NickBlack.com

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller

A couple of friends have kindly pointed out that it might be possible to interpret my last post – Ghost Acreage and British Immigration – as suggesting that stopping immigration would effectively solve the population problem in Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like that old adage; if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. The real task will be to get population down this century to manageable levels without chaos. Chaos is the real enemy. The point I was making is that when politicians talk about ecology in a country at twice carrying capacity, without mentioning immigration, it’s inherently hypocritical.

There is another version of ghost acreage that is actually much scarier. It’s sometimes called phantom acreage and means the extra energy provided by fossil fuels and its effect on population. We have relied on fossil fuels to change our environment so that it will support many times the historical world population. But now we are bumping up against hard limits in food supply, water, a host of critical metals and gases, fish stocks, and of course fossil fuels. So we’ve set ourselves up for overshoot. The issue in Britain, and for the rest of Europe, is how to manage population so that overshoot doesn’t cause a chaotic crash. To my knowledge no civilization, in the 69 odd empires so far, has managed it. They just collapsed. I have started to see some alarmed commentary on the ominous figure of 70 million UK population, so perhaps there’s hope that finally it’s sinking in.

Which brings me to my subject: Obsolete Paradigms.

I know that numbers of ecologically minded folk have started to run for the hills, or its equivalent, the transition movement. They argue that it’s already too late to avoid a crash for many parts of the world and it’s wisest to adapt our small towns, like Totnes, to a post fossil fuel community. Well…yes and no. There are two problems with this approach. One is that if things do really collapse, then Totnes isn’t going to be some safe haven. That is unless the good folk of Totnes are considerably better armed than I thought. Two is that it assumes that we are at the end of innovation, and I disagree completely. We are on the cusp of an era of innovation unique in our history. What’s hanging us up is not so much carbon fuels and climate chaos as it is an obsolete paradigm.

The usage of the word Paradigm has changed significantly over the last century, but here I mean it as the axiomatic epistemological framework of a culture. I’m taking it from Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but not just applied to science. I mean the entire paradigm of the way we operate on earth.

The one we have right now is cobbled together from bits of desert religions and some economic ideologies based on an early and tragically misinformed interpretation of Darwinian evolution. Its main weakness is that it requires infinite resources and space. On the one hand you’ve got ‘go forth and multiply’ and on the other you’ve got ‘don’t worry when it (whatever it is) runs out or gets too expensive we’ll substitute something else for it.’ Both ideas are idiotic in a closed environment. So we need to get rid of it, as Bucky says, not by fighting it, but by making it obsolete.

We need a new framework. Let’s see if we can hack one out on the fly. We’ll need some basic rules. To make it more interesting we can make it a test. We’ll call it the intelligent species test. If you’re too dumb to manage your environment and population you go extinct.

Axioms of a New World Order:

1. All species that reproduce without limit in a closed environment die in their own poisons. I like this one because of its elegant simplicity. Take your pick, either you set a limit on your reproduction or you make earth an open system, which means you’re going to have to figure out space colonization. Or a bit of both?

2. The laws of thermodynamics are true. There’s no work around. That’s called magic, including those desert religions, and much as I love Harry Potter movies, it’s made up. Have you ever noticed that’s what all magic is about? Some sort of exception to the laws of thermodynamics. Only we’re making up rules for a real planet here, so no cheating.

3. Pollution is not intelligent design, it’s a complete failure of design – a failure of the imagination. Pollution is not waste. It is useful chemicals in the wrong place in the wrong concentrations. It’s our job to manage our chemical and metallurgical environment. Disposable? You live in a closed system dope. (Talking of closed systems did you see the news about the urine clogging up the water recycling on the space station?)

4. Adapt or die. Adaptation is time dependent. Whether we’re talking about a species or infrastructure, it all takes time. We can probably adjust to global average temperatures on a century timescale. On a decade timescale we won’t.

5. Complexity theory is true. Complex systems tend toward the fragile, and once their equilibrium is nudged by some enthusiast with a hammer they can get very unpredictable. Respect recursive environments, especially if you live in one.

That’ll do for a start.

I don’t think there’s much to do about the religions, unless there’s some mass spontaneous waking up experience round the corner. I’m stumped. About capitalism I’m more hopeful. Suppose it’s not the be all and end all of human economic organization? Why are we all so attached to it? I understand if you’re one of the 1% of the population that’s really profited from it, but I don’t understand all the enthusiasm from the 99% who didn’t. The Gini Coefficient numbers on most of the developed world outside Scandinavia are hilarious. It’s virtually feudal.

We can start by including Gini Coefficient in all national economic calculations, in the same way we include inflation etc. Scandinavia looks like it does okay with .25! And we go to full cost accounting, no artificial externalities. No, Virginia, carbon isn’t free. None of this cap and trade malarkey. You smoke it, you pay for it. Why are we subsidizing the use of fossil fuels? How is it that international aviation fuel isn’t taxed, but ground transportation fuel is? Let’s tax aviation fuel and subsidize solar and wind power. Subsidize disaster preparedness – think Haiti.

None of this is particularly threatening as far as I can see.