Why Do Today's Realities Escape Society?

 

Philpott Lake, Virginia, as seen from the Visitor Center of Philpott Dam

First of all, many people do clearly see what is happening. However, society as a whole still has many blind spots. The news continues to worsen regularly as this article points out, and more studies pointing out tree decline and deforestation like I have written about before are constantly coming out. That article is about the forests in the UK and this article goes into detail on the Amazon Rainforest, quickly turning into a carbon source rather than a carbon sink. Countless articles tell the story of countless animals meeting up with mass die-offs, including the elephants in this article. Once again, Tom Murphy hammers these points out in his new article here (his word, BTW), quote:

"What I am saying is that a system powerful enough to destroy ecological health and biodiversity—which we have demonstrated in spades—cannot survive unless it deliberately refrains from using this power. It must invert the cultural hierarchy and place ecosystem health—the vitality of the biodiverse planet—above all other considerations…ABOVE ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS, to hammer the point. 

We have abundant evidence that we can destroy life, at large scale, up to and including a ballooning number of permanent extinctions. It is far beyond our power to create biodiversity and life—especially pre-tuned to play a viable ecological role in the context of all other life. Only life can create itself, and only long exposure to the full world-as-it-is can shape life to work in the long term, via multi-level selection processes. While we can’t create and shape life to our whims, what we can do is get out of its way: let life do what it does best. Give it room. Make it a priority. Respect it. Live in awe of it. See it as the only thing that allows us to be who we are. Without it, we are nothing. If a person is naïve enough to think that we can engineer what we need as a replacement, then at least we can hope they have the decency to keep quiet, lest they unwittingly advocate the demise of everything they themselves hold dear. Sir: please take your hand off the saw, and carefully step back to safety, for the good of us all."

I've not seen this emphasis and this loud of a proclamation from so many sources before now (also see these two recent articles of mine here and here). It does appear that society may finally be getting the fact that things are about to become much dimmer and much sooner than previously thought. Of course, this might be my own personal brand of hopium. I have spent the better part of the last decade trying to raise awareness of the predicament we are in and it has been like pulling teeth just getting that word (predicament) into people's minds. Despite many people now realizing where we are, most of society is still sleepwalking into disaster.

So many of today's so-called "solutions" rely on attempting to "fix" issues without stemming said issues at the source or root. Plastic pollution, like all pollution, is caused by technology use. Relying on technology use to solve what technology use has caused is a logical flaw in societal thinking, as demonstrated in this article, quote:

"However, the authors of the current paper say that even if these technologies were to show signs of being truly effective, they would barely scratch the surface of the global problem. Cleanup practices could also lead to greenwashing through new "plastic credit" schemes to offset the emissions of plastics through the indiscriminate use of unselective and harmful plastic removal technologies.

As a result, the international group is concerned that focusing too greatly on cleanup approaches will create more environmental risk, and be a distraction from the key priorities of the Plastic Treaty negotiations: Plastic pollution prevention."

Notice the last two words of the first sentence of that quote: global problem. Notice the incorrect usage of the term - it is NOT a problem; it is a predicament. This same type of incorrect communication is pervasive and endemic in society today, which is most likely why so many people forget that predicaments are NOT problems. Something I noticed in the messaging of this article is rather disturbing, as it points to common beliefs rather than facts when communicating these issues. Look at the following paragraph extracted from the article, quote:

"If you look globally at all glaciers that are distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheet, they have contributed roughly 21% of observed sea level rise over the last two decades. So, these smaller ice masses are an important part of the SEA LEVEL PROBLEM. Millions of people worldwide also rely on glaciers for fresh water, agriculture and hydropower, so it's deeply concerning that we're allowing this to continue. THE CHOICES WE MAKE OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS WILL MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE TO HOW MUCH ICE WE LOSE."

I CAPITALIZED the two areas of concern. Sea level rise (SLR) is not a problem with a solution, number one. It is a symptom predicament of overshoot (and also climate change). It has an outcome, not a solution. The choices we make over the next few years ignores the simple facts of oceanic thermal inertia, civilizational inertia, and the lag effect. This makes the choices we make over the next few years more or less irrelevant. How can scientists make such ridiculous and irresponsible statements? Once again, denial of reality is the psychological mechanism showing itself here. Telling people that a predicament is a problem (implying that there is a solution rather than an outcome) is outright lying.

Science communication clearly needs to improve. Only facts should be disclosed and when opinions or beliefs enter the picture, they should be labeled as such. While the choices we make are never totally irrelevant, making a claim that the next few years could ever somehow change the trajectory we are on now in a significant manner ("huge difference") is completely ludicrous. These types of claims mislead most people into believing fantasies, myths, and fairy tales about the future rather than the down-to-earth reality.

