Are We Running Out of Road? Part Two

 

The rocky route up to the top of Whiteface Mountain in New York

My first article in this explanation as to why we cannot "solve" the predicaments we face went over multiple symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot and gave examples of various ideas (typically called "solutions" but don't actually solve anything because they don't target the root predicament (overshoot) and/or its cause, our behavior of technology use) which demonstrate the reductionism of the ideas surrounding them. Much of this stems from our inability to see ourselves as part of the entire biosphere we live within. Instead, we often think of ourselves as separate entities who have free will to control the world, something that is but an illusion.

All of this is why so many scientists and engineers spend their time devising reductionistic ideas on how to tackle what they see as "problems," not realizing that the issues are not problems, but predicaments. Predicaments have outcomes, not solutions. Attempting to "solve" symptom predicaments never actually solves anything because attempting to treat symptoms never resolves the actual issue causing the predicament in the first place. What's worse is that most people attempt to utilize technology to solve the predicament that technology use caused to begin with. Attempting to use the same ideas that caused the issue in the first place only results in exacerbating the existing issue. For instance, many people are concerned about climate change, but it is a symptom predicament of overshoot and cannot be reduced absent reducing overshoot. This means that reducing emissions cannot be accomplished by working on emissions - emissions, like climate change, are just another symptom predicament of overshoot and can only be reduced by reducing overshoot.

I have spent the last several weeks attempting to explain our inability due to our lack of agency to solve the predicaments we face because all the cards are stacked against us doing so. Our cultural conditioning and indoctrination promotes thinking about today over thinking seven generations ahead. More importantly than even that is the fact that civilization is unsustainable. Every once of infrastructure we have built over the last 12,000 years depended on conditions that cannot be sustained. This means that the very fabric of everything which surrounds us today is slowly going away. 

Now that we've covered the basics, I wish I didn't have all this other material to add here. However, I do, and originally I was going to add it to the article I published two weeks ago. I've been on a writing streak lately, possibly having to do with the fact that all the predicaments we face have been speeding up rapidly. Anyway, I am writing this in September, so by the time it gets published, these stories will probably be old hat already.

The Honest Sorcerer has an excellent article published just yesterday that fits into this story perfectly, which can be summed up in two sentences he wrote:

"I’m sorry to be the party pooper here, but without fossil fuels there are no wind turbines or solar panels either. Nor bridges, dams, power lines or industrial civilization for that matter."

He's right, of course, and I think it is prudent to point out other fragilities of civilization here from Mariah Continelli. It's nice to see so many others in this space here comprehend what is going on. What is saddening is how many scientists just don't get it. I wrote an article about doomism a while back, and I see that Michael Mann is at it again. 

The actual reality on the ground is that some areas are seeing huge drops in crop production, with apple orchards in Vermont reporting only 50% of normal harvests. If you have read my article about extinction events and hydrogen sulfide, then this story about the sargassum belt in the Atlantic Ocean might concern you. While we're on the topic of the oceans, ocean acidification passing the planetary boundaries has hit the mainstream now. If you are up-to-date on cryosphere developments, then you know what the discovery of 85 subglacial lakes in Antarctica means. 

I could go on and on and on with more proof of where we are headed, the trajectory that is represented by these facts, and what the outcome will be. However, time is fleeting and I'm sure you have better things to do than read more of the same stuff you can find almost anywhere nowadays if you are willing to look, so I'll just post a picture:

Yes, if that picture looks familiar, it is because it has been posted here before. I have posted other articles with this type of information about the rate of change (see here and here and here and here and here and here). All one really has to do is look at the graph above and realize that we are headed for 10C rise over several hundred years (or perhaps a thousand?), not many thousands or tens of thousands. Even if we only make it to 6C or 8C over the next several hundred years, that is still a rate of change that far exceeds this planet's largest mass extinction, known as the Great Dying, the End-Permian, 252 million years ago. Considering that that event had 96% of all marine species and 70% of all land vertebrates going extinct, we are assured of surpassing it this time.

A new article from Dave Pollard asks an interesting question, "Does our growing intolerance of others portend, or reflect collapse?" I think it is an excellent article that explains what is at the root of the emergence of the increasing polarization of society - fear. However, the most interesting part isn't actually in this article but in a link to another article near the end, which contains this tidbit of wisdom explaining how we are not evolved for modernity:

"In an extraordinary interview by UK Channel Four’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi raises some possibilities. “Humans are not evolved for modern life”, she says, acknowledging that this ‘modern life’ is, ironically, a human invention. “We believe what our tribe believes”, she says, and while that was an evolutionarily successful strategy, it cannot hope to cope with the vast realms of information, perspectives, beliefs and worldviews that humans have to absorb and make sense of today, nor with the fact that our knowledge is increasingly second-hand and prone to self-perpetuating mis- and disinformation. And when there’s a schism between what we’re being told (even if it’s by ‘experts’ and competent, experienced people) and what our ‘tribe’ is telling us, we will seemingly always default to the views of our tribe, she asserts.

We fear, and we rage against, what threatens us and our tribe, but we now frequently have very little first-hand, personal experience to substantiate or mitigate those fears and furies, she explains. We can only imagine, and, Ella says, evolution has also inculcated in us a ‘negativity bias’ that inclines us to fear and believe the worst. She talks about how intelligent people can genuinely come to believe almost anything, including for example the idea that science is deceptive, untrustworthy, or simply made up and wrong. She describes our brains’ incapacity to juggle inconsistent worldviews without judgement, even as our society presses us to have an unqualified opinion on everything. We are now almost total misfits for the world that we live in, she suggests, a world we have largely created ourselves."

The link in the quote goes to the video of the interview, and is definitely worth your time. It explains why and how we got here and delves into what this quote further down goes into:

"In another interview by Krishnan, the brilliant musician and polymath Tim Minchin talks about his own worldview on human nature, a subject he says he’s spent his whole life studying. “We live in a deterministic world and humans are just meat robots”, he says, acknowledging his biases right up front. “Watching young males [in recent decades] go right and young women go left, it’s disastrous, but that’s [all about] what they’re exposed to”, he says, echoing Ella’s and Daniel’s views of the malleability of people’s opinions.

Tim sums up his views on the human animal by saying:

Certainly in my industry, art and storytelling and building narratives, the messiness is in us, you know — you can’t clean up humans. That’s what [my play] Upright’s about — that the scars and the beatings we take and the errors we make and the pain we get and the pain we cause — that is us. The piano is the metaphor in Upright, but [the narrator] says “it’s all hacked up and battered and it’s a little bit out of tune, but it’s got its own tone, and and if you play it you’ll find it’s beautiful”, and he’s talking about himself I suppose. Or it’s like we are our damage as individuals and as a species, so you can’t fix it."

You can't fix it. That is what I have spent the last 12 years trying to explain, the last 5 of which I have written over 200 articles in an effort to bring more awareness to that simple fact. William E. Rees also has a new article out that more or less reiterates much of what I have written here over the past several weeks (although in a much shorter package!). The important item in Rees' article is that we are all subject to self-delusion, which is delved into more detail in this article from Mike Brock. Another source of information confirming the "you can't fix it" theme is from my article last month (link above in first paragraph explaining the illusion of self and separation) in this paragraph, quote:

"A very helpful video has been released where Nate Hagens interviews a forensic psychologist and a distinguished psychoanalyst, Dr. J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., ABPP, and Dr. Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., ABPP.  As you can probably guess, this episode deals with psychology, specifically, the Dark Triad and Dark Tetrad types of individuals, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism. Another item you can probably guess about this episode is that what is pointed out fits into the predicament category, as is divulged right around the 1:02:35 mark in the video."

For more evidence of denial of reality, one only need to look at the constant stream of ideas which typically constitute ways to increase overshoot rather than reduce it. Here's one discussed by Andrew Nikiforuk in the Tyee about nuclear power known as small nuclear reactors (SMRs). Here's one on a different angle which denies the psychological realities I have spent the last several weeks pointing out. The denial there is that funding is the issue preventing reducing overshoot from happening. What was the title of William Rees' article above? Oh, that's right - "Fatal delusions and the curse of 'maximum power'." Unfortunately, funding will not change our psychological realities or how we operate as a species. Having optimism bias also will not change who and what we are as a species.

Another article from Dave Pollard brings into focus the reality that grass-roots organizing like what Suzanne is attempting to do above simply won't work:

"I’d love to believe that “precise, sustained and targeted pressure with clear objectives, conducted by people with a defined set of common interests” would be sufficient to bring about positive change to reverse or even slow the hollowing out of our economic and political systems. We can all agree on many things we would love ideally to have, but as they say, “you can’t get there from here”. It’s too late. This hollowing out, and the accompanying grift and kleptocracy of those pillaging what’s left of public property, public resources, and public services, is just an inevitable consequence of collapsing systems.

In short, as awful as the current state of our political and economic systems is, it’s only going to get worse. The idea of re-building “community” and trust and responsible, functional, responsive public institutions, while everything is falling inexorably apart, is just a pipe-dream. Time to get ready for the fall."


As much as I hate to admit it, he is absolutely correct. Tom Murphy explains here how 8 billion will die, period:

"But we mustn’t forget that 8 billion humans are driving a sixth mass extinction, which leaves no room for even 10 humans if fully realized, let alone 10 [billion]. Deforestation, animal/plant population declines, and extinction rates are through the roof, along with a host of other existential perils. We have zero reason or evidence to believe (magically) that somehow 8 billion people could preserve modern living standards—reliant as they are on a steady flow of non-renewable extraction—while somehow not only arresting, but reversing the ominous ecological trends.

No serious, credible proposals to accomplish any such outcome are on the table: the play is to remain actively ignorant of the threat, facilitated by a narrow focus on this fleeting moment in time during which the modernity stunt has been performed. If ignorance did not prevail, we’d see retreat-oriented proposals coming out of our ears for how to mitigate/prevent the sixth mass extinction—but people say “the sixth what?” and go back to focusing on the Amazon that isn’t a dying rain forest. Most people know about climate change, but the dozens of “solutions” proposed to mitigate climate change amount to maintaining full power for modernity so that we motor-on at present course and speed under a different energy source. The IPCC never recommends orders-of-magnitude fewer humans or abandoning high-energy, high-resource-use lifestyles…because it would be political suicide—which says a lot about the limited value of such heavily-constrained institutions."

Then he poignantly exclaims (once again our inability to see the illusion of self and separation):

"What makes us think we have a choice to separate the good from the bad, when they are most decidedly a package deal that we’ve been wholly unable to separate in practice, all this time? The following tangled figure—itself a staggering oversimplification of the actual mess—is repeated from an earlier post on Likes and Dislikes.

The fundamental flaw is that when faced with an unfamiliar landscape, our brains instantly and automatically assign separate qualities and features to a reality that in truth is inseparably inter-linked. Because the connections are numerous and often far from obvious, we are tricked into believing the entry-level mental model of separability. It’s the most basic and naïve (often adaptively useful) starting point to recognize a bunch of “things” without delving into the Gordian Knot of relationships. But that’s the easy part, and many stop there before it gets hard—often too hard for the very limited human brain, in fact. No blame, here: we all do it."

Recently, a friend brought another one of Bhodi Paul Chefurka's articles up, and I reminisced about my thoughts when I first read it about a year after he published it. Taking in the meanings and implications was a difficult process after discovering peak oil some 4 years prior. 

I truly hope these last several articles have helped (anyone who doesn't yet comprehend determinism, acceptance, overshoot, and our lack of agency to "turn this ship around" or otherwise "solve" the predicaments we face) to comprehend these topics better (and I hope that isn't hopium). Understanding these predicaments takes a considerable amount of time and patience to absorb and internalize and develop coping mechanisms for. Concomitantly, internalizing and accepting these predicaments as predicaments requires the knowledge that most people will never likewise accept and then internalize that knowledge. For me, Stoicism has helped immensely. Maybe studying it will help others.

Thank you for reading this article. It's that time of year where we spend time thinking about all the things we are thankful and grateful for. Recently I finished reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, so I am reminded of the Thanksgiving Address. I'm thankful for many things, such as my health and the fact that I have lived through the pinnacle of the human experiment, but I am most thankful right now for the fact that you are reading this and taking in what these predicaments mean. Now I can extend my greetings to you by sharing The Scenery of Virginia and Eagle Rock!