Groups of Value

The term “values” can be reduced to what someone uses to define “good” and “bad.” In my attempts to quantify it and relate it to behavior and global outcomes, I’ve identified a set of resources and amounts of them that everyone has and uses to some extent. Fractions of the totals of each per person throughout a population, representing how much each resource is valued, are ranked based on calculated distributions of each using historical projections of the totals over time that are embodied in simulations.

There are four identifiable groups that remain constant in their fractions of the population until too little habitat remains to support each person and members of the species that maintain it. The ranks of value placed on waste (artificial environments), habitat (natural environments), and people are unique to each group, as shown below. Note that the two middle groups could also be considered one group, as mentioned in Distributions.

Waste is valued most by the smallest group and people are valued most by the largest group. Habitat is valued most by the two middle groups, with one valuing waste second and the other valuing people second. No one in one group places the same amount of value on people or waste as anyone in another group. Members of either of the middle two groups can value habitat the same as members of the other group, but not members of either of the two remaining groups. Some members of the smallest and largest groups can value habitat the same, but no one can value habitat the same as members of the two middle groups.

If the value placed on each of the resources is exclusive of the others across the whole population, the fraction of the population valuing waste is 9%, the fraction valuing habitat is 40%, and fraction valuing people is 51%. Note that even for these groups, the fraction valuing people is much larger than the fraction valuing waste.

Money as a resource indicating relative economic activity (as indicated in the diagram for small populations and discussed in Economic Distribution) have favored equal value placed on people and habitat (corresponding to half the total habitat available to the population) while promoting increased waste by those who value it most. As shown in the following graph, waste production by a simulated world like ours has outstripped population growth (driving human transactions) as a component of economic activity and remains strongly associated with it. The “rich,” those benefiting most from that activity, and everyone else, represent another set of groups - defined by the value placed on money.

Implicit in this approach to quantifying what someone considers good and bad is the debatable assumption that their current conditions represent what they prefer, and that others they compare themselves to are likewise in preferred conditions. Even using change over time might not be a reliable indicator of preferences; the change could be so far beyond the person’s control and the destination is opposite to their preference. Referenced to groups, a person could move from one group to another due to the actions of others or environmental effects that force change in availability and consumption of resources. This appears to necessitate an additional variable for consideration: choice. Based on national statistics from 1800-2017, happiness varies as shown below, as does life expectancy, where the red lines mark the limits of each the four groups we started with; this suggests that members of a population will tend to prefer a higher value of waste.

As waste effectively decreases habitat, the ability of nature to provide basic biological needs decreases to a point where more people die than are born, beyond which the population crashes. Thus, increased waste decreases how long the population can exist (its longevity). Another set of groups could therefore consist of a group that cares about longevity being longer and the other that doesn’t. The group that cares about longevity would likely value habitat more than anything and waste less than people; the other group would consist of everyone else.

Upgrades

For much of this year I nursed a slowing computer while attempting to further my research and to do some writing within time limited by working a full-time job (luckily at home). As has happened in similar experiences, I built up a cache of insights that I could share when conditions permitted while sharing tidbits of related wisdom and information on social media platforms, most notably Twitter (@bradjarvis), which also served as a tool for collecting relevant source information. Just when my computer became unusable due to “upgrades” in the operating system and software that its speed could not handle, I capitulated to the need for a hardware upgrade (a new computer) to keep up with them and maintain the most basic functionality.

My new insights, as the most useful have, came from taking a fresh look at the essence of the mathematical modeling of historical data that has dominated my decades-long research into how basic values and resource availability are coupled to affect how long and how large a population can survive. This phase of the research focused more on what happens to groups within a global population than on projections of what happens to the entire population, requiring many more calculations to provide meaningful results. I had enough results by the time my computer became unusable to begin drawing conclusions that could be tested and used to extract a simple set of rules that embody their derivation.

The most fundamental insight of the model has been that human consumption of ecological resources (provided for sustenance of life in ecosystems) varies predictably with habitat density; where habitat density is the ratio of consumption for needs to the number of resources that remain (which are available to members of other species to meet their needs). One of my new insights is how consumption for needs (which is proportional to the number of people) increases with habitat density, and how the amount not consumed for needs (what I call waste) decreases with habitat density. 

Economic activity, measured globally as Gross World Product (GWP) and on a national level as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is a function of the number of potential exchanges of resources, which varies with the number of people and the resources they consume. The distribution of people and resources derived from their relationships to habitat density can therefore be used to estimate the range of habitat densities occupied by an economically active group like a nation for which that activity is measured. Related aspects of people’s lives such as life expectancy and happiness show looser correlations with habitat density that can therefore be used on a society level to infer the dominant values associated with those aspects along with the more direct ones: population size and longevity (how long the society can survive with its resource base).

