Don’t Do That… Again

Ross Douthat’s NYTimes Op Ed piece (2/15/10) attempts to give the impression of thoughtful balance, albeit from a Republican perspective. I have no idea if Douthat actually believes what he is saying, but have the sense that his “even handed” treatment of the limited understanding of the Democrats is mostly pretense. However, the essential error of the piece has little to do with the partisan bickering that passes for commentary.

There is no Free (sic) Market process either in place or possible… what we have currently in place is the ‘natural’ product of what has been called “free market” over the last half century. This is so obvious and simple: as groups of people come to accumulate wealth (and power) they use that wealth to strengthen their protection of it and in the process need more. In this positive feedback design even charity is a form of wealth protection just like a high wall or a locked vault.

People who enter this process of action and belief create ever more complex, opaque and effective designs to gather more wealth – this must include a public relations component to convince the Great Many that such accumulations are natural, essential and ultimately beneficial to all. Most end up believing their own propaganda and respond to rejection of their sophistries with the outrage of a zealot. This is especially problematic because of all the machinery that exists to respond with more wealth extraction, aggressive PR, power concentration and in-group identification.

The propaganda creates an ethic that wealth is good – at least natural – with the consequence that those who rise up to speak for and organize the cacophony of the Great Many are compromised by the wealth and power system that is in place – they become part of the PR arm of the elite; and if they can not be compromised, they can be frightened, marginalized as “nuts” or killed.

This is the reality that resides behind Douthat’s “Oh so reasonable and bipartisan” consideration of healthcare legislation. The question is not how can two (or more) rational and equally reasonable positions be compromised into a plan that will bring medical care to people in the most efficient and economical way; we have that answer from 30 other developed nations. But rather the question is: how can the current structures for accumulating wealth from medical services be left in place, or improved upon, while giving the impression that more services are being delivered to at least the more politically active in the society?

The argument between the Democrats and Republicans is over whether the wealth accumulators should have to give up a bit of the growth of their advantage or whether they should get a greater advantage in this moment of opportunity. This is called, in the linguistic Madness of our time, Socialism vs. Free Market.

Such arguments have to be replaced with a real ethical argument and it must be loud enough that it can be heard in the pauses of the media-dominated elite noise machine. Excessive wealth is not good, just like greed is not good. Wealth is not a condition, but a process that unprotects the tiny bits of wealth that actually productive people accumulate for their personal safety, unprotects with force, guile and law. The inherent form of such a relationship is enmity, thus the many war based metaphors of business.

Our present economic and political system unprotects the many tiny accumulations of those who actually add value to the objects and services of exchange and protects the accumulations of the moneychangers who position themselves at strategic points in the movement of wealth. This is a natural process in an unregulated world, natural like the build up of driftwood and silt in the bend of a river: the first random point to deposit a snag begins to reshape and build a stream bank that collects more and more until the force of a flood overpowers the design, resets the ‘established order’ and process begins again.

So long as we choose to live on the river bank or so long as we choose or must live in a complex economy we must regulate both for our safety. Wealth that exceeds about 10 times the average minimum levels for personal safety should be socially unacceptable, the pitchforked mobs on the march with torches in hand. That the medical industry grazes on the health needs and fears of the Great Many, and siphons off nearly 30 % of the Great Many’s medical payments into the paper work of insurance companies whose monetary incentive (forget human concern) is to deny medical care, that the 100 million dollar buildings housing these thieves are not being torn down with the bare hands of the outraged is remarkable.

No, Douthat’s argument is not some evenhanded, enlightened invitation to compromise with actual healthcare as the goal. It is a call to submission to wealth and power.

There is no going on from where we are now. There is only the flailing hopefulness of the hopeless. We see this in the insane recalcitrance of our political actors, in the unbelievably twisted arrogance of the economic elite and the madly mindless obsequiousness of the Great Many. Those with some purchase on reality are so marginalized and insignificant: they are like shrews in the forest – tiny, impossible to find in action, though occasionally a bone is found in the waste of a predatory bird or a discarded beetle skeleton with the marks of sharp little teeth. That is about how much evidence we see of real ethical and knowledge-based activism.

