In the last essay, ‘The
Ranting of a Lunatic’, I wrote these words referring to the human future:
“There is only one option left; the options with which we are most familiar and
therefore to which we most expect and wish to turn are gone: we must change
the way that we think and we must change the things that we believe; we must
make radical and rapid changes in how we live. We will either do this
with some design and planning or the changes will be forced on us by the
environmental realities of a world that can no longer support our insolence.”
I have, in many earlier essays, suggested answers to how we
need to think and what we need to believe, in fact, the suggestion of such
changes have been a consistent theme [1], but I have been a bit cowardly in
offering detail about how it is that we need to live. The essay, ‘The
Strongest Force In The World: for good or ill’, details some of the
mandatory changes in our relationship with the earth, its productive capacities
and biophysical systems; briefly recapped they are: take much less from the
earth’s productive capacity and do much less to the earth’s sustaining systems.
There are great consequences for daily life in this simple paradigm shift.
The most obvious and likely outcomes of humanity confronting
these mandatory changes are the typical human responses of regional, economic,
ethnic and religious polarization, conflict and war. These are also the least
interesting (though the most personally traumatic): the end result would very
likely be the devastation of the earth’s surface and the pollution of the
atmosphere and ocean with such materials and to such levels that much of
complex life would go extinct. One
can draw a number of plausible scenarios where this would be the result in
whole or in part.
What follows is based on the more interesting notion that
people, generally, come to some level of realization that “winning” the
economic or regional battles for possession of a planet being killed off by
those very battles is the greatest insanity. After a period of adjustment to such an idea and its
associated understandings, humans would be in a position to begin to fulfill two
basic conditions: the biological nature of the human species and the ecological
role of humans in the global ecology.
Since the most of humanity has no intention of living in grass huts and
herding goats, how to do this while maintaining technological preeminence will
be the greatest “entrepreneurial” challenge in human history requiring a large
revision in the goals of human action.
Let me ease into this by describing first how humans will
not be living. There will not be
endless shelves of consumer goods and food supplied by an international
transportation infrastructure. All
high-energy consuming activities will be reduced at least 10 fold with solar
capture being the primary energy source and that source moderated by the
limitations on the industries that produce solar capture hardware. Photosynthetic solar capture (including
food production, but also for a variety of other uses) will become more
important, but with severe limitations on it being developed to industrial
levels.
Many if not most of the buffers between environmental
conditions and the daily experience of life will be gone unless they are
supplied by low intensity designs or direct human effort, i.e., we will get wet
when it rains, cold when it is cold, hot when it is hot and dusty when it is
dusty. Gone will be effortless
travel, limitless healthcare or hours spent on entertainment options.
It should be noted that billions of people presently live like
this; what would be different for them is that they would not be misguided into
thinking that the impunities of wealth were an option for them.
The great question is what would replace the consumer
society and its organizing expectations; because that is exactly what would
have to be done. The flippant, but
necessary answer is an appreciation for life – life as the most remarkable and diverse organization of matter and
energy in the universe that we know of.
The destruction of that appreciation has been the most incredible loss
to the human species imaginable.
It will only be recovered by changing the details of how we live [2].
* * *
Are you ready to bale the bathwater into the toilet as the
flushing water? Would you be ready if by doing so you saved 60 gallons of water
a month for drinking and cooking?
Would you be ready if that was what you had to do to get the 60 potable
gallons?
Are you prepared, with knowledge and physical and emotional
capacity, to supply 50% or more of your nutritional needs by gardening and
gathering? How about clothing
needs, housing and protection from the “elements”?
Can you work with your neighbors? Do you have the emotional
maturity and political (real negotiating and compromising) skills to organize
community action for the benefit of the whole community and not just attempted
self-aggrandizement? This is the
opposite of impunity; it is responsibility to the community and therefore to
the ecology as a whole.
Could you raise insects for food, insects that eat, and
therefore convert, compost into high-quality protein? And more importantly, would you give your time and effort to
such “insect ranching” as a community service.
Are you prepared to walk 5 miles as a normal expectation, to
bicycle 10 to 25 miles to public transportation or to work? Are you ready for that work to be
community based, supplying – in whatever form – much of your needs for exchange
transactions, but only 50% or less of your total needs.
Are you ready to learn the world around you so that you
could both use it for your benefit, but also not abuse it so that it loses its
capacity to benefit? This is the
natural relationship of every species of life to the ecology in which they
live. It is the relationship that
humans must form with the world.
All other living things acquire this relationship on the uncompromising
anvil of evolution, humans evolved a new form of information handling that now
requires that they make this relationship explicit through acts of scientific
investigation, learning and behavioral changes to fit biophysical Reality.
Are you ready to die when you are injured or diseased, when
an organ fails, when you have worn out your body or when the mind is gone? Death is still, after all these years,
the unsolvable mystery, but it loses its terror after a thoughtful, fulfilled
and purposeful life, especially when the values and products of that life are
absorbed into the community in which that life has been lived.
Are you ready to make learning about the world (the
universe), other people and life’s processes a central value? Something must
replace consumerism: consuming information/experience, then applying it to more
fully manifest the pleasures of living, would be a low impact replacement. Physical activity, especially for its
own pleasures, would be another; walking, running, climbing, swimming can be
done without a tracksuit from AF or snorkel gear made in China. The focus is
shifted to the activity and away from the accoutrements in all things as a
general process.
Are you ready to live in a 200 to 400 square foot space and
the whole of the out-of-doors?
Could you share that space with others?
* * *
There would, of course, be many more changes in how we might live, but this offers a beginning view of a chance to adapt a
realistic relationship with biophysical Reality. The goal of the economic elites is that 90% of humanity live
in these ways while they continue on with impunity, but that is a sure
prescription for conflict, war and the destruction of ecological stability,
even as it is the most likely future.
[1] list of some essays that detail beliefs needing to be
changed or the new beliefs needed:
List of some essays arguing that growth must end:
[2] The key element in all of our options is how work and
its value-creation are arranged. Frederick Engels summarized Marx's theory of
historical change: “The materialist conception of history starts from the
principle that production, and with production the exchange of its products, is
the basis of every social order; that in every society that has appeared in
history the distribution of the products, and with it the division of society
into classes or estates, is determined by what is produced and how it is
produced, and how the product is exchanged.” C. Wright Mills gave a compact paraphrase to Marx’s theory
of history writing in The Marxists
(1962): “Political, religious and legal institutions as well as the ideas, the
images, the ideologies by means of which men understand the world in which they
live, their place within it, and themselves--all these are reflections of the
economic basis of society.” And As
Upton Sinclair said in even shorter form, “It is difficult to get a man to
understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding
it.” The work that people do is
the nexus of social order and expectation.
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