Yeah, But What About Human Ingenuity?

 

Trail at Bell Smith Springs in Southern Illinois

OK, I wrote that title sarcastically. Still, it's a valid question if not a hilarious one. How do people promote human ingenuity when the predicaments you see all around us are the result of human ingenuity? If we were or are so ingenious, why do we live in a system (civilization) that is unsustainable? Why, if we are so ingenious, are we busy promoting infinite growth on a finite planet? Of course, these are all rhetorical questions and it should be obvious to almost anyone with a pulse that we are quite hypocritical in our behaviors. We certainly aren't as ingenious as we think we are. Hubristic, arrogant, and self-absorbed seem better adjectives to me, but what do I know? After this article was originally written, I wrote this article about our species.

Asking this question about human ingenuity and doing just a small bit of research will bring up all sorts of answers, some of which actually show true goodness, true spirit, and true genius. One of the answers given that I don't agree with was the development of the plow, which is what started agriculture. Sure, at the time, it seemed like a good idea which could save us a lot of time and spare us from hunting and gathering. But there were serious downsides to the idea which were not foreseen back then. Just like many ideas today - the positive attributes are seen immediately but the negative ones usually require time to take effect. In fact, most ideas that we've come up with involving technology seemed like great ideas when first developed because at the time they were developed, there weren't any shortages of the materials required to build them and there was plentiful stocks of energy to accomplish the end goal of not only building them but also of actually using those ideas and maintaining them. Little attention was given to the consequences of scaling such ideas up once society adopted such ideas as the norm. Another idea that really hasn't been looked at critically is the production of electricity and the infrastructure required to build and maintain such a system at scale. 

The sad truth, once one is willing to admit it, is that technology and its use is precisely what is driving us over the cliff. We were previously able to live in a sustainable manner (more or less) before the adoption of agriculture as the main system of food production, allowing for the development of civilization. But with this development came permanent housing and the development of towns and cities, the system of government, the banking system to control the flow of money, and the bureaucrats throughout all systems to count and keep track of all of it. We can now see the evolution of all of this and come to the understanding that this was always how it was going to turn out, by analyzing why we did this. 

One of the largest troubles about our so-called ingenuity is our ability to be clever but not wise. For instance, one of the symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot, climate change, is causing many ski resorts difficulties due to a lack of snow. One so-called "solution" is to use snow-making machines to allow skiing without snow and/or temperatures which would allow snow in the first place. Of course, the trouble with this is that the so-called solution actually acts as a positive feedback loop, contributing to the very predicament it is marketed to "solve." The same can be said for practically every product manufactured claiming that it is a "solution" to some predicament. Predicaments don't have solutions, so people buying these products are only fooling themselves in purchasing such products and claiming they are "taking action" against or "fighting" climate change. 

Herein lay the fault of logic with regard to so many issues today. No amount of technology and no amount of human ingenuity can solve predicaments because they do not have solutions; they have outcomes. So, anytime you hear of something being a solution for climate change, or energy and resource decline, or collapse, or extinction, or cryosphere loss, or pollution loading, or sea level rise, or any other predicament, you can confidently ignore such claims as nothing more than denial of reality. Buying a new technological product of any stripe (car, electricity, solar panel, wind turbine, house, etc.) will not solve (and frequently not even help reduce) a predicament, period. 

So, considering how human ingenuity brought forth this set of living arrangements to begin with, what does this say about the prospects of human ingenuity to be able to deal with the set of predicaments overshoot has dealt us as a consequence? If we are so ingenious, why is civilization collapsing? How long before industrial civilization ceases to exist? When so many of the proposed "solutions" amount to nothing more than bargaining to maintain civilization which accomplishes nothing to reduce ecological overshoot, the master predicament causing all the symptom predicaments, what does this say about our ingenuity (or lack thereof)? I would go so far as to say that what is really needed is a sense of indigenuity. For this, I will need a new article explaining what that actually is. 

Until next time, Live Now!