, at worst as sedition (for example, a conservative friend once told me that the reason I could continue writing such things was because I was too powerless to be considered a threat).

In my cynical moments, which are becoming more frequent, I'm inclined to view recent economic and political events is as a preemptive power grab by those with the most to lose if the artificial world is significantly modified. I have no doubt that many of them are smart enough to see the inevitability of such modifications if anything resembling civilization is to survive this century (or even, as I've argued, the next couple of decades).

By watching what they're attacking, it's obvious that they understand at least the outline of the modifications that need to be made. The Achilles heel of our system is arguably its promotion of hoarding and waste, which enables a decreasing number of people to have an increasing amount of personal power at the expense of everyone and everything else. By contrast, in a sustainable system (such as a healthy, natural ecosystem) very little is wasted, and everything else is effectively borrowed. To defeat any transition to sustainability, those who choose to hold on to power (or want some day to attain it) would try to maintain people's dependence on non-renewable resources for as long as possible, destroy or manage to own the elements of natural systems that might be enlisted to provide free resources and services, and undermine cooperation among people that can't be controlled economically or otherwise (thus enabling people to find more natural niches than the ones provided by the existing system). All these things are being done, with already devastating consequences.

When I'm feeling extremely cynical, I imagine (and write) that the people who worship power are simply following the logic of competition to its ultimate conclusion, where only a few people (“the winners”) survive, and everyone else dies. Whatever their motivation, the end result may actually be worse: with no one to take care of them, and the natural world in decline, they'll just be the last ones to die. To avoid total depression, I spend some quality time in denial, then resurface with hope that somehow enough people can be educated about the fatal flaws in their worldview that we can work together to create a future for all of us and maybe a few more generations.

The View from Home

Sometimes, it helps your thinking to just look around where you live. For all my study of ecology and culture, I have to admit a fair amount of ignorance about my local environment outside of the usual range of knowledge most of us have. For example, I didn't know until very recently the species of trees on one of the routes I frequently walk (the dominant ones, currently with leaves, are Blue Spruce, Western Larch, and Ponderosa Pine). Of course, knowing the name of something is mainly good for communicating with other people about it, sharing what you each know and perhaps taking action based on that shared knowledge. I have a number of books (not to mention access to the Internet) which can provide a lot more information, including the books I've used for identification.

I've spent a lot of time studying and thinking about the similarities and differences between what I call the natural world and the artificial world, and how the two interact. My focus has been mainly on how what we do with them is healthy or not, contributing to our survival or ensuring our demise (there is, of course, a lot more to care about; but given the currently high probability of our demise, I feel justified in my preoccupation). In the urban area where I live (metropolitan Denver), the natural world is clearly at a disadvantage: trees, shrubs, and grasses are planted, pruned, and watered wherever people deem they can be, and wildlife is tolerated wherever it isn't perceived as a threat to the way people think their environment should be. My state has done a fair job of protecting wild areas both inside and outside of settled regions, but even there you can see that plants and wildlife have clear limitations imposed on them by the artificial world, a part of which we all carry with us.

The recent disaster in Japan was a horrific reminder of how the the two worlds can seriously harm each other, and how that harm can potentially spread to every neighborhood due to the global reach of the artificial world and the huge influence it has over the natural world. My neighborhood has already seen extreme weather due to the climate changes caused by industrial activity all over the planet. The vacancies at local malls are part of the devastation caused by marauding Wall Street traders and irresponsible bankers who live many hundreds of miles away, and hint at more systemic problems. For a beginner naturalist like me, it's going to be tough learning what's normal for my area before it all changes, but at least I'll understand the changes better in the process.