Looking at a Lifestyle 3

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” ― Gautama Buddha

 

In the second essay of this series, I offered the thought that ‘we’ need to more competently develop the capacities of pre-adaptation: making adjustments to our habits and expectations in response to future events rather than only responding to the conditions, albeit new ones, that are immediately before us. But, of course, knowing how we will be living in the future is a substantial difficulty; cue, Mr. Berra.

 

The first steps are, of course, to accept that there can be predictable futures and that responses in the present are needed to mitigate future dangers. Competent sources of knowledge and prediction need to be recognized and empowered. Then, as with any journey of consequence, we must have a clear idea of destination in order to decide a route.

 

To begin we must reorient ourselves with a diametrical turn in our most fundamental comprehension of our place in the world. Our dominating response to the most challenging issues today continues to be: “What ‘new things’ can we invent to defeat the unfortunate consequences of what we have done?” But the question must be: “What does the biosphere require to retain and regain integrity and stability?” The focus must be on the systems and processes that have evolved and maintained the biophysical structures of the earth over billions of years, not the short-term needs of an economic or political calculation. To put it bluntly: If the human ‘we’ is only able to focus on how to maintain our present ways of life and parochial thinking, then ‘we” will not survive; the conditions for complex life on the earth’s surface could well be compromised by our failures for thousands (perhaps millions) of years. I realize that this sounds overly dramatic, especially given the ease with which most people live in the developed world, but an increasing number of the most sober and serious thinkers** in all relevant areas of study are either at this level of concern or rapidly moving in that direction.

Here are three conditions of a long-term survivable future; a ‘place’ we need to get to. We actually know them, even as we don’t want to recognize them!

• The human animal needs to use far less of the earth’s productivity: perhaps somewhere around 10% of the present use. Reducing the human use to the ‘one earth’ measure of the Ecological Footprint tool will be woefully inadequate to allow the biosphere to reorganize into a healthy, self-maintaining system that isn’t continuously challenged by human activity. Such a use rate would still be orders of magnitudes greater than any other species has ever used in the history of life on the earth.

• A near net-zero exchange relationship within ecosystems: even with a reduction in the use of the earth’s productivity, the way humans use what they take from the environment and what is returned to the environment must be in homeostatic ecological balance – as is, and has been, true of every other species of living things for billions of years.

• Absolute accountability for actions in the environment: feedback systems that make human economic/political/social structures and actions directly accountable to ecological conditions and events in the manner of all other organisms. The powerful human adaptations** that have made possible, for many generations, the ‘defeating’ of ecological conditions, require inhibition and regulation; must be directly responsive to their effects on the living space.

Our present human world seriously violates all of these conditions; we are not a functioning, integrated part of the biophysical systems that sustain and allow complex life on this planet and it is increasingly clear that the universe will not be bent to puny human will (make note of exceptionalism from The Enlightenment). All of the narrowly focused economic, social and political narratives and arguments that massively dominate the discussion of our human future are devoted to very short term and ultimately distracting actions that ignore, deny or are simply ignorant of these realities.

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What would the human world look like as people fulfilled these conditions? How would societies be structured? What political and economic systems would support those conditions? How could social, political and economic systems be made directly responsive to environmental conditions and changes rather than the immediate perceptions of economic need and political advantage? There are only a few ways that these conditions might be met, only a few; that is the nature of biological fitness. I am proposing one option that seems possible; others should be proposed.

Since it is often assumed that ‘we can’t get there from here’, that some form of conflagration will be required before humanity will begin to make the needed changes, we can’t know how we will pass through the changes as human made ‘realities’ ultimately collide with Biophysical Reality. We cannot know what form of situation will precede our potentially adapting to environmental reality, but informed thought and preparation now is essential.

I will begin with the assumption of a population of about 4 billion people; any population much less than that in the next 100 years could only be the result of catastrophic destruction of human societies and the earth’s biophysical systems resulting in some unthinkable post-apocalyptic scenario completely beyond the scope of our potential influence.  (the next and last essay in this series takes on the thorny issue of population reduction).

With such a large population in some continuity with the past, all the present issues of human nature and limitations, economic dependencies, political aspirations, nation states, business interests, ethnic and ‘racial’ confusions and more would still be with us; we would not be living in wickiups, or sod houses, in tribal communities, plowing our fields with mules. It would not be a luddite world; we will remain industrial, technological societies. The changes that our species must make will have to come from more fundamental aspects of ourselves; otherwise, we will very rapidly repeat all the behaviors of our history.

• The most fundamental change would be to return the natural, biophysical world to its role as the primary informing source for our actions.

• An economic system designed to distribute compensations based on contribution to the material productions and stability of society rather than extracting and concentrating society’s production of wealth.

• Hierarchical systems of social valuing that depend on contributions to values of respect, honesty, social stability and an informed population.

• Our expectations of how we are to live a ‘proper life’, need to come from our ecological relationships, replacing the anthropocentric “stories of us” that dominate the present time.

It is essential to understand that any coherent system must have an informing source: in the living world that ‘source’ is the evolutionary process mediated through the designs surrounding and functioning by the DNA/RNA/protein nexus; in the human world, as it separated from the living world, our coherency was mediated by the stories that we told ourselves. These stories were, for hundreds of thousands of years, almost entirely based on our relations with the immediate ecologies in which our communities lived; were therefore closely related to and responsive to biological processes. We adapted ways of restraining and regulating stories so that while they might seem quite fanciful to an observer, they were instructive and integrating of actions in the environment. But, as, increasingly, our own stories came from our imagination and were less and less restrained and regulated by the biophysical reality of an ecosystem, we lost our way as a functioning part of earth’s systems.

The essential condition of competent response to a world of still large human populations will require a reattachment to ecological feedback with extensive measurement, evaluation and enforcement of environmental data (the only other way is to live in direct and immediate individual sensory contact with the environment as small populations of essentially hunter-gathers). Without immediate, controlling feedback from the world’s ecosystems, we would certainly use our powers of long-term avoidance of environmental consequences to quickly recreate all of the present devastating ills, just as we have done in the past when faced with more local failures of environmental services. We have clearly demonstrated in the last 10 to 20 thousand years that Homo sapiens sapiens cannot be trusted to act in the world without the environment as a dominant external informing source.

 

This all leads me to a radical, frightening and very unsatisfying conclusion: Humans must find a way to create a computer based system to which they give up major aspects of what we have come to see as our proper powers of control over ourselves and the world. Such an ‘intelligent’ computer system would have to be untouchable by any human agency once set in place.

 

We have tried to use stories of moral authority. We have tried laws. We have tried regulation. And through it all we have gone in 10,000 years, not even a wink in evolutionary/geological time, from stone tools to structures attempting to fuse simple atoms in the manner of the interior of the sun… Gone from a million or so people to 8 billion and increasing… Gone from functioning stable biophysical environmental systems to dangerous levels of new chemical species from pole to pole and disrupted biophysical systems endangering the present assemblage of life… and we are not fazed; we are continuing on with the same methods: growth and change, more energy production, more intervention.

Since we will not, cannot, restrain ourselves with any devices of our own control, we must use what we do, invent and implement, to find a way that will be effective in restraining and regulating us. It seems that such an option is sitting there in front of us: artificial intelligence, sophisticated computer and measurement systems with actionable powers over economic and physical operators.

To be clear, I hate the idea. But, I have a correspondent who is thinking of another option; eugenics (with the full range of the new genetic methods) to change the very nature of the human mind and native behaviors that would allow for our survival as a new species, manufactured in the manner of wolves turned into domestic dogs. There is a point in survival when it isn’t survival at all! It is more than beginning to appear that we must consider the difference.