The upgrades to the underlying historical data and its analysis showed that, in general, nations have kept their minimum habitat density the same as the world’s while varying their maximum habitat density. This maintains a link to the people in the society with the most access to resources that can be used to meet needs and are paid handsomely for it. In the extremely rare exceptions where that link has been severed, it appears to have been accompanied by rapid demographic transition or government collapse. If, as most of my simulations of the world’s future show, the minimum habitat density climbs in response to critically depleted resources, what triggered those exceptions may also become outcomes in a self-sustaining feedback loop that accelerates the process, enhanced by environmental feedbacks that further reduce available resources.

For now, my new computer is performing as well as I hoped, apparently matching what my not-too-old computer was able to do. Like humanity’s instinctive drive to increase the number of people in the world, which seems to be our dominant value, my hard drive is filling up with the inevitable upgrades to my software and the files (and increases in file size) that I am generating with each new increment of my research and writing. Some time when I least expect it, a critical amount will be used and a new set of upgrades will threaten to make this computer inoperable, just as our planet is on the verge of becoming unable to sustain life as we know it, forcing us to quickly (and impossibly) find and move to another one or die. Refusing that next upgrade is still an option, as is reducing what we’re already doing with it so we can use fewer resources. Unfortunately, our planet – like my last computer – may be doing the ecological equivalent of changing the operating system so that functions we need can no longer be done without a lot of adaptation. Time is running out to find and implement a solution to this conundrum, and I’ll keep doing what I can to help that process.

Focus on the Future

The fictional "world like ours" portrayed in the Simulated News blog is about to execute a global strategy for confronting a threat of imminent global extinction that was confirmed nearly seven months ago. Definitions of the threat and the strategy have evolved along with my progress in simulating the future and evaluation of options for making it better than the alternative that we are living.

Our real-world trajectory is bleak, as any open-minded perusal of recent scientific research on climate and ecology will attest. Timelines for action to limit mass death of people and members of other species are converging on the period that my simulations have identified, along with a similar scale of effort. 

Humanity's extinction, which results from all of my simulations if action isn't taken, is generally considered an extreme worst-case scenario by mainstream science, and taken as an article of faith by a growing minority that is focused on what I call "self-sustained feedbacks" (such as the melting of permafrost and polar ice, and the decimation of species at the base of ocean and land food chains). Global catastrophe involving sizable fractions of the world population by the middle of this century is a likely alternative outcome, which can at best (with current capabilities, as I understand the literature) be delayed until the end of this century. 

The apparent dependency on available ecological resources of population (among other variables) modeled by my simulations has yet to be proven as more than a strong correlation. Demographic transition is the generally accepted explanation for the observed changes, involving reduced fertility in response to better economic conditions that are notably a reward – if not the goal – of dominating our natural environment. Both explanations logically ascribe a peak in population to a peak in economic activity (which I model as a function of a group's population and total consumption – essentially the trades of resources). A decline in economic activity would naturally accompany a reduction in resources that can be traded; and people (traders) dying from harmful environmental conditions, reduced resources, or both. Population loss is effectively inevitable; the main uncertainty lies in how soon and how much.

Probability is not destiny. As individuals and as groups we can take actions that will alter the trajectories of our lives toward something better, however we choose to define that. Alteration does not ensure success, but it changes the probability. I personally define success as, at a bare minimum, extending the survival of our species – and the species it depends on – for as long as possible; beyond that, "better" includes minimizing pain and suffering for as many people as possible, and extending to the affects of our actions on other non-human lives. My writing and research related to this topic are part of a set of personal actions intended to increase the probability of success.

In the imaginary world that I call "Hikeyay," representing one of several simulations resulting from my research and the subject of the Simulated News blog, the overwhelming majority of the global population has chosen to reduce their personal consumption and let the population decline naturally by not replacing those who die from old age until it is almost too late to maintain a constant level. Activities are focused on putting the drivers of extinction in reverse: creating habitat, controlling invasive species, cleaning up pollution, and eliminating over-harvesting of "resources" that largely include members of other species. Gaps in capability will be filled by the development and deployment of technology, especially relating to pollution and self-sustained impacts. 

Hikeyay's global strategy is based on success as I define it, taken to an extreme that is unlikely in our world but dictated by the logic of the model on which it is based. The inhabitants readily admit (as my proxies) that the intended end-state is a very unlikely, even with their civilization's extraordinary level of commitment. The effort will, in the worst case, buy time that they wouldn't otherwise have to live, and do so according to their values. I believe their example is worthy of emulation to the extent possible in this world.

Declaration of War

Yesterday, the president of the United States issued what was, in effect, a formal declaration of war against life on Earth. In a speech based more on ideology than reality, he firmly placed the economic growth of the United States based on fossil fuels as a higher priority than trying to limit the high risk of extinction imposed by one of the most destructive consequences of using those fuels: global climate change.

Substantively, it wasn't a surprise. By word and deed, economic dominance over the world has been the primary goal of the president and his supporters, as a natural consequence of placing one group as "first" and insisting on increase of exponential growth by that group. The main topic of debate has been more around who is really in the group than what its goals are.

Dominance of one group over one or more others without their consent falls within any reasonable definition of "war." Humans have been waging war on other species for millennia, and by now have essentially won. Those who prefer domination over other people have been waging the more familiar kind of war for just as long, but on average have been kept from lowering the overall population by accessing more resources; but now that critical resources are becoming scarce on a global basis, that is about to change.

Those of us preferring coexistence tend to value life over personal power, and have attempted to delay that change for as long as possible. This has been done through development of agreements like the Paris accord and the development of new technologies to get more utility out of remaining resources without causing more damage in the process. Climate change has achieved its current priority due its potential, now actualizing, to reduce resources faster than we are consuming them, taking control out of our hands and forcing competition into primacy – with inevitable, deadly effect.

For several years I have had a creeping feeling of dread, like others whose opinions I have read and discussed personally. This has come from study, analysis, and experience in my own environment as the evidence of growing damage to the world has become pervasive. For some reason I can't yet fathom, the president's decision to openly step away from global cooperation to deal with climate change, even in a largely symbolic way, has amplified that feeling to the point of alternating depression and rage. Dealing with that remains the focus of my creative writing, and is fueling my personal drive to resist in every way that matches my values as the environmental and social crap storm that is now defining our lives continues to grow in intensity.

Communicating Complexity

We each interact with people, our physical environment, and abstract constructs that help us understand and deal with ourselves and our world, and that give it all meaning. Also, the physical environments interact with each other. Descriptions of these interactions and those that participate in them together comprise a basic collection of information relevant to a given population of people over a limited range of time when the information doesn't change appreciably.

If we could write a book of these descriptions, its size would be a measure of the complexity of the system that includes the people and their environment that is comprehensible in terms of human experience. It could therefore be potentially usable for directing activities toward goals on a human scale, by projecting how future "books" might appear. If it was too big and unwieldy to be used by the majority of people, that fact could itself be used to identify how out of control our lives have become.

The required size of such a book can be estimated fairly easily when we consider that each of us has our own experience of the world. The environment can be split up into a number of pieces equal to the size of the population, each with a known and unknown component; and the number of interactions between people and those pieces, as well as descriptions of the interacting parts of it and us, is simply the square of the population size. The number of interactions between people, and descriptions of the people themselves, is also equal to the square of the population size, as is the number of interactions between people and their internalized abstract constructs. If we aren't concerned with the interactions between parts of the environment and each other, then the number of descriptions we need is three times the square of the population size; if we are concerned, then the number of descriptions is four times the square of the population size.

We typically only interact with one other person at a time, and we're only aware of our part of what's happening. For a population of two people, the minimum number of required descriptions is twelve (two-squared times three); and the number of descriptions per person is twelve (the descriptions) divided by two (the population size), or six. Six is therefore a good number to use as a natural number of descriptions from an individual's point of view, which I'll call a "chapter" (note that a book that includes only the number of descriptions per person would be purely from a single perspective, like a novel with a single main character, and would omit other perspectives). A fully-descriptive book will therefore have a number of chapters between one-half and two-thirds the square of the population size.

Books have words, of course, and one way to estimate the number of words is to use the best known book of all: the Bible. The popular King James Bible has an average close to 24 words per verse, 24 verses per chapter, and 24 chapters per book. The number 24, besides also being the number of hours per day, is also close to the square of the number of commonly used personality dimensions (the "Big Five"), and a commonly used minimum population size for getting good statistics during measurements. If one of our "descriptions" has the same number of words as an idealized chapter of the Bible (24-squared, or 576), and a person can read at a speed of at least 250 words per minute, then a chapter will take about one-quarter hour to read. If a description is only 24 words (equivalent to a verse), then a chapter will take only about one-half minute. Ultimately, though, the number of words defines how detailed our descriptions will be, and it should be chosen to match the level of detail that's meaningful.

The Bible's significance, of course, far transcends its popularity. For one thing, it has functioned as a universal guidebook for living and meaning for much of the world's people, despite the fact that the kinds of environments and social interactions it describes have become less common in the millennia since it was written. As such, it may be a useful benchmark for the amount of complexity that is useful in performing such a function, though the proliferation of clergy and scholars enlisted over history to interpret its guidance indicates that its complexity may be too much for common use.

If we ignore the fact that the Bible describes many events (more than one period of time) on the basis that people could "interact" through the record of their lives, and that God acted as a medium for environmental interaction with people, then we can use the model to estimate its complexity. The model shows that 24-word descriptions correspond to a population size of 100 (to match verses and minimum number of descriptions); and 576-word descriptions correspond to a population size of 20, which is less likely based on the number of people discussed in the Bible. A population size of 100 requires a minimum of 30,000 descriptions. For comparison, a population of 10,000 in a small town today requires 300 million (10,000 times as many descriptions); and a population of 24 people, typical of a group of hunter-gatherers, would require only 1,728 descriptions.

More research needs to be done, especially around the constructs that embody values, meaning, and rules of conduct that ideally enable people to maintain the integrity, survival, and basic thriving of their society. The Bible appears to have started from a set of initial conditions that include the constructs, and then progressed through at least two iterations of experience, learning from the experience, and updating the constructs based on what was learned. If its particular template is to be followed, then our new world community is in the lessons-learned phase of an iteration where millennia of new experience is being processed as much more experience continues to be added.

We can now quantify the magnitude of this task by equating experience with complexity. Based on population size, world complexity is now 1,260 times what it was when Christianity started (50 million times what it was at the beginning of civilization), and is rising rapidly, having multiplied by a factor of ten in just the last 70 years.

In light of this, it would not be surprising if people are concerned that their lives are losing meaning and losing control. If governments and their laws, as well as science and technology, are civilization's primary means for enabling more complexity as well as keeping up with it, as history seems to indicate, then they could rationally be blamed when that complexity becomes personally unmanageable, especially as it is coupled with experiences of negative effects of environmental degradation stemming from the consumption that they also enable.

If this analysis is correct (as a contribution to the "lessons learned"), along with predictions of disastrous consequences of not reducing our depletion of species and resources that maintain the habitability of our planet, then an appropriate course to ensure our survival as a species is to first focus on stopping the growth in complexity and better managing what we have. This would involve an overhaul of our values and means of determining how to meet them (our common, internalized constructs), along with promoting the social and environmental interactions that support those goals, which will likely include restructuring our institutions rather than crippling or destroying them as a knee-jerk response to our frustration with the complexity they represent. Next, we might let our population naturally decrease to a sustainable level while simultaneously changing our physical and social infrastructure to reduce our ecological impact to a safe level and ultimately accommodate a simpler, healthier, and more meaningful life for individual people and other species that can help support them.

Spaceship Finance

In its simplest form, personal financial planning is governed by one inescapable requirement: Total income over remaining lifetime must be greater than or equal to expenses over remaining lifetime. If you're lucky, "remaining lifetime" is the sum of working years and retirement years, where you are not physically working during retirement.

In practice, planning gets complicated by the many forms of income and expense, but even they can be simplified when you realize that there are basically only two types of each: constant and exponential. The exponential types, in particular, can get pretty tricky, since they depend on the ability to accelerate growth of money without limits, and that money can represent both physical things and non-physical things. As the constant types have been increasingly linked to the exponential types (for example, your "constant" salary is likely paid by an employer who relies on exponential growth in profits), they too have become harder to plan for.

Now that we face hard limits to the availability of quality ecological resources, upon which our economy and our physical survival is based, basic assumptions built into our economy are beginning to lose their usefulness, which is making successful planning by most individuals and many organizations even more difficult. In addition to reducing room for growth, which has been assumed to be infinite, we are degrading the ability of social and physical ecosystems to absorb or nullify the negative effects of our actions within a period of time that is meaningful to people. This results in decreasing exponential income and increasing exponential expense, as an average, for our whole population, which reduces our effective lifetime.

One positive aspect of our situation is that we are collectively becoming a global village, re-creating some important dynamics of near-isolated communities of the past. In an idealized version of such a community, the social and environmental impacts of economic activity were felt directly by both businesses and their customers. Since the number of prospective customers was practically limited, businesses had to focus on keeping them satisfied; and since resources were limited, their consumption had to be kept below the regeneration rate (such as the growth of new trees for wood) if the business along with the community was to survive over a long period of time. Businesses were rewarded with enough profit to create new products or services only if they could find more resources or efficiencies in the use of existing resources, and if it didn't result in harming the community. Exponential growth became possible as a community's territory expanded and its population grew to take advantage of the newly available resources. Combining of multiple communities also contributed to that growth, leading to our present situation. Enabled by multiple technologies that have also grown exponentially, we have turned much of our planet-sized spaceship into a giant community of communities, subject to rules of survival similar to the ones those early communities had to live with, but without most of the self-replenishing resources they had.

