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- The incredulous: Those who either know so little or haven’t had the opportunity to think about what they know, that they find the idea of collapse preposterous, unimaginable, and/or unthinkable.
- The hopeful: Those who believe that collapse is not inevitable or can be significantly mitigated, or believe that even if it is inevitable and can’t be significantly mitigated, we should try anyway.
- The deniers: Those who are intimidated or offended by, or overwhelmed with anger and/or guilt at, the very idea of collapse.
There are three (very large) groups to whom one cannot usefully or comfortably (or sometimes even safely) tell these truths:
I have always found that, when in a crowd that I know contains members of one or more of these groups, or whose members I don’t know well, it’s usually unwise to talk about what’s really going on in our world. For the first group it’s a conversation-stopper, for the second it’s either disappointing or annoying, and for the third it’s an invitation to a hostile debate or a fight, neither of which serves any purpose.
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As I write this there are a dozen violet-green swallows flitting outside my window, soaring over my hilltop home and down into the valleys all around. Swallows are very adept at turning in mid-air, in a way that looks a bit clumsy but is actually ideally suited to catching insects in mid-air. They will also fly near larger birds in the hope of catching their moulting feathers in mid-air. The two pictures above depict this.
But I also know that swallows will perform these acrobatic feats, including catching and releasing feathers blowing in the wind over and over again, for no apparent reason. Just for fun. The fact that doing this is good practice for more serious pursuits is not the point — most wild creatures play as their principal means of learning new skills, but clearly take great pleasure in doing so for its own sake, just because it’s fun. [If you're a skeptic, look at this bird behaviour, or this one, and tell me this isn't pure, calculated, play].
Maybe the birds are telling us something. Their story, their way of coping with reality, is to play, to take joy in every moment. Maybe that is the story of all wild creatures: That life is play, delight, pleasure, laughter, living in Now Time. Maybe that should be our story, too, those of us who can no longer believe the invented stories of our culture, and who can no longer bear the story of grief and shame and anger and sadness and fear for our future that we have told ourselves about this terrible, real world.
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"In the face of these realities, 21st century conservation is changing. Conservationists have taken steps to become more "people friendly" and to attend more seriously to working landscapes. Conservation will likely continue to create parks and wilderness areas, but that will be just one part of the field's larger goals. The bigger questions for 21st century conservation regard what we will do with the rest of it -- the working landscapes, the urban ecosystems, the fisheries and tree plantations, the vast swaths of agricultural monocultures, and the growing expanses of marginal agricultural lands and second growth forests that, as agriculture and forestry become more productive and intensive, are already returning to something that may not be wilderness, but is of conservation value, nonetheless.
In answering these questions, conservation cannot promise a return to pristine, prehuman landscapes. Humankind has already profoundly transformed the planet and will continue to do so.6 What conservation could promise instead is a new vision of a planet in which nature -- forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems -- exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes. For this to happen, conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness -- ideas that have never been supported by good conservation science -- and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision."
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But ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility of nature, frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever. Some ecologists suggest that if a single species is lost, a whole ecosystem will be in danger of collapse, and that if too much biodiversity is lost, spaceship Earth will start to come apart. Everything, from the expansion of agriculture to rainforest destruction to changing waterways, has been painted as a threat to the delicate inner-workings of our planetary ecosystem.
The fragility trope dates back, at least, to Rachel Carson, who wrote plaintively in Silent Spring of the delicate web of life and warned that perturbing the intricate balance of nature could have disastrous consequences.22 Al Gore made a similar argument in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance.23 And the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned darkly that, while the expansion of agriculture and other forms of development have been overwhelmingly positive for the world's poor, ecosystem degradation was simultaneously putting systems in jeopardy of collapse.24
The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse. Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem. In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function. The American chestnut, once a dominant tree in eastern North America, has been extinguished by a foreign disease, yet the forest ecosystem is surprisingly unaffected. The passenger pigeon, once so abundant that its flocks darkened the sky, went extinct, along with countless other species from the Steller's sea cow to the dodo, with no catastrophic or even measurable effects.
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Conservation's binaries -- growth or nature, prosperity or biodiversity -- have marginalized it in a world that will soon add at least two billion more people. In the developing world, efforts to constrain growth and protect forests from agriculture are unfair, if not unethical, when directed at the 2.5 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day and the one billion who are chronically hungry. By pitting people against nature, conservationists actually create an atmosphere in which people see nature as the enemy. If people don't believe conservation is in their own best interests, then it will never be a societal priority. Conservation must demonstrate how the fates of nature and of people are deeply intertwined -- and then offer new strategies for promoting the health and prosperity of both.
"Here’s another round in what has become a heated, but ultimately productive, conversation on strategies for sustaining the planet’s biological integrity as humanity’s influence builds. Critics of Peter Kareiva, the lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, had the floor in the last post and now Kareiva reacts:"
"Our root problem today is not obdurate denialism coming from the right. That insanity is part of Culture War and can only be treated as a mental illness. Blue America must do what it did in every previous phase of the U.S. Civil War. Simply win. Answer the Tea Party's tricorner hat nonsense with the Union volunteer's kepi. We will stop resurgent feudalism and know-nothingism. Tell the troglodytes and oligarchs they cannot have our renaissance. Our enlightenment. Our proudly scientific civilization.
No. What I find far more worrisome is the left's mania to confuse ALL optimism with complacency, proclaiming any zealous, can-do enthusiasm to be part and parcel of the right's madness."
"To Prevail is to accept that our technological tools are changing how our humanity expresses itself, but not changing who we are. It is to know that such changes are choices we make, not destinies we submit to. It is to recognize that our technologies are manifestations of our culture and our politics, and embed the unconscious biases, hopes, and fears we all carry — and that this is something to make transparent and self-evident, not kept hidden. We can make far better choices about our futures when we have a clearer view of our present.
To Prevail is to see something subtle and important that both critics and cheerleaders of technological evolution often miss: our technologies will, as they always have, make us who we are.
Human plus a Computer equals a Human."
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Western intellectual culture is in the midst of a civil war between two superficially distinct viewpoints: a claim that transformative information technologies are set to sweep away human civilization, eliminating our humanity even if they don’t simply destroy us, versus a claim that transformative information technologies are set to sweep away human civilization and replace it (and eventually us) with something better. We’re on the verge of disaster or the verge of transcendence, and in both cases, the only way to hang onto a shred of our humanity is to disavow what we have made.
But these two ideas ultimately tell the same story: by positing these changes as massive forces beyond our control, they tell us that we have no say in the future of the world, that we may not even have the right to a say in the future of the world. We have no agency; we are hapless victims of techno-destiny. We have no responsibility for outcomes, have no influence on the ethical choices embodied by these tools. The only choice we might be given is whether or not to slam on the brakes and put a halt to technological development — and there’s no guarantee that the brakes will work. There’s no possible future other than loss of control or stagnation.
"Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. "
"Basically, human optimism is a neurological bug that prevents us from remembering undesirable information about our odds of dying or being hurt. And that's why nobody ever believes the apocalypse is going to happen to them."
Thomas Friedman recites the catechism of the race to the bottom. All hail the powers of freelance.com and the poor, hungry, and driven.
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Barrie offered me a few examples on his site right now: Someone is looking for a designer to design “a fully functioning dune buggy.” Forty people are now bidding on the job at an average price of $268. Someone is looking for an architect to design “a car-washing cafe.” Thirty-seven people are bidding on that job at an average price of $168. Someone is looking to produce “six formulations of chewing gum” suitable for the Australian market. Two people are bidding at an average price of $375. When Barrie needed a five-word speech to accept a Webby Award, he offered $1,000 for the best idea. He got 2,730 entries and accepted “The Tech Boom Is Back.” Someone looking for “a rap song to help Chinese students learn English” has three bids averaging $157.
"Its only with the collapse of the housing bubble, the onset of the prolonged recession and the proliferation of that last promised technology, the tablet, that network culture has entered more fully into a condition of not only a suspended past but also a suspneded future. The housing bubble itself was a crisis of the future. As history had ended, so now the future ended. Ezra Pound's old cry "Make it new!" could now only be uttered by tired characters in a thought bubble in a New Yorker cartoon. And just as the days after 9/11 gave us a war without end, we are now given a recession without end. The new stationary economy seems punctuated by mini-booms that will buoy markets and epochal crises (like the impending collapse of the Eurozone, the second leg of the Great Recession, and of course everyone's great terror, the collapse of the massive Chinese property bubble). But the Great Recession is itself no longer even something that finance fears. The canny will make billions as before. Everyone else will be poorer, their futures more exhausted, less full of promise than ever. "
"I hate to say it, but I am afraid I put the greatest stake in the last scenario, the Fall Of The West. The greed and stupidity of our ruling class — theoretically run by elected officials with our consent, but in fact run by powerful interest blocs with little or no regard for our needs — is the abiding fact of the current economic crisis, which has been going on for decades. We cannot expect them to take actions that are harmful to their own interests, even if it means running the whole world off the cliff."
"Only when a significant proportion of our species moves past the Second Denial can we start working on mitigating and resilience actions that will actually help those facing the crises of civilization’s collapse. Only when we give up our “we can control this” mentality, and our magical thinking dreams and schemes — belief in and wasted effort on global consciousness raising, spontaneous voluntary massive change, technological cures, gentle transition programs, wishful incremental-change-is-enough (if we all do it) thinking, individual preparedness plans, social/economic reinvention and “innovating our way forward” projects — will we be able to face the stark reality of what our children and grandchildren are going to face because of our stupidity, and get to work on actions to mitigate its worst effects and develop the capacities we and they will need to cope with cascading crises as they unfold."
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
World energy production per capita from 1945 to 1973 grew at a breakneck speed of 3.45 %/year. Next from 1973 to the all-time peak in 1979, it slowed to a sluggish 0.64 %/year. Then suddenly —and for the first time in history — energy production per capita took a long-term decline of 0.33 %/year from 1979 to 1999. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline. More to the point, it says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.
But if you believe that the sum of a million local efforts is somehow more than the sum of a million local efforts, I must beg to differ. For every local success there are many local failures, dozens of errors of stupidity and unimaginativeness and greed and ignorance and disinformation, that will need us to act to educate and persuade and mobilize and connect and reframe and intervene and subvert, next week and next year, to undo the damage that grows everywhere and every day. The battle of the local activist is always a heroic but rear-guard action, a minimizing of cumulative losses.
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