Endings

The Scope of This Blog

In the Spring of 1969, on the plaza of the University of Oslo, just in front of the Grand Hall used for celebrating the Nobel Peace Prize, I ran into an exhibition arranged by environmentalists. Its topics were population growth and dangerous contamination -- both issues under human control. The book presenting this exhibition had this ending:

All resources should be aiming at only (this) purpose: To save man from starvation and poisoning. We should cease looking at problems individually. We are living on a planet. All problems are ours – are yours. But what can you do? Political action is needed. But this is difficult without a public opinion. You can contribute to this public opinion.
Friends of the Earth Norway: Og etter oss. (And after us.) 1969

Since then, I have found or been made aware of more books with similar endings. A paragraph where the author pleads with the reader one last time to understand his or her view of the human predicament and to implement his or her prescription before it is too late. Each presents the author’s well-argued call to arms, “act better or suffer the consequences of careless actions.”
Reiel Folven

PS This was originally posted in 2007 on endings.vox.com. In 2010 I had to move this blog to the present platform. I have been unable since to reintroduce the tabs lost at the conversion.

Catabolic collapse

Any society that displays broad increases in most measures of capital production coupled with signs of serious depletion of key resources is a potential candidate for catabolic collapse.

John Michael Greer in The Long Descent, 2008

The Problem with Presidents

The only way around this is to develop a strong, new international consensus, among citizens as well as governments, that the world needs more global governance (not global government). Only then will the mightiest nations think of the greatest good and allow institutions - from the G20 to the U.N., from the IMF to the World Trade Organization – to be revitalized. Yes, these bodies are imperfect. But in the world of politics, it is easier to reform existing institutions than to create perfect new ones. Mao´s successor, Deng Xiaoping, taught us how pragmatism could revive one great civilization. We need to muster the same pragmatism to save humanity.

Kishore Mahbubani in The Problem with Presidents, Newsweek, August 23, 2010.

 

Out of the cul de sac

The relatively few people who do have firm convictions are often regarded as "unreasonable" because their convictions cannot be reasoned away as mere opinions can. That to me seems exactly as it should be. Humanity is in the process of demonstrating that it can successfully reason its way into a cul de sac. But is there any reason to believe that it can also reason its way out of it? Perhaps it is high time to start being unreasonable, to decide for ourselves that we do not like the cul de sac into which our reason has steered us, and to refuse to go into it any deeper. Perhaps we could even find a way out of it. And perhaps a few of those people whose minds you can sometimes almost read will almost be able to read our minds as well, and will choose to follow us out. And the rest will just stand around and argue about it: "Baah!"

Dmitri Orlov in The great Unreasoning, April 18, 2010  (Blog Cluborlov)

Begin a gradual population reduction

As should be obvious from the foregoing discussion, there are no easy solutions to migration problems. Even though this may not be as serious and acute problem today as it has sometimes been presented, it promise to become so in the near future if humanity continues to play out the terminal “business-as-usual” scenario. For the United States (and the other receiving countries), most of the possible steps that might reduce the flow of illegal migrants involve serious questions about civil liberties on the domestic front and about politics and ethics in foreign affairs.

The immediate course for the Unites States should be to establish an explicit population policy, determine the actual number, flow, and socioeconomic impact of migrants, and develop demographic scenarios that would achieve the goal of ending population growth and beginning a gradual reduction. When that has been done, it may turn out that the current levels of migration will prove acceptable. If not, relatively ad hoc measures might be sufficient to adjust the flow to desired levels. We suspect the latter may be the case and that illegal migration could be removed from the crisis list while the nation gets on with the real serious job of making the transition to a sustainable society.

Paul R Ehrlich et al in The Golden Door, International Migration, Mexico and the United States, 1979

 

The effect of environment on Man

The environment as frontier is gone. There are very few surprises in store for us. The prerequisites of existence within the limits of our circumstances are now fairly clear.

From the viewpoint of the social sciences, man’s social and psychological environment is largely a product of his own creation, and he, in turn, is fundamentally influenced by this product. Indeed, the social effect on man of the environment he himself has created may prove to be the most important aspect of this relationship. For in the long run of history, the product becomes the master. Man has produced modifications in his environment that have set irreversible evolutionary trends in motion (Proshansky et. al. in Environmental Psychology, 1970).

The present question is whether we can organize and govern ourselves in such a way as to exert some influence over the direction of those trends and so preclude the imposition of those natural checks on development and well-being, to which Homo Sapiens, like other animals, is subject. That is the next frontier.

Robert J Maxwell in Contexts of Behavior, 1983

One must work at being sustainable

In conclusion, sustainability is not the achievement of stasis. It is not a passive consequence of having fewer humans who consume more limited resources. One must work at being sustainable. The challenges that any society (or other institution) might confront are, for practical purposes, endless in number and infinite in variety. This being so, sustainability is a matter of solving problems.

In the conventional view, complexity follows energy. If so, then we should be able to forego complexity voluntarily and reduce our consumption of the resources that it requires. This approach to sustainability implicitly sees the future as a condition of stasis with no challenges.

In actuality, major infusions of surplus energy are rare in human history. More commonly, complexity increases in response to problems. Complexity emerging through problem solving typically precedes the availability of energy, and compels increases in its production. Complexity is not something that we can ordinarily choose to forego.

Applying this understanding leads to two conclusions. The first is that the solutions commonly recommended to promote sustainability–conservation, simplification, pricing, and innovation–can do so only in the short term. Secondly, long-term sustainability depends on solving major societal problems that will converge in coming decades, and this will require increasing complexity and energy production. Sustainability is not a condition of stasis. It is, rather, a process of continuous adaptation, of perpetually addressing new or ongoing problems and securing the resources to do so.

It is useful to think of sustainability in the metaphor of an athletic game: It is possible to “lose”–that is, to become unsustainable, as happened to the Western Roman Empire. But the converse does not hold. Because we continually confront challenges, there is no point at which a society has “won”–become sustainable in perpetuity, or at least for a very long time. Success, rather, consists of staying in the game.

Joseph Tainter: Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability, Speech at the 94^th Annual Meeting of Ecological Society of America, New Mexico 2009

  

The most urgent fight of our lives

The picture has become clear. Our planet, with its remarkable array of life, is in imminent danger of crashing. Yet our politicians are not dashing forward. They hesitate, they hang back.

Therefore it is up to you. You will need to be a protector of your children and grandchildren on this matter. I am sorry to say that your job will be difficult – special interests have been able to subvert our democratic system. But we should not give up on the democratic system – quite the contrary. We must fight for the principle of equal justice.

One suggestion..350.org…..

But as in other struggles for justice against powerful forces, it may be necessary to take to the streets to draw attention to injustice. There are places where action has begun to have some effect….. But overall, results are small in comparison with what is needed. The international community seems to be headed down a path toward inadequate agreements at best. Civil resistance may be our best hope.

It is crucial to all of us, especially young people, to get involved. This book, I hope, has provided some assistance in understanding what policies we need to be fighting for – and why this will be the most urgent fight of our lives.

It is our last chance.

James Hansen in Storms of My Grandchildren, 2009

PS  I have posted an Amazon.com book review to point out a flaw in this excellent book, which may make the “last chance” imaginary. Reiel

The chief cause of problems

Ecological balance is too important for sentiment. It requires science.
The health of natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity. It requires engineering.
What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life.

Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline, 2009

 

 

Systems thinking

We know what to do about drift to low performance. Don´t weigh the bad news more heavily than the good. And keep standards absolute.

Systems thinking can only tell us to do that. It can´t do it. We´re back to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap, but it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond – to what can and must be done by the human spirit.

Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems, 2008

Readings

 

 

Wealth means fewer children

It surprises me that people still sheepishly ask us, “But won’t this (health aid) lead to overpopulation?” Women will naturally have fewer children if they know their kids have a greater chance of survival. Knowing that is really key.

Melinda Gates in The Tools to Save Lives, Newsweek, Nov 9, 2009

Gates is a roman catholic mother of three