On my journey to understand the source of my existential dread about Climate Change, I’ve been thinking about the complexity and scale of the challenge – of what needs to happen for us to change the direction we’re swimming in as a species and whether it is even possible. I’ve been thinking a lot about faith – in science, in engineering, in technology. How beliefs aren’t shaped by facts and how facts and beliefs are processed in different parts of the brain. I’ve been thinking about how minds and behaviours change; all the stuff I know about human behaviour, psychology, and its use in the context of how we interact with technology. About how what we say is often different from what we do. About the power structures and systems we are born into and how they change and influence how we interact with one another. And finally, the fundamental instincts associated with human survival and whether or not we may have changed our environment too quickly for our biology.
Every time I follow a thread and start to tease apart ideas, they end up even more tangled than before. And so, this is my attempt to list those threads separately. To share some thoughts about why and how things are so complicated when easing the pressure on our planet as humans multiply exponentially. I haven’t done this to attempt to ‘solve’ our existential crisis. Instead, I hope to find a truth somewhere within. One that can help me make better decisions about how, why and where I spend my finite time on Earth to help extend a planet’s ability to sustain healthy human life.
–
Science and engineering aren’t enough
It’s the story of human technological advancement – technology improves lives, except for the unintended consequences that occur when we were unable to plan for it or never saw it coming. In those cases, technology creates more problems than it solves, and so we build more technology to solve those problems – only creating more problems again. And so the loop goes — the story of CFCs, Road Transport, Mosquito Netting, Uber, AirBnB, The Wheel. No matter where we are in history, something can be ‘blamed’ for improving one thing and stuffing something else up.
We’ve been at this human-technology relationship thing for thousands of years and, over that time, thousands of people throughout history from all walks of life (philosophy, mathematics, science, art) have tried to ‘solve’ this problem or at least explored its root causes to develop ‘solutions’ or ‘methods’ that will help us see a little bit further into the future. Perhaps anticipate some of the unintended consequences of the technology we make for ourselves.
I don’t have answers, but I’ve acknowledged that technology alone won’t save us. That’s a weird thing for someone who builds technology to say, I suppose. But, it feels true. I am deeply worried when I hear political leaders express their technology fundamentalism with phrases like, “Technology, not taxes.” If we keep digging with the same shovel, we’ll just get a deeper hole.
Engineering is the primary method we have for building technology, and it’s suitable for solving some problems, but not this one. It often works hand in hand with scientific discovery, another method we’ve developed for problem-solving, but it, too, has its limits.
And so, like so many others throughout history, I’m left with… what? Nothing?
And maybe that’s it – maybe part of what will save us is admitting to ourselves that neither science nor engineering will save us and, instead, reckon with the idea that we, as a species, are not in charge of all but, quite the opposite, we are dependant on all.
The problem with engineering
Engineering, as a methodology, is one such way of trying to understand a problem. The idea that a problem can be broken down until only its smallest parts exist, and then, understanding those things, we can solve them in sequence to make something better has, in fact, made some things better. Bridges and tunnels are awesome. I love them! We’ve got some amazing ones. Computers are great, too. And, you know, we’ve been to the moon! Engineering is great.
But then again, those engineered solutions have changed us. Once we’ve got a tunnel, we can get to a new place, and populate it, and pollute it. What to do about that? Computers have been positively transformational in so many ways, except now we’re a bit addicted to them because someone worked out how to profit from our attention. And then there’s all the stuff that helped us get to space. Of course, what allows us to get to space also helps us send our garbage up there.
And so, we’re in this conundrum. Engineering and its underlying belief system, ‘technological fundamentalism’, won’t get us out of the existential crisis we’re facing.
The problem with science
The scientific method has been another approach to problem exploration. That we can begin with a hypothesis – what we think will happen – and test it rigorously to learn about something so that we can, eventually, develop a response for it. And, like engineering, I bloody love science! Penicillin? X-Rays? Our understanding of light, the atom, biology, psychology, anthropology and so on. It’s quite literally amazing.