All of this can actually be explained in one post that Dave Pollard just recently wrote, quote:

"Three years ago, I added a third ‘law’ to the small set of ‘important things I’ve learned over the years’ and codified on this blog. The three laws are:

Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour: Humans have evolved to do what’s personally urgent for them (the unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then to do what’s easy, and then to do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are seen as merely important. Social, political and economic change happens only when the old generation dies and a new generation with different entrained beliefs and imperatives fills the power vacuum. We have evolved to be a collaborative and caring species, and we are all doing our best — we cannot do otherwise. We have no free will — our behaviour is entirely the product of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the ever-changing and unpredictable circumstances of each moment.

Pollard’s Law of Complexity: Things are the way they are for a reason. To change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex (and it frequently is), success at truly understanding and changing it is unlikely, and developing workarounds and adapting to it is probably a better strategy. Complex systems evolve to self-sustain and resist reform until they finally collapse. For that reason, the systems of global industrial civilization culture, having precipitated the sixth great extinction of life on Earth, are now collapsing rapidly and inevitably.

Pollard’s Law of Human Beliefs: We believe what we want to believe, not what is actually true. We want to believe in happy endings, simple answers, the inevitability of progress, self-control, karma, responsibility, destiny, miracles, a proper order of things, the power of love, and infinite human capacity and agency. Most of us want to believe in a higher power that can step in when we falter. We want to believe what those in our circles of trust believe (even if it’s crazy, gaslighting or propaganda). So we tend to seek sources that reinforce those beliefs and ignore those that undermine or unsettle them. Our hopes and expectations are determined by those beliefs. Our worldview is the sum of those beliefs, hopes and expectations, and bears no necessary resemblance to truth or reality. This invented reality is the only way we can make sense of a world that is impossible to grasp, to understand, or to ever really make sense of."

This all makes perfect sense as to why so much of today's reality appears to escape most of society. By the way, I highly recommend reading the entire article to gather more insight on this extended explanation of denial of reality. Denial of reality (often combined with optimism bias) and bargaining appear to be the main stages of grief or mechanisms that many people either never get out of or return to after reaching acceptance. I actually catch myself occasionally returning to one of the stages as it is sometimes difficult when a particular idea seems technically possible to remember that those ideas generally require something that is not possible or something that takes us in the wrong direction, nullifying any real benefit.

I had actually hoped I might find something to prove my theory that we lack agency incorrect in the two most recent books I read (here and here), as they were both older books I hadn't yet read completely. While I did find both books hopeful that society could find a way to work itself out of the set of predicaments we have gotten into, both of them were also doubtful that this could be accomplished as long as BAU (Business As Usual) continued. BAU has continued for more than 50 years after the publishing of the Limits to Growth and a little over a decade since the copy of GeoDestinies that I have was written (around 2012 for the updated portions). While there are plenty of signs that BAU has reached its "best by" date, I don't see signs yet that collapse is everywhere and all-encompassing. Overall though, both books (disappointingly) actually provided plenty of material that upholds my theory.

Since every plan so far that actually has any chance of reducing overshoot requires global unity/cooperation, this rules them all out because that is impossible. For those who believe in such fantasy, those ideas seem very possible. For those who see that global unity has never occurred, is not occurring now, and will never occur due to the constantly changing conditions of each geographical area based on its geological resources as pointed out in my last article, they will realize that those plans all require not just global unity, but belief in the plan to begin with. This equates to religion and we have seen how well one religion has worked out globally...oops, it hasn't. Very few things based upon belief have ever been globally universal. So, how likely is it that any of these plans might garner enough support from society at large to actually reduce overshoot voluntarily? Well, I answered that in my last article too in a quote from this article:

"We are trying to solve problems within the same systems that are responsible for creating them and that only exacerbate those problems. Moreover, we are locked and trapped in these systems. […] But these systems are far too complicated and too interconnected to fully understand their function. Managing these systems in a way that would allow for controlled shrinkage while maintaining our prosperity is not possible. There is no path to sustainable or planned decline. […] The conclusion of this report is that a decline in energy will almost certainly initiate a series of processes, at the end of which will be the collapse of our civilization. We are close to a point where world oil production will decline or may have already reached that point (peak oil). Our civilizational structure reacts unstably to a withdrawal of energy. In all likelihood, our globally interconnected civilization is on the verge of a surprisingly rapid and imminent collapse."

Needless to say, the chances that society will voluntarily "degrow" is almost nil if one looks at all other civilizational collapses. Their degrowth is almost always forced on them in one way or another, generally through insufficient resources such as water, food, and energy. 

The purpose of this blog is more along the lines of helping people to understand that due to the trajectories of overshoot and its symptom predicaments (especially population growth), we lack agency to be able to mitigate or reduce said overshoot and the concomitant symptom predicaments we face. Even in countries where population growth has turned negative, one must remember that global population growth affects us all anyway regardless of a few countries lucky enough to be experiencing contraction of population. Mass migration will bring population growth or explode it in regions that are able to sustain (or appear to be able to sustain) more people. Carrying capacity is now continuously being reduced due to our massive overshoot condition. As long as this condition continues, talk of "solutions" and/or ways to mitigate will remain just that - talk. Until and unless overshoot is reduced, symptom predicaments cannot be reduced. The idea of symptom predicaments being solved or reversed is laughable at this point in time, and most have inertia and lag effects which will keep them gaining ground for quite some time to come, even if overshoot began being reduced today.

I have shared a site which delves into the reality of today and many of you probably know of Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine and the Dark Mountain Project. Here is The Manifesto where it all began, and here are a couple of quotes from it:

"There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history … Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story."

"1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.

4. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.

6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.

7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.

8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us."

The important part of understanding both this blog and the Dark Mountain Project is revealed in this article by Paul Fidalgo, quote:

"The Dark Mountain Project is not apocalyptic in the strictest sense. The world is not coming to an end, because as destructive as human beings have been to its ecology, the planet itself will be just fine. What is coming to an end, as they see it, is the relatively recent industrialization of human civilization, along with a great deal of the natural world that has been thoughtlessly ravaged to fuel that industrialization.

Neither a political movement calling for change nor a nihilistic death cult, Dark Mountain almost has the air of a support group, which to me makes it by far the sanest and most compelling of those in the vein of “primitivists” or “collapsitarians.”

The project was kicked off in 2009 when two former environmental activists and journalists, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, realized they had both been thinking the same thing about their passionate efforts: This isn’t going to work. The astonishing scope of the social and ecological catastrophes to come clearly dwarfed the middling sacrifices that people and governments were willing to make to address them.

Kingsnorth and Hine decided to end the pretense of optimistic environmentalism, to abandon the idea that this great unraveling could be re-raveled, and to come to terms with the grief that follows. “Let’s not pretend we’re not feeling despair,” Hine told the New York Times. “Let’s sit with it for a while. Let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the darkness, what do we start to notice?”

Discovering a group of folks who had collectively decided to stop chanting “Yes we can” and instead collectively moan “Actually, no we can’t” was a revelation to me. As much as I long for the kind of prosperous future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry and his Star Trek inheritors, optimism about the future of humanity and its habitat never jibed with what I thought I understood about the facts of climate change, resource depletion, mass extinctions, and, more recently, global pandemics. Whether purchasing the right “green” cleaning products, recycling my cans and bottles, or paying that extra nickel for plastic shopping bags, these little moves, even taken as a whole, seemed laughably insufficient to the task at hand. Eco-friendliness seemed to become far more of a cultural signifier than a preservation strategy."

THIS is precisely what Problems, Predicaments, and Technology is similarly about. I'm not interested in spending lots of time coming up with so-called solutions or rambling on about technology use reduction because those are both things which either don't really solve anything at this point or they are highly unlikely to even be attempted. While I think I have ventured to explain this sufficiently throughout my blog, I occasionally get the idea that some folks still don't really understand. This is fine, as I can only try to clarify myself. Whether that understanding is actually reached by others is not under my control. 

It is important to note that just because I choose not to engage in the obsession over "solutions," that doesn't mean that I don't occasionally dip myself into the hopium that a viable population will survive the upcoming die-off in a "bottleneck" and come out the other side unscathed. It is my knowledge of the rate of change this time (in comparison to other mass extinctions) that precludes such hopium from being anything more than pure fantasy. While it is true that none of us know precisely how everything will turn out, the general trajectories involved make it clear that things will not turn out well any time soon and as long as overshoot continues to increase, conditions can only worsen.

That all being said, this does not mean in the least that I advocate for stamping on the accelerator. To Live Now means simply to discover what you are passionate about and do it - now. If you have the means and/or ability to attempt to reduce overshoot by reducing your use of technology, then do so. If not, no harm and no foul. Nobody who can read this is free of complicity and a zero-carbon footprint is impossible, which means we can all work to reduce our ecological footprint but cannot become carbon-free. Trying to live lightly so that others can simply live is the goal, but keep in mind the reality factor. It's rather easy to believe in "solutions" because doing so provides the fantasy that what we've done through our use of technology can be "undone," which is not true. While some things can be undone, most simply cannot. Extinct species are not going to come back. Keep in mind that they went extinct for a reason. That path of evolution happened for a good reason and attempting to bring back extinct species is not a good idea. Just because a human or group of humans thinks doing so does not make it a good idea in nature's eyes.

I continue to try to clarify myself in these areas of concern, so as to try to distill the meaning of my writing. I do appreciate corrections occasionally made here, and those corrections I usually attempt to point out in future articles. As always, more on this subject to come later; but for now, until next time, Live Now!