It is there, of course, just like the shrews, a ubiquitous presence of concern, distrust and potential activism, but its every move is countered by a predatory economic elite totally dedicated to the preservation of their entitlement. We have seen this before; when the Great Many finally have had enough they will, like dogs driven mad by mistreatment, attack indiscriminately, even (especially) each other. This is the bloody reality that boils beneath the maddeningly dishonest Op Ed machine and political playacting.

Riddle Me a Measurement

A few years ago I was teaching some teenaged young men and women how to measure. Why they didn’t know how to measure is grist for another mill; for the purposes here, they did not know. The utility of inches and feet were compared to the efficiency of centimeters and decimeters. The importance of creating a sense of the unit sizes, various mnemonics suggested, was emphasized; and historical differences offered. I rather naively assumed that we could go on from there to measuring with the various units; practice would develop for each person their own route to discovery of measurement as tool.

After a few minutes of measuring common classroom objects – notebooks, books, pencils – the numbers were disturbingly inconsistent. I was prepared for confusing millimeters with centimeters and even metric with imperial units, but 3 people sitting at the same table getting 10 mm, even 20 mm, differences when measuring the same book surprised me.

I then observed a most remarkable thing. Students were often taking great care reading the number intended to represent the length of the object, but giving the most casual attention to setting the origin point of the measurement. Some were setting the starting point at the ‘one’ position on the scale. Others were beginning the measurement at zero, though without much concern about it being well aligned or it remaining aligned when their attention was turned to the ‘reading end’ of the measuring stick.

Since it is my style not to point too directly at errors, preferring that they be discovered, I would only say when given a measurement that it was incorrect and to do and think through the process from the beginning again. Many times students became frustrated telling me in detail of their monumental efforts to read the numbers accurately from the scale; saying these things while the origin end of the measuring tool was flopping around in 5 mms of limbo.

Some of the more aggressive students tried to defend their numbers with argument rather than measuring several times, collecting the numbers and looking for the sources of the inconsistency. Leaving aside the purely defiant, most students were reluctant to test the situation and take responsibility for the numbers – the ruler was giving the answers and therefore taking a single measure with a single ruler was all that was necessary; and that answer would just have to do.

Again, what led these poor, misguided students to these deeply held attitudes is a topic for another time; what I began to think about was the metaphor to so much else in our lives. I often hear people argue politics and economics with great attention to the ‘end points:’ “Communism is a failed system, just look what happened to Eastern Europe.” “No, no! It is Capitalism that is the failed system, just look at the destruction of climate stability.” “Oh triple no! Capitalism is the greatest source of growth and only growth can save the poor – rising tides and boats, etc. – so we must grow faster and faster to catch up with the increasing rates of poverty.”

In these arguments I hear the students saying: “The edge of the book is exactly on the line at 243 mm and that has to be the measurement.” Another (while looking from an angle of 45 degrees) says: “Looks like 245 mm to me.” A measurement from another table comes in at 237 mm and yet another is certain that the length is 9 1/2 ‘cm.’

This makes an obvious argument for learning history as a way to set our “zero” points when measuring the present or extrapolating the future, but that is not where I am going. I am more concerned with habits of thought, and not just of students, but of people in general.

If education does not result in it being either obvious or readily discoverable that the zero end of a scale must be set with same attention and accuracy as the reading end of the scale is read, then the basis of all other thought is compromised. We are a creature of metaphor: understand a physical lever and understand the “levers” of political power; understand conversions of inches to centimeters and understand ratios of all kinds; understand the concept of the limit and understand ecological complexities.

If a person cannot measure the length of a line, find the area of a complex space or figure out how to estimate the volume of a solid, then how in the world are they to think through the complexities of even honestly presented social, economic or political concerns?

A Gentle Manifesto

When I read the many, and growing numbers of, essays exampled by the argument in an essay from The Toronto Star a couple of years ago, “Don’t Fix The Economy, Change It”, I come away with the sense that something rather serious is missing from the formulations. As a bit of an amateur logician, I have come to realize that there is an implied premise in all of these arguments; it is: For the salutary changes posited to take place, the reins of economic power would have to be pried from the cold, dead and still grasping fingers of those presently in charge – they will give them up in no other way and they will make no changes of any consequence that would weaken their hold on power or on wealth without the direct and creditable threat of forces sufficient to deliver on the threat. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I have argued for years in my writings that one basic way to understand economics is to look for the patterns and methods of the protecting and unprotecting of ‘wealth’: ‘wealth’ as the accumulation of raw material (even as in the most simple storing of body fat) and products of the imagination made manifest. Through the normal distribution of acquisitiveness, amplified by our large populations, there are small, but significant, numbers of people who, for multifarious reasons, need to accumulate surplus over their immediate needs; some are driven to do this to great excess. This creates a real and immediate need for others to collect surplus so to better protect themselves from those who are driven more by pathology than reality.