But then, science, too, has its limits. The scientific method requires 3rd party observation of phenomena to ‘prove truth’. It also takes quite a long time, in some cases, for things to be “scientifically-proved”. In some views, that’s a good thing, but in others, it ‘slows progress’. Our indigenous peoples have had 60,000 years of observed knowledge about Australia, but we think that’s not science because they didn’t write it down. And anyway, even once anything is scientifically proven, there is always the underlying human nature of it all – what can be used for good can also be used for evil. I hesitate to use such a cliche example but, you know, there’s always that atomic bomb thing that happened.
Why won’t science and/or engineering work?
I don’t have a definitive answer to the question about why science and or engineering aren’t adequate for the crisis we face, but, so far, I’ve come across four concepts that feel like they are key influencers in ensuring that science or engineering won’t ‘fix’ this predicament we find ourselves in.
I’ve recently come across Robert Jensen’s work on hierarchy and the work of Dave Snowden on complex adaptive systems. There’s also Jevon’s paradox (still fundamentally contested, but interesting), and Hedonic Adaption. I can’t help but see a connection between these concepts that work together to prevent us from making meaningful progress in the fundamental things that will help us plan for a future that is headed our way whether we like it or not – a slow and steady contraction of power, energy, resources, and, well, human life – that will be required to sustain healthy human life on the finite planet that supports us.
A crash course on hierarchical systems
I’m no expert in this area, but, for my own purposes, here’s my attempt at summarising Robert Jensen’s work on hierarchy. He talks about four primary hierarchical systems (in order from historically oldest to newest) that prevent fair and equitable distribution of power, energy, and resources in today’s world. These systems also largely shape our epistemology.
- Patriarchy. A system denoted by the systematic and long-term dominance of women by men that leads to the unequal distribution of resources between genders.
- States and Imperialism. The accumulation of wealth, resources, and power of nation-states lead to the unequal distribution of resources between countries. This creates a first-world and ‘developing’ world.
- White supremacy. Modern notions of “whiteness” are linked, in part, to what was required by states to ‘conquer’ other states – a sense of superiority over the ‘other.’
- Capitalism. The fundamental belief that maximising competition will result in the greatest good. Except, what underpins the ‘free markets’ of capitalism are the first three systems of dominance. Jensen reckons with the idea that capitalism is governed by the unconscious bias present in the first three systems – which makes the idea of ‘free’ markets a fallacy anyway.
Not everyone agrees that these systems exist or of their effect on the way we humans interact with each other. But what seems true is that those who refute that these power relationships exist are the same folks that benefit from them. From a personal perspective, I don’t know any women, people of colour, socio-politically or economically marginalised people that stand up for patriarchy, white supremacy, government control or capitalism, respectively. But then, that’s just me. There may be others who disagree.
Power is, of course, also prevalent in our categorisation of ‘the environment’ or ‘nature’. We’ve proven over the years that we’re incredibly good at manipulating the natural world for our own ends (again, to extract resources, wealth and comfort). This notion of power in the form of human supremacy is the fundamental hierarchical relationship that seems so difficult for us to reckon with: the idea that human intelligence and our species’ ability of language and environmental manipulation gives us some level of superiority over non-human species. This, for me, is the fundamental misconception of our time; our arrogance as a species has led us through the ice, bronze, steel, and industrial ages to arrive at what seems to be ‘the age of waste’. And, quite literally, it’s killing us and taking other species with us.
Complex Adaptive Systems
With these four hierarchies in place, technological and scientific fundamentalists build new technology to solve problems that can be defined through processes of engineering and/or science to make money. Or, let me put this another way:
In the first world (state and imperialist hierarchy), primarily male technologists (patriarchy) funded by wealthy white men (white supremacy), plan, schedule, and build technology for profit (capitalism) to increase their wealth.