Our new community and the environment it occupies is much more complex than the ones we were naturally evolved to maintain, which is a big reason for our heavy dependence on technology. Our computers and communications enable us to share and mentally process experiences around our community, translating its complexity into much simpler forms we can comprehend, thus keeping us from being aware of all but the largest of the consequences of our actions, and, even then, not with the gut-level feedback we naturally depend upon for knowing and acting to change the status of our environment. Put another way: We have taken over Spaceship Earth by cannibalizing its parts for our pleasure and thereby sabotaging its life support systems, while knowing a lot about the small part we were supposed to operate before we went rogue, and knowing very little about the rest of it.

One thing we do know is that life tends to maintain habitability for itself, and there is still a chance that species we haven't destroyed could fix enough of the damage we've inflicted to keep our planet habitable (if still uncomfortable) for at least a few decades more than if we don't let them. To give them that chance, we will need to let them have more resources. From a personal finance point of view, I estimate will all need to learn to limit our individual expenses to under $12,000 per year, which, not surprisingly, is most easily done by reinforcing the necessary regrowth of natural ecosystems and their denizens so they can provide more replenishing resources like what we evolved to consume (of which we should use less than half). This should also help reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, one of our largest negative impacts on ecosystems both directly and indirectly (through climate change).

Ideally, the world community would eventually function like an isolated sustainable community, utilizing exponential income and expense only as necessary to deal with conditions that require swift growth or contraction to maintain survivability, instead of an ongoing expectation for personal gain. For most of us, our life focus would shift to favoring quality over quantity. The inevitable fraction of the population that found this impossible to live with would have the option, like generations of the past, to explore new environments – this time in space – and make them habitable for people, so long as those efforts did not degrade the lives of existing communities.

Year Of Validation

It is now a year since I made the first projections into the future using my population-consumption model. At that time, I had identified three representative scenarios of what would happen after 2008, when the model showed humanity using up all of the valuable ecological resources that weren't already enlisted in maintaining civilization (technically, the number of "environments" people had created equaled the number of possible environments using available resources). A newly published academic study indicates that consumption of major resources other than energy reached a peak around 2006, apparently corroborating this critical point in the model's projection (which was later refined to 2009).

A few months ago, the WWF's latest Living Planet Report famously highlighted the fact that animal populations dropped by little more than half between 1970 and 2010. This too is consistent with my model, which in its last iteration showed a 55% drop in the Living Planet Index (LPI) over the same period. The model uses the LPI as a proxy for the amount of available ecological resources, and the amount of resources we are using as proportional to the global ecological footprint, so this and the consumption study are significant data points in validation of the model.

One other aspect of the model appears to have been partly validated over the past year, which I referred to in a previous blog post. As happiness increases, it takes more resources to become happier; and above a certain threshold (82%), consumption (of ecological resources) becomes negative, which I interpret as the consumption of virtual resources. My model includes the observation that our economy is based on the valuation of environments that theoretically would provide maximum happiness, and in one of its first validation exercises, reproduced our unequal distribution of wealth as a result of the economy's positive valuation of the excessive happiness of a few people. Since money is used to trade real things, that money is expected to represent real resources (even though they are in fact virtual) and therefore it appears that the rich are hoarding a lot of resources and effectively stealing from everyone else. It is logical to assume that the excessive happiness is likely met by using other people rather than other parts of Nature, and this would manifest as what the rest of us would consider antisocial behavior, with an associated reduction in conscience and empathy that enables people to be treated as things to be used for gratification (what I've called the root of all evil). The studies I learned about seem to verify this assessment. For me, the scariest part of this analysis has been the capacity of a few people to own everything, especially given the complexity of the systems we all operate under and the physical limitations we all have in comprehending, much less managing, what's around us; that they would become sociopaths makes it even worse.

The three projection scenarios I started with a year ago were based on simple extrapolations of happiness over time, and its effects on population and consumption. Those with the most physical credibility resulted in a catastrophic decrease in population, starting soon. I followed those projections with a series of simulations, producing theoretical versions of the world using random values of variables my model had identified based on research into the past, and then generalized the results which I have since considered more reliable and used as the basis for the projections and recommendations that I've presented since then. Given how sensitive the projections are over the next two to five years, we should know soon whether the model is truly valid. As a scientist, I can't wait. As a person, I wish I could wait forever.

Values For An Ideal World

The British-based organization Common Cause provides an excellent, formal discussion of current research into world values, and how it relates to issues of social and environmental health. By comparison, I have tended to be pretty loose in my treatment of the subject of values, citing specific applications interchangeably with their deeper motivations. For example, my valuing the maximum amount and thriving of life over time and space is a special consequence of action based upon the formal "self-transcendence" group of values; it is also closely related to what I have been calling "global responsibility." Not surprisingly, the opposite group of formal values, "self-enhancement," corresponds to maximizing personal "happiness" and meeting "personal responsibility." There are two other, opposing formal groups of values, "openness to change" and "conservation," which in my world-view are more aligned with the "openness" dimension of personality that prefers certain "environments" over others (in this case, dynamic vs. static). As Common Cause points out, we all have these values to varying degrees that depend on specific situations, but we also have preferences (much like we have preferred personalities) which will make us more or less inclined to change our circumstances.

In the context of creating a healthier world that approaches the ideal, where humanity doesn't suffer major population loss and it gives other species more power so they can reduce the threat of uninhabitability, self-enhancement and conservation can no longer be dominant. More variability in the environment is inescapable whether or not we pursue this course, since a significant amount of climate change is already locked in, so those of us who prefer change will tend to benefit more than those who don't. If we choose to let pursuit of personal power dominate, conditions will only get worse; because people with power will benefit from further limits on resources and therefore promote more, until they can't, and we will all fight to the death for the remaining scraps.

The requisite change in dominant values can occur voluntarily or not. In my concept of an ideal world, the change is voluntary, proceeding from a fact-based civil discussion of what our dominant values will be and the preferred consequences of living by those values. Reality is likely to be a lot messier, even if we do readjust our values in time to avoid calamity, which I consider a long shot worth taking.

Happy Environments

My mathematical model of population and consumption now has an economic component that projects Gross World Product (GWP), global wealth, and wealth distribution backward and forward in time. The latter was aided by the lucky release of a new report on global wealth.

As people pursue happiness as defined in the model, they must seek and manipulate sets of conditions (what I call "environments") that maximize it. Economies are cultural tools for enabling this, so it's not surprising that they can be described in the same terms. One such term dominates this new view of economics: "happy environment."

People who have total life satisfaction occupy environments that are matched to all of their needs and wants. Such matches are uncommon, just like finding the perfect house. But if we could disassemble, move, and assemble all the environments we collectively have access to ("inhabited environments") to make environments that match as many people's wants and needs as possible, each of those environments would be a happy environment.

Our world economy doesn't explicitly traffic in happy environments (to my knowledge, this is a concept that I just invented), but it appears to do the equivalent. From what I can tell, it defines one set of happy environments for actual, physical conditions. It defines another set for all the ways those environments can be manipulated. Then it defines a third set for all the ways the environments and manipulations can be manipulated as abstract entities that embody their value. Mathematically, economic activity (such as that measured by GWP) is proportional to the square of the number of happy environments; and wealth is proportional to the cube of the number of happy environments.

One of the most controversial issues facing people today is the tremendous inequality in the distribution of wealth. If it was distributed purely on the basis of happy environments, this wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue as it is (though it certainly isn't issue for the few people who benefit from it). However, as I discovered while trying to find out how the model could reproduce the actual distribution, our economy apparently uses both happy environments and consumption to determine who has how much wealth, dominated by the latter. Our exhaustion of sources of new environments (and associated resources) has an already focusing effect on wealth distribution, which I plan to elaborate upon later, but this dependency on consumption makes it extreme.

Projections of our economic future follow the same trajectories as happiness and population, which are the factors that define the number of happy environments. Thus, we are probably at the peak of everything, and can expect it all to drop to zero by early in the next century (at the latest). I'm continuing to explore the alternative "best" case, which unrealistically relies on finding and using millions of Earth-equivalent biospheres over the next 800 or so years, which is what it would take to follow our preferred trajectory. If the model's assumptions are accurate that far into the future, then we will once again be at a peak, but it will be an ultimate one.

Beyond Hope

As I discussed in The End of Hope, I believe there is now sufficient evidence to conclude that civilization as we know it is doomed, and there's virtually nothing we can do to stop it. The analysis I did back in 2011 appears to be holding true, especially the "worst case" projections of population and Gross World Product, which for planning purposes are likely to crash during the period 2030 to 2070.

Planning for what? There is still some hope that our species, albeit a much smaller number of us, will survive. For those of us who care about optimizing the future for as many people as possible, this means that we must focus on ensuring that the survivors can have the best life possible, and that future generations won't repeat our mistakes. In short, we need to try to offset part of our legacy of death.

In the book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," journalist Naomi Klein describes how believers in unrestricted capitalism have used (and in some cases precipitated) disasters to enable the takeover and ruination of entire countries by cutthroat corporations while their citizens were fighting to survive. As ecological disasters and resource depletion overwhelm the world, those who control the corporations will be even more tempted to acquire power beyond their dreams, even as the foundation of that power implodes around them. Because this same acquisitive drive has been a key contributor to the combination of over-consumption and pollution that is pushing us and other species to extinction, it must be vilified at every opportunity and kept from having any significant influence over whatever culture ends up surviving.

Much of the world that the survivors inherit will be indistinguishable from what we might associate with the mythical hell, and due to the persistence of greenhouse gases, those conditions will last for at least a millennium. Regions that might remain habitable will need to be mapped, and both physical and cultural tools (including knowledge) will need to be developed so they can stay that way. Where adaptation in harsher parts of the world is possible with additional technology, that technology and the means to maintain it will also need to be provided.

This effort will require a heroic level of selfless commitment by many of us who can't expect to be among the survivors. There will be a lot of resistance to be overcome, initially among those who are unaware of what's ahead or in purposeful denial about it. It is far too easy, even for us, to hide from the harsh reality of what we've created, and to ride out the remaining vestiges of the comfortable lives many of us grew up expecting to continue into a healthy old age. One way to help deal with these challenges can also inform the survivors we dedicate ourselves to helping: document what's happening around us; observe and learn about the variables affecting our local environments, manmade and natural. Get to know in person the people who will either share our plight or be among the survivors who can testify that we did our best to help them, despite what we already did to make their lives a living hell. Find others who feel the same way, because we can't do it alone.

The Politics of Happiness

In a couple of days, the U.S. elections will be decided. As has been the case for more than a decade, many races are so close that the difference between winners and losers depends mostly on who is most motivated to actually vote. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that no matter who wins, at least half of us will lose. From a big picture perspective, however, all of us will lose, because virtually all the competitors have a fundamentally flawed worldview that practically guarantees it.

This worldview, that there are no limits to what can potentially be done to increase human happiness, is tempered only by the answers to questions that define people's values and seem to most influence how they vote. Such questions include: how much influence any of us should have over the happiness (and survival) of others; what, if any, is the minimum amount of happiness society should tolerate; and who (or what) can be denied the means of attaining happiness. If the worldview is right, then the proper application of ingenuity, effort, and social engineering by a society can sustain unending growth in the happiness of its members in accordance with its values.

The flaw in the worldview is the dependency between happiness and ecological impact: as happiness increases, we use greater and greater amounts of resources other species need to both survive and keep the world habitable. Over the past forty years, we've used so much that those species are going extinct at an alarming rate. Continuing and accelerating this trend is already endangering our own species, exemplified (but by no means limited to) the destabilizing effects of carbon pollution on the world's climate. As more species die off, and we directly consume many of the rest, the world will become so difficult to live on that our own life expectancy – and happiness, which is proportional to it – will reach a maximum and then drop in response, along with the number of people on the planet.

Worldwide, more people are getting this message, and are actively finding ways to at least become more efficient with how much happiness they get for the ecological resources they consume. Here in the U.S., we're still like adolescents who want the advantages of adulthood without the responsibilities, taking from our mother (Earth) without paying our own way. Other nations, such as the oldest in Europe, have experienced the consequences of overburdening their environments and learned to live within limits; we petulantly deride them for not being growth-oriented enough, not acknowledging that it is because they have already grown up.

Whatever the results of this year's election, we all need to work toward creating a healthier, more enlightened world, beginning with the people and places we personally interact with. Changing the dominant worldview is key to this; otherwise we will see a growing number of people lose much more in the years ahead.

New Infrastructure

It's no secret that the physical infrastructure of the United States is in bad shape. Recent predictions about global climate change show that even if it was up to par it would still be inadequate. Meanwhile, the president is pushing a jobs bill that would, in part, spend money on rebuilding the infrastructure which, like the economy it was designed to support, depends on cheap access to fossil fuels and other oil derivatives. Unfortunately, peak oil is here, which makes that dependency problematic.

Clearly, any efforts to build infrastructure must take into account the new reality we've created: one of scarcity and unpredictability as blowback from our sabotage of natural and cultural systems for short-term gains in personal happiness. This means not only assessing the impact on our current way of life, but having an honest, nationwide reassessment of our basic values and the kind of lifestyle that can support whatever we decide. The result of that assessment can be used to drive the design of the new infrastructure.

If we value life, including the community of other species that keeps our world habitable, we will favor a culture and an infrastructure with no negative ecological impact. This would require that we all at least become knowledgeable about the basics of how the natural world works, especially in our own regions. We must also work to understand and respect each other and other species, with a concentration on enabling all of us to meet our basic needs. Our physical infrastructure may become almost indistinguishable from the rest of Nature (and certainly usable by it, while we are using it or afterwards).

To the extent we don't value life, we will have to learn to deal with the consequences, which we will be doing in the extreme if we keep on our present course. Anything we build will need to survive worst-case conditions whose magnitude and probability have been completely and honestly anticipated.

Relative History

In 2001, for the first time in history, total life satisfaction became possible for at least part of the world's population. That part of the population had characteristics that enabled it to most effectively alter its physical and social environment to meet its wants, mostly by creating an artificial world out of the natural world. Until the limit was reached, each of these people's part of that conversion (consumption) had been increasing by an average 3.3% per year, corresponding to an increase of 0.004 in happiness (on a scale from 0 to 1), which they knew qualitatively if not quantitatively.

People with different characteristics don't experience life the same way, as if they inhabit different, yet similar environments. The others have tried to modify their environments, but they have fewer options, physically or by choice, and therefore compromise in meeting their own wants. Those closest to Nature, unable or unwilling to live above basic subsistence as humans had until the advent of civilization, saw almost no change at all in their environments; until, that is, they got a lot of help.

Acquisition of money has long been associated with consumption. Expecting their happiness to continue rising, those at its peak continued accumulating money and gambling it on the prospect of future growth. The money was gained by finding lower costs of labor (the poorest people) and lower costs of resources (the resources that had sustained them). Physical consumption among the poor began growing at the rate that the richest had previously enjoyed; but the total was still relatively much smaller, by a factor of about 600. This mismatch led to a decrease in the world's overall consumption rate beginning in 2004, which was soon followed by a global recession as it became clear that the anticipated growth wasn't going to materialize.

That's my current version of recent history, anyway, based on recent research into the range of possible “environments” that people can experience and how observable variables such as happiness are changing over time. I remain uncertain about the nature of the happiness maximum, whether it's a biological failsafe (as I speculated in “Two-Thirds Happiness”), or a mathematical oddity (see “Prime Happiness”), but its existence does continue to have explanatory value, as this narrative illustrates.

Environment Control

In our pursuit of more happiness and longer lives, we humans have been modifying our environment, gradually bringing it within our control. My recent research suggests that in 1943, as the world's industrial base was ramping up in the midst of war, humans for the first time could control the average environment. Our control increasingly accelerated until 1965, as world oil discoveries were approaching their peak. We haven't been able to maintain that level of acceleration since then, and recently – 2007, as the world economy was tanking and we had arguably hit peak oil – our control began to actually decelerate. If current trends continue, I project that we will stop being able to control the environment at all in 2022, corresponding to when the world's population is expected to peak.

The research is based on a premise I've explored in the past, that we each have a set of conditions under which we thrive the most – are the most satisfied with our lives. Simplistically, this might be correlated to our personality, which expresses how we prefer to deal with the rest of the world. If our environment is matched to these preferences, then we will have maximum control over our lives and be as happy as possible and live the longest; to the extent that it isn't, then we are unhappy and don't live as long.

If we simply consider an arbitrary continuum between two extremes for the human population that represents our preferences, the average for the random population will likely correspond to the center (if the extremes are arbitrarily given values of zero and one, then the average of the population would be one-half). The environment (technically, the part that affects us) would have a similar continuum, but not be necessarily bounded as we are; that is, it could have a value less than zero or a value greater than one. Using these definitions, we have maximum happiness (and life expectancy) when our “value” and that of the environment are equal, and happiness decreases as the values get further apart.

With some reasonable assumptions, I used my historical estimates of happiness and their projection into the future to derive how the average of the environment's continuum might be changing over time. The small and virtually constant happiness in the earliest part of my simulated history forced me to accept the idea that the environment's continuum would largely be out of our control, represented by how much of it didn't overlap with the population's continuum. As the population has consumed more, corresponding to its growth in size, the overlap (control) has increased. Unfortunately, we are unable to continue this process for much longer, since the resources we depend on for that control are becoming harder to get and process.

The historical summary at the beginning of this post is my first attempt to assess how this new viewpoint relates to actual events, and the first evidence I can recall of a direct correspondence between my models and peak oil theory. What we may actually be seeing here is a glimpse into the difference in effects on consumption growth between energy supply and the depletion and degradation of the biosphere, which I expect to expand on further.

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.