And so the race is on: we spend about half our time protecting our own and about half the time figuring ways of unprotecting the ‘wealth’ of the other fellow. We protect with weapons, locks and laws and we unprotect with weapons, lock-picks and laws. Obviously those who make the weapons and control the laws are in the best place to unprotect the wealth of others. And so again the race is on!

Our economic systems become ‘religions’ in the service of the protecting and unprotecting. Capitalism is hated rationally by those whose wealth is unprotected by it and loved irrationally by those for whom its designs allow them to unprotect the wealth of others. Socialism (meaning a socially responsible pattern of human relations) would limit the ability of capitalists to unprotect the wealth of the Great Many. But ultimately these economic designs are adaptations responding to technology, power, numbers and opportunity; they have never been determined by reason or by understanding of long-term sustaining.

The terrible meaning of this reality is that in the long history of natural economies before humans, economic adaptation was in the service of ecosystem integration and stability by virtue of the beneficence and violence of evolutionary process; human economies are also adaptive, but have disconnected from environmental realities in such a way that not only do they ignore the value of the lives of humans, they ignore the value of life on earth altogether. And in an even more terrible irony, the greater the disconnection from reality, the greater is the power to do harm in reality: a man living in a cave with only stone tools saw clearly his dependence on the world around him and was careful not to do it harm, and yet he had no real power to damage it. The man in a top-floor corner office with billions of Joules of power at his fingertips believes in his own ascendancy, the world not at all and, yet can in a stroke, bring down a species, a hundred species, an ecosystem.

The meanings here are dark, the actions called for difficult and dangerous. I tire of the mealy-mouthed lies from the political heights. I tire of the silly affectations of the simply angry – angry that they have been stolen from, but who would, in a heartbeat, steal from others.

A critical mass of people must come to understand and act with some reasonable and general comprehension of our situation: more the American revolution than the French revolution. The Great Frustration will come of a sudden and sweep unevenly through populations as it always has. This will happen, and is being prepared for by those who will want only to crush it. But it will not come easily; there is so much to lose.  Almost everything that most people believe will be challenged and changed.  Some will be economically and emotionally crushed, and some will die.  It would be best for the world if our capacity to imagine, our Consciousness Order powers, could be organized in such a way that we began to reflect on and anticipate the adaptive changes that will reconnect us to the environmental reality we have for so long ignored, but the cost will be dear.

First the ideas, from as many sources as possible, as loud as possible, as constant as possible; and then the forming of action. There is a promised land; not promised by any God, but promised by a new (evolutionarily new), incredibly powerful adaptation, the Consciousness System of Order. The human species is its present repository. We can imagine and then tangibly create that imaging; an entirely new way of being in the universe.

Let loose on the world and unguided, this adaptation has been running its course.  Since the limit of imagining is hugely wider and faster than other forms of change, this adaptation has disconnected humanity from Reality as one of its possibilities.  But it is within the possibilities of the Consciousness Order to reconnect to Reality in new and as yet unimagined ways.

We are entering the desert and it is uncertain in what form we will emerge. We can continue to allow the most insane and afflicted among us to determine our fate and future or we can imagine another way and make it happen.

Taking Without Compensation

This essay has appeared various places over the last several years. I am reprising it in response to Copenhagen climate conference.

(Preamble: This is perhaps the most important moment in the history of the human species since Toba erupted 75,000 years ago and nearly removed our species from the earth – there would very likely have been an ascendant species of the genus, it just would not have been us. The present economic crisis presents us with what seems a simple goal: to return to the economic stability and direction we were going in. We are deep in the details of how to do exactly that. Mike Whitney, Paul Craig Roberts, Chalmers Johnson, Paul Krugman and others are un-spinning these details for us; but, this is a time to begin to recognize the most basic and underlying cause of the present perturbations. It is vital to use such moments, not to return to the conditions that brought us to this pass in the first place, but to begin to understand how we need to live for the long run. It seems that only in times of trouble are we willing to see other possibilities. Now is just such an opportunity. Of course, we must pay attention to the details, but not to the exclusion of the larger goal of sustaining survival of all life on the planet.)