When these four power systems conspire, even with the best intentions, to make the tools and systems within which the world, at scale, operates, we work only to strengthen the underlying conditions to help these systems remain dominant. Even if we, and I say we because I am one of those white males, don’t think we do. Case in point – the rise of Web3.0. Do we really believe the de-centralised web or cryptocurrency has the power to de-stabilise those who make the rules? Those same people who are already at the top and have the most power to protect what they stand to lose? The only people I’ve come across who share this belief tend to be the ones who already have the power, resources, and capital to control it. After all, the first generation of the internet was meant to be democratising, but look where we are.
And so, as Dave Snowden discusses using his Cynefin Framework, the relationship between technology and humans is a complex-adaptive one. And Complex Adaptive Systems have a few key traits:
- They are dispositional. No matter how much we try to plan or predict, we can never say X will equal Y as we could in causal relationships (that science or engineering deal with). We can say that this system is predisposed to respond in Y way if we do X, but we can never know for sure. (This trait is the one responsible for unintended consequences).
- We can only learn about the system by interacting with it., i.e. We build something, give it to humans, they use it in intended ways, and inevitably, unintended ones.
- Unintended consequences are unavoidable. We’re not smart enough and the human project changes with every new technological innovation in ways we just can’t foresee. The way we reduce these is to build lots of parallel tools with tight feedback cycles so we’re able to respond more quickly to the change we’ve imposed on whatever systems we’re interacting with (kind of like pure agile software development).
The only thing we know is that the human system is governed by historical power structures outlined by Jensen, and so, it’s likely that the technology most likely to be created, and the technology most likely to scale, will be the technology made by wealthy western white men (that’s me, by the way) and, will be least likely to displace the power that they (and I) have. Again, that’s a disposition, not an absolute, though – and it’s in that space that hope lives.
But, before we go there, there’s the matter of Jevon’s Paradox and Hedonic Adaptation.
The human/energy relationship
We’re at a moment in history when technology fundamentalists say that efficiency is the way out of this. Getting rid of fossil fuels and making energy efficient solutions to road transport, heating, cooling, etc. I used to believe this, too. But, then I came across Jevon’s Paradox:
In 1865, William Stanley observed this with the use of coal. An increased efficiency in the use of coal led to an increase consumption of coal in a wider range of industries.
The same could be said for the cost of production of plastics and their use. The cheaper they get, the more able we are to use it for all sorts of stuff and so the total number of plastics we use grows exponentially.
I’ve seen Jevon’s play out personally, even at an individual scale. In fact, I’ve done it. If the dams are full, I (we?) are more likely to have a longer shower. But when the dams aren’t full, we can quite easily manage on a 2-minute one instead. If it’s cheaper to use and more available, we’ll use more of it. What happens if that’s true at the scale of 7-8 billion humans?
What does that mean for the new saviour – renewable energy? Or electric cars? Will we drive more if it costs less to drive, only increasing our need for more renewable energy? In the short term, that seems fine, but we’ve lost our second sun in fossil fuels, so now we’ve only got one and it has limits. That limit is more difficult to see because we’re not digging it out of the ground, but it’s there.
Some believe technology will help us find another complementary source to the sun (i.e. nuclear, or something that doesn’t exist yet) but, no matter what happens, humans consume a lot of energy, more and more if there are 8-billion of us. A technology fundamentalist says, “don’t worry, we’ll be right”, but, as Robert Jensen says, the physics and chemisty, at least in our current understanding of them, doesn’t work – we are living in a system of finite energy (thanks Einstein!) and if there’s enough of us trying to draw it from the sun, there won’t be enough to go around. Given the heirarchical systems at play, wealthy men in developed countries won’t be the ones missing out.
Hedonic Adaptation and Abundance Denial
And so we come to the key question – what is enough for a person? Especially in a world where we all start off with different amounts of things because of the historical inequality we’ve set up around us. How much is enough money? Enough food? Enough water? Enough shelter?
When I was younger, I survived quite happily on $40k AUD per year. I had food, a place to live, enough to pay bills and have a holiