Marginal Hope

 

I watched the last two nights of the Democratic National Convention, during which my chronic trepidation was replaced with the alternating concern and hope that I last felt before the disastrous U.S. election of 2016. Now as then, there is a choice between bad and insufficiently good responses to the threat of global extinction that could occur within decades.  The main difference is that bad choices, here and in other influential countries such as Brazil with its critical rainforest, have drastically reduced the range and practicality of good responses that might be taken now. 

 

One of the foreseen drivers of our own population loss - disease - has ironically bought humanity perhaps a couple of more decades by slowing its destruction of ecosystems needed for survival. That time should be used to stop and then reverse the destruction by reversing the drivers of extinction: habitat loss, invasive species, pollution (especially climate changing carbon), overharvesting, and human population growth that multiplies the others. 

 

Much of the world's attention has been on fighting climate change while improving people's quality of life. This aim is behind the most conspicuous environmental plan advocated by the Democratic party's presidential nominee, which attempts to eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050 by developing new "green" technologies that a revitalized economy can deploy over the intervening period and maintain afterward. 

 

I have used my Timelines model of global variables over time to explore implications of this plan, and found that it would require a 97% decrease in total ecological footprint (what I've been calling consumption) from 2021 to 2050. With our present capabilities, the decrease would almost necessarily require a huge drop in population so that those alive in 2050 could at least meet their most basic needs with the resources they can use, and leave nearly two trillion tonnes of already emitted greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 

 

What may be the most obvious alternative for those of us who reject mass casualties is to simultaneously reduce per-capita ecological impact, and to fully develop and deploy technology that can quickly convert previous emissions into forms that will not raise global temperatures or cause harm through other modes of extinction such as habitat loss and (different) pollution. Reducing the pollution load on natural carbon sinks such as soils and oceans would be a reasonable priority in this phase of the effort, which must be completed over the next decade (after which we won't all be able to meet needs).

 

My trepidation over the plan as presented by the only political party willing to admit and address the extinction threat is that it does not demonstrate an appreciation of the urgency, scale, focus and sacrifice that is required. It is, however, a vast improvement over existing alternatives which almost certainly will push us and the world further along our trajectory of doom.

 

Failed Responsibility

Having failed the most important test of political responsibility in our lives, we the citizens of the United States are now coping with the aftermath – both socially and environmentally. 

Those of us living with the mistaken belief that "personal responsibility" without societal correction is the key to a better future seem willing to tolerate the consequences of disabling the most powerful tools of that correction, governments, with the faith of a spoiled child that an omnipotent parent – either a deity or an economic force – will prevent the worst of those consequences.

Meanwhile, the rest of us must soon, if not already, deal with the reality we helped create, and continue fighting to slow the global trajectory of death and destruction that is by now inevitable. That fight requires enforcement of honest accountability for how people's actions impact others, and promotion of valuing life above everything – including pursuit of possessions and life-devaluing status – that are stealing or degrading the resources vital for its continuation.

A mix of two strategies for avoiding harm (confrontation and mitigation), this approach assumes that people are capable of changing their motivations sufficiently to cause an appreciable slowing in both consumption of critical resources and competition over what's left. To the extent that such a capability does not exist, for example due to innate biological or psychological limitations, then success will be limited. Current behavior as an adaptation to past pain may also be a limiting factor, though some change might be accomplished with a more measured, compassionate approach.

Other countries are trying their own strategies, in part by legacy (they're stuck with what they have) and in part by experimentation. Like a worldwide game of musical chairs, we're all doing what our experience and judgment guides us to do; and like that game, we'll have to live – or die – with responsibility for the result.

Healthy Is Now Ideal

Two years ago, I laid out a set of requirements for what I called an "ideal world," which in retrospect I could have called a "healthy world." Much of my writing since then has dealt with many of the same ideas, teasing out details, exploring the implications of my evolving model of global variables in the past and future, and sharing personal experiences and expectations that appear to be echoes of each other.

Built into all of it was the hope that some significant part of the population would seize on those or similar ideas and, in the presence of obvious danger, use them as the basis of a way to diminish or escape that danger. The political climate at the time was cautiously reasonable, inching toward awareness and agreement that something major needed to be done to avoid global economic and ecological collapse that was becoming perilously imminent. There remained a chance that the world might succeed in at least delaying that collapse by a few years.