There is a very basic question that we do not often ask, but that is essential to our relationship to each other and to the flow of life on this earth – big picture stuff, with personal consequences. Where does what you use and accumulate come from? That you buy ‘stuff’ with the money that you earn is not enough of an answer!

If your child came home today with a pocket full of candy, you might ask where it came from. If he came home with a new very expensive bike, the question would certainly arise. In these situations we have a reasonably clear view. The child has an understandable "personal worth" of charm, persuasion, group affiliation and some money. Friends share candy wealth. New bicycles are sometimes loaned, but if the child consistently accumulates more stuff than you can account for, you will attempt to discover the source. That is the goal here. You and I "possess" accumulations of things; where does it all come from?

Let's examine something simple: the wooden stool next to my desk. I exchanged money for it years ago (the larger meaning of money can’t be considered here). The furniture store exchanged money for it from a shop where people were given money to cut, shape and assemble the wood pieces. The wood was bought from a sawmill. The trees came from a forest.

But, the forest was not compensated for the tree. The people driven out by the cutting, who once lived in the forest, were not compensated. The animals and the plants killed or driven out by the cutting were not compensated. Neither was the soil or the animals, plants and bacteria of the soil.

In other words, if honestly examined, the layers of compensated transactions cannot disguise the fact that at base we take what we have. Humans exert the energy, possess the ability and operate the behaviors to take the material, inorganic and organic, from the earth's surface, water and atmosphere. This taking is not compensated, i.e., we do not systematically give back something useful in reasonable corresponding amounts to the soil, to the river, to the forest, to the ocean, or to the atmosphere as compensation for what we take.

We only compensate when the material is held in some protected condition, and we compensate not so much on the basis of value of the material, but on the force of the protection. We only compensate with a full recognition of value when the force of protection is equal to our power to acquire.

If your child answered, "Oh, there was this little crippled girl with a whole lot of candy, so I just took what I wanted. Its OK though, she couldn't chase me and didn't have any weapon to stop me.” how would you respond? 99.99% of parents would be extremely troubled and many would immediately and directly condemn such behavior as absolutely wrong.

But these same parents will eat bananas or drink coffee grown on land that just a few years ago was taken by guns and fire from the people who lived there. These same parents will accumulate twice, ten times, a hundred or a thousand times as much material wealth as is needed to allow them to be safe and comfortable (considering such accumulation a duty, a right and point of pride), letting the fact of several steps of exchange disguise that all that they have was taken from somewhere without compensation.

We all in essence hire (worse than hire--demand, often on penalty of death, that they perform this work) a ‘goon squad’ to do the taking. And we then are satisfied and righteous because the last transaction up the chain of transactions is civil, orderly and compensated. Ultimately we despise those who are driven to be close to the taking, the miner, the farm laborer, the lumberjack, the mercenary solder, as tainted and unfit for association with those who have purified the theft with multiple compensated transactions of the increasingly powerful.

How would you feel if you child answered, "I gave this kid $50.00 for the bike ($2000.00 full suspension model). He took it from in front of a store where he found it unlocked.” If he said, "I paid $150.00 for the bike at a second hand store. They bought it for $50.00 from a kid who took it from in front of a store.” Would you feel better? Would you feel better still as more distance of transaction is lain on and as each layer of power (knowledge of the "true" value) is compensated? "I gave $100.00 to a friend for a quarter share in whatever he bought. He paid $400.00 for the bike to someone who paid $150.00 for it at a second hand store. They bought it for $50.00 from a kid who stole it." Would you recognize that you were supporting the uncompensated taking no matter where you were in the string of transactions? Would you speculate on a relationship between a market for the bike and forces that push someone to take the bike in the first place?

While talking about these things with a ten year-old child, she said, "But you can't pay a tree." This was the distortion inculcated. She imagined a dollar bill left on the stump and correctly recognized the silliness. But, payment is based on satisfaction of need. You will not do for me if I do not give to you what you recognize as meeting a need, and I must comply because you hold either your action or material in a protected condition. The tree's wood, the ore in the ground, a chemical or the power in water are not protected, there is only a degree of difficulty involved in taking them. Overcoming the difficulty is not compensation. If it were, then those who have to travel far to buy food would get it for less!

"You can't pay a tree.” But trees have needs: water, certain qualities of soil, light, atmosphere, temperature range, wind, certain insects, birds and other animals, certain bacteria and molds in the soil, certain association with other plants, and more (to be left alone!). While less clear, ore bodies or oil pockets and the surrounding substance have the need to be undisturbed in order to remain as they are, part of the physical process of the earth's crust; and, perhaps more persuasive to a pragmatic human, remaining as they are does not release heavy metals, silts and other extraction wastes into streams or onto the surface.

The essential need of anything is to remain in a sustaining condition in its ecosystem or physical cycle. Specific needs are all adaptively structural into this overall need. Protection from harm meets needs in this paradigm just as well as supplying some metabolically vital substance.

Every successful (long lasting) organism adapts to meet its own direct needs and to function as part of the sustaining structure of its ecosystem. It does this through direct adaptations and adaptations that modulate and inhibit its own primary need meeting behaviors from upsetting the balanced sustaining structure of that ecosystem.

This last is exactly what humans have not done. Humans are at the beginning and untried stages of their very unusual--unique—adaptation; the speed of application, power and range of effectiveness of the human adaptation combined with certain of its present defects (primarily the nature and role of illusion), may limit the chances of humans surviving long enough to adapt fully to their environment by bringing the power of their adaptations under evolutionary and ecological control.

Taking without even the recognition of the need for compensation is just one of the difficulties for humans and distorts all subsequent economic relationships. A second distorting reality occurs when compensation is based on the power of the protection over holdings rather than on value. A consequence of these distortions is the drive to incredible excesses of accumulation rather than supporting the goal of using as little material as possible to have as full a life experience as possible – a manifestation of this is the confusing of the quality of life with the amounts of our accumulations.

What we do is take whatever is unprotected, invent ways to protect what we have brought into our sway, and invent ways of defeating the protections of the other chap. All of this fidgeting about for advantage vis-a-vis other humans leads to a complete disregard for any non-human source that we might take from.

The process of compensating and protecting complicates and complicates, eventually becoming economics and politics. And creating power, creating explanations and justifications for our actions and creating the systems of ordering principles like how interest rates relate to unemployment rates and the complications of the money supply. Such explanations all serve to distract attention from concrete evolutionary realities, and are used to render such arguments as these presented here as foolish when, in fact, these arguments are the essence of our continuing life on earth.

It must be understood that human biological success is not a positive function of our present definition of economic success, but rather is the opposite. Economic growth, technological development and increasing per capita wealth are the sure representations of a species out of control. Spreading and increasing taking is modeled not on the behaviors of the large carnivores (representing 500 million years of evolutionary history and millions of potential examples), or the behavior of any complex creature. It is modeled by a wild fire that burns all the available fuel until, nothing left to burn, it extinguishes. If this is to be the major result of human evolution, the fire could be the very fire of life on earth, and the fuel could be the bulk of life sustaining substance and opportunity.

No organism can base its existence on increasing rates of uncompensated taking from fixed amounts of material and energy. What humans have been successful at doing so far is forcing the consequences of their taking onto other creatures, weaker cultures, yet unborn humans, and into distorted relationships with each other and the environment. Seen with any clarity of perspective, it is clear that this can only go on for so long. We can only refine, patch and postpone the effects of this style of relationship with the environment to a point, beyond which we will quite simply be unable to keep up with the total ecosystem distortions and failures.

There is a very strong tendency to reject this sort of thinking for a variety of not especially sound reasons: “It is not positive. It is doom and gloom.” “There seems to be no way to respond effectively to this argument and still keep 3 cars and stock in tobacco, nuclear weapons and East Indies hardwoods.” “This can't be right since we would have to live differently, and if it is right, it’s too hard.” “This can't be right because there is no way out if it is right.” These all share an essential reason for rejection—'We don't like the consequences.'

Well,... As my children might say, "No duh.” If a situation presents you with only undesirable consequences, then you had better pick the options that offer the greatest chance of coming to a new position with some desirable consequences, even if the initial effort is the more difficult.

It is to the immediate benefit of those who profit from the present patterns of material excess to deny that there is any problem or that we as a species are by our excesses contributing to our own destruction and immeasurable harm to balance and order in the biosphere. No powerful media source is going to say, "Don't buy my stuff because its production harms the environment. Our workers are exploited. You don't need it for any sound reason. And finally, it does not even do what we imply it does anyway." Even though these might be the more true of all the things that could be said about a product.

When the goal is to get as much stuff as you can – the insatiable desire for goods and services talked about in economics – from a limited world of finite resources, a distortion of perception devalues all ideas but those that support the goal. If the goal is to use as little as possible in the most efficient way so to live as fulfilled a life as possible, all ideas and experiences become valuable. Experiences, understandings and feelings about and from self, others and the world become the essential ingredients of life. We understand from this perspective that whatever we have we get by taking and that we have a responsibility to find an effective means of appropriately compensating that taking. For every other organism this is solved in the evolution of their various instinctual behaviors, and it was for humans part of our development when we lived within the order of the environment. We are no longer ordered by the environment in which we evolved and so now must make such valuing and compensating a part of a cultural ethic if we are to regain our balance and leave an inhabitable world for our children and grand children.

Another argument against these views is to say that it is fine to take without compensation what is not owned. This opens the thorny issue of what it is to own a thing. In the view presented here it only means that the thing is in a protected condition (by force or threat of harm; finally based on the willingness to inflict greater harm than a potential taker is willing to endure in the attempt to take).

The view here is that nothing is owned. No one has some abstract right to the control of anything. Humans have expanded the "right of place" -- an organism brings under its protection a certain amount of space around its own body or around its group -- to include anything definable as property. In doing this we usually get it exactly backwards claiming we have the right to protect something because it is owned by us, when in fact it is "owned" by us only as a function of our holding it in a protected condition (with threat of teeth and claw, knife or gun, moral condemnation or law). But strangely, what we “own” is not “protected” from abuse, damage, misuse or destruction by its "owner"; only protected from being assumed and consumed by another creature.

This is clearly the truth of things. It is only necessary to see what happens to desirable material when the actual protections are weakened or removed in social disruptions; the facts of ownership go in direct proportion to the failures and rearrangements of the power to protect.

Material or land that is not protected from taking or is in a condition of protection that is very weak compared to the power that is brought to taking is taken without thought of compensation because "it is not owned". It is then "owned" by the taker and may be used in any way that the "owner" wishes, again without compensation.

We have seen this function from human slavery, to animal ownership, to land ownership, to portable personal property. An "owner" could sell or kill a slave, beat an animal, monoculture farm crops, burn rather than give away clothing, all as full and "protected rights" of ownership, and with complete disregard for compensating the "thing owned", and complete disregard for any other that might have an interest in the "thing owned" (that is, be in some ecological relationship with the "thing"; soil systems and strip mines, indigenous peoples and rain forest removal, or broadcast pesticide/herbicide effects).

Ownership is then one of those illusions that distorts and misguides human relationships with other humans, objects, creatures and territories in their ecosystem. Humans have finally assumed that they own the whole biosphere and can do with it as they please, when in fact humans are but a part of the biosphere and depend for survival along with every thing else on its unmolested continuance.

The failure to have instincts that guide behaviors toward a symbiosis with the ecosystems in which we live, and the failure to develop thoughtful behaviors to the same purpose upon recognition of the inborn deficiency, may will be the ultimate failure of our adaptation. We might simply take without compensation or respect until the sources work their final and greatest power, to be used up and gone from the earth forever (or even gone or unusable for a few days or months, if immediately vital for life, would be equally devastating).

So the answer to the original question: We take what we have, because we can, from the finite supplies of the biosphere as does every other organism alive today or that has ever been in the nearly 4 billion years that life has existed on this earth. However, every organism on earth other than present humans compensate for their taking by returning to the biosphere, in appropriate amounts and forms, what is required to maintain the balance of life sustaining physical and organic processes. If this were not the case, life would not presently exist on earth.

That humans take without compensation is not a clever or "slick" move, i.e., the way that humans function in their economic exchanges is a serious distortion of the systems of compensation that have evolved as ecosystems – interwoven symbiotic exchanges of material and energy through interpenetrating physical and organic cycles.

The evolutionary rule is to take what is needed and to give back what is needed. Every organism must take (space, minerals, water, organic materials from the dead or the living, energy). Every organism changes the space in which it lives by its presence. But every organism must take and modify place in such a way that there will be material to take tomorrow and all tomorrows to come; the processes that replenish must be supported and not overwhelmed.

I don't know how to make this point with the authority that is needed; it is the most important understanding in the world for humans: no species can take without compensating. The evolution of organisms within ecosystems is the structuring of mutual interpenetrating balanced exchanges.

If humans continue to apply their adaptive powers, without major modifications toward truly compensated taking of material and energy, they will do such terrible damage to the physical and biological cycles supporting life in the biosphere that there will be a cascade of extinctions of millions of species.

This could mean that Humans in the present subspecies form (the scientific name is an appellation I cannot in good conscience apply. We are many powerful things, but wise is not one of them) lasted a little over 100,000 years, not even a good wink in geological time. If the last 3 billion years, from the beginning of simple but reasonably abundant life on earth, were condensed in time and played as a two hour movie, humans like us would occupy about 1/4 of a second of film time (7 frames) and then we would, along with millions of other species, disappear.

My best guess, however, is that humans will not become extinct. Such an event would require an almost unimaginable set of devastating conditions--the very fabric of the biosphere would have to be seriously torn to kill the cockroaches, rats, humans and other broadly adapted and adaptable creatures. For the most tenacious species to be extinguished, the very atmosphere would have to be unusable for some extended period of time, all the water poisoned or some other primary conditions of life totally disrupted.

But should we, and it is likely that we will, continue on in our present fashion, changes will be precipitated beyond which it makes no sense to try and see, other than to suggest that, at least for a time, taking will again be compensated and humans will have "returned" all that they have taken in a great convulsive act of repossession.

All this together puts people who recognize and understand it in a very difficult position. The natural evolutionary goal of any species is to function in a sustaining relationship with its environment. In personal terms for humans this means using as little material and energy as possible to attain as vital, dynamic and spiritually full life as possible. The consequences of this goal are balanced environmental relationships—the natural flow of life and death, speciation and extinction, adaptation and innovation in physiology, anatomy and behavior for 10's, 100's, 1000's, 1000000's and even billions of years.

However the social, political and economic dynamic of our time supports, encourages and demands that people use as much material and energy as they can and accumulate in a protected form as much (of everything) as possible (this is a basic tenet of economic theory). These behaviors are what society approves of and values. Not accepting and performing these behaviors is considered subversive, lazy and stupid (if you're so smart why aren't you rich!).

Both are realities. To be "successful" and accepted in the society, a person must consume excessively. To be true to our humanness and to meet the goal of being part of a sustaining ecosystem we must consume only what we need and must actively find ways to compensate all takings. The excessive consumption and its collection of supporting values has a clear end consequence for those who will see; no less than the damage of life sustaining processes of the biosphere and the violent readjustment of life to the dramatic physical changes (not just human life, but all life: virus to mammals). We would leave a legacy not of wealth and power for our children, but a legacy of contamination, disease and the violent convulsions of population reduction, economic disruption and political failure – if they were lucky.

The consequence of using only what we need – consuming very much less of everything – would have immediate consequences nearly as economically devastating as an economic collapse (it would be an economic collapse, but could be in part controlled), but if thoughtfully engaged, disease and contamination could be minimized, and the convulsions of population reduction and political failures also minimized.

It is, however, unlikely that humans will consume less so long as they can consume more. It is unlikely that humans will see the consequences of their actions and mitigate against them when they can take now and leave the full price of compensation for their children to pay later. So the dilemma is how to live in an excessively consuming society seemingly insulated from recognition of its most likely future?

The question is: Do you consume to excess and contribute a tiny fraction to the problem that will not be solved anyway, appear "normal" and live with the recognition of the potential to be more fully human, yet not make the effort to be so? Or do you consume at the level of needs, reduce the tiny fraction of your personal contribution to the overwhelming assault on ecosystems, live to increase your humanness, but in the process be undervalued and even condemned by significant parts of your society; be judged crazy, lazy and irresponsible (such a terrible thing to be called irresponsible when acting in the only possible responsible way).

This is the simple reality of the choice. All that depends on it is everything. It is impossible to act in a benign way.