I spent a fair amount of creative energy trying to assess the probability of success. As a trigger for some of that creativity, I simulated people and environments in fictional writing – a tactic that had coincided with previous bursts of insight (most notably in the development of my first novel). My most recent attempt followed a thought experiment in one of my books, and yielded a model of interaction between groups that made some interesting predictions that could be tested; chief among them: that interaction between groups is always destructive to the identity of at least one of the groups through either assimilation or death.

The last election here in the U.S. appears to have rejected global collaboration for mutual survival, and in light of my research suggests that the group most effectively in control of our politics and economy has felt enough of a threat to its identity that it is willing to threaten the survival of everyone in order to ensure its dominance. Use of the word "dominance" is deliberate: my group interaction model defines it as the total control of all resources by one group. Though I haven't as closely studied it, there appears to be a similar dynamic at work in much of the rest of the world. In previous years, this threat might have been dealt with by acquiring more resources and moving people away from each other in order to safely establish group identity ("isolation"); but the world is running out of basic resources, and we don't yet have the ability to settle other habitable worlds – if there are any. Competition will therefore be the driving activity of our future, and competition is the key to dominance.

I brought up the "ideal world" concept again because since the election I have come to a number of realizations, among them that the ideal world I envisioned is in fact what a healthy world would look like, as opposed to the dying world we live in now; and that even if we are beginning the collapse I've forecast and feared, the best we can do is to create pockets of healthy community and environments wherever we can. In future Idea Explorer posts I will dive into what systems engineers might call "derived requirements" for specific situations, and in my other writing (such as Twitter and the Land of Conscience blog) I will explore what implementation looks like.

Complexity and Global Warming

Global warming continues to generate bad news for the present and the future:

• El Niño has finally arrived, promising that temperatures over land will soon rise to compensate for the statistical lag between observed and predicted values
• Oceans and land are becoming less efficient at keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (the latter no-doubt aided by our rapid erosion of soil), and temperature rise will likely accelerate to a new rate not seen in over a millennium
• As California, already suffering from historic drought, is coming within a year of exhausting its stored water, and the largest South American city is much closer to running out of water, new research projects that multi-decade "mega-droughts" are likely to become normal by 2050
• A huge Pacific cyclone has just decimated the island nation of Vanuatu

Meanwhile, the legislative branch and the governments of several states in the nation most responsible for the problem (mine) are actively trying to convince its citizens that the problem doesn't exist, and that it is acceptable to continue the actions that precipitated it. These actions benefit individuals and corporations who stand to lose large future profits if the actions don't continue, and who bankroll the campaigns of politicians who spend more time pandering for money than developing the legal framework for maintaining our increasingly complex society, which is arguably much more than a full-time job by itself. That complexity, and the inherent limitations of our minds and bodies in dealing with it, along with arbitrary values and knowledge unshared and untied to the realities of community survival in this new world, is fundamentally inhibiting the responsible application of the power granted humanity by its numbers and its technology, power which has enabled our present, existential crisis.

Ironically, reducing the complexity and the power likely have the best chance of reducing our risk, but it will also reduce our domination of the natural environment that is the measure of happiness that we are most tuned to. Some of those who resist such a reduction seem to have put their hopes in advanced technology, effectively outsourcing mental effort to computers now on the verge of artificial intelligence, and attempting to reduce our dependence on wild species for maintaining Earth's habitability by tinkering with their biology and ours. The resisters may however be trading one set of problems for a potentially more dangerous set, as some of the smartest (human) minds have warned regarding artificial intelligence.

Luckily for most of us, complexity is built upon simple building blocks and relationships; and with some training and freedom to explore and think about what's around us (instead of being slaves to our jobs, our tools, and distractions), we can use that fact to make a dent in creating a more healthy part of the world for ourselves and those we come in contact with. Global warming, for example, is a special case of too much waste in an effectively closed system like the Earth, a consequence of our physical relationship with Nature that people throughout the lifetime of our species have understood, or learned the hard way (as many of us are doing now).

When we acted as part of Nature (ecosystems) instead of apart from it, energy and materials cycled through us with negligible waste, where "waste" is the result of an activity that is unused or unusable by life for a period of time. Now we generate much more waste, and those materials (including gases) that do enter ecosystems can either be used by life, harm it, or kill it, at least until something evolves that can use (consume) it. One way to judge whether we are creating too much waste is to observe whether the amount of animals and their variety is decreasing around us, which is a basic sense built into our own biology. Clearly we are failing that test, and are on the way to failing the ultimate test while we keep doing so, as the growing list of hazards and catastrophic events stemming from global warming clearly indicates.

Evaluating Competition

It seems that here in the United States we compete for everything. This is certainly the case with politics (managing government) and business (managing the economy), which arguably have the the largest direct impact on our lives. Most of us are effectively slaves to the economy, where we must constantly convince someone that we are better than other people in order to survive. Lost in this competition are answers to some fundamental questions:

1. What are we ultimately competing for?
2. Are the winners really "better" than those they defeat?
3. Is the competition worth the cost?

Biologists would say that most competition can be best understood in evolutionary terms, as a selection of mates whose offspring have the best chance of surviving long enough to have offspring. In this case, the net result of the competition defines its goal: extending the collective lifetime of our species as long as possible. The term "better" is more than just a verdict of who wins a particular competition; it is a value judgment, assessing who supports a particular value more than others. If the value is "human life," then the better people are those who do the most to maximize the amount of human life over time. The cost of the competition must be weighed against the results to determine if the competition is worth it, which involves an additional value judgment used to identify what constitutes a "cost." We can most simply use the same value (or values) for both costs and benefits; for example, assessing whether the rules and conditions of a competition will lead to a net increase or decrease in human life over most potential outcomes.

From the perspective of an individual person or organization of people, the primary value is personal happiness, which is intimately tied to longevity, physical consumption, and the assistance of related individuals. Individuals can choose to collaborate or compete, a choice that is determined by both personal predilection (some of us are more prone to compete than collaborate) and the availability of resources (when resources fall below a threshold where everyone can meet their needs and wants, people will be forced to compete with the others to get what they need and want, unless collaboration can increase the amount of resources).

Artificial competitions, such as those between businesses, manipulate these variables by imposing goals, rules, and conditions, and often selecting participants with particular inclinations and abilities, with the effect of (at least temporarily) increasing happiness for those who win and those who support the competitions with resources. Little, if any, consideration may be given to the net gain or loss to anyone or anything else because the values embodied in a competition do not extend to them, unless additional values are imposed by an outside entity which acts on their behalf, or are inherently shared by the competition's participants who are part of an impacted group.

Political competition is perhaps the most critical of artificial competitions, because it determines the leadership of government, whose influence is derived from its function to enforce and support values common to a society, especially the the lives of its citizens, by for example acting as the "outside entity" influencing other competitions. For societies such as ours that have global impact through artificial (abstract and technology-driven) means, the natural large-scale value of human life should be explicitly discussed and accepted or rejected by all citizens on a routine basis; and, if accepted, it must be intentionally integrated into the values that underlie all activities contributing to that impact, especially the governance of our society and how we choose our leaders.

Due to the world's complexity and global proximity to natural resource limits, those of us with significant influence can no longer follow our natural proclivity to increase our happiness, with its attendant and excessive consumption requirements. Humanity has arguably passed the point where significant additional resources are available, and some of us are already using technology and wealth to manipulate institutions like government and business, which enabled our growth, to facilitate the opposite: competition (with unfair advantage) for what is already being used by the rest. Together we need to reexamine the competitions we are participating in, and consciously decide whether the values they serve are in line with the future we want, before that future is decided for us.

Political Responsibility

The elections over the next two years will be critical for the future of humanity and the other species we share the world with. Government, as the cultural institution entrusted with providing the basic needs for a healthy, thriving society, needs to focus on dealing with the imminent and existential threat of catastrophic climate change, as one of several mechanisms reducing the habitability of our planet. The people we elect to manage our governments (especially here in the U.S.) will be responsible for providing that focus, and doing whatever they can to ensure the survival of people alive today, and improve the chances of survival for at least the next fifty generations.

With the stakes so high, we can't afford to have people in government who are ignorant of the threat, deny its existence, choose to ignore it, or prefer to actively make it worse. Given how little time is left to act decisively and effectively, such people will become literally murderers on the largest of scales; and by allowing them to serve, the rest of us will be complicit and very likely suicidal.

This isn't to say that government is the only determinant of our survival. All of us need to begin reducing our contribution to global warming greenhouse gases such as those used for energy (coal, gas, and natural gas) by at least 5% per year just to have a chance, albeit a small one, of avoiding the worst effects. We need to also reduce other activities that are killing off other species that help keep our planet habitable, such as appropriating land that they need for habitat. This will be a huge challenge, given that most of us are hooked on increasing happiness through domination of Nature, and doing the exact opposite to serve that purpose. As a prerequisite to meeting hat challenge, we need to at least acknowledge its existence and the value of meeting it; this is a test that should apply to all us, but especially our leaders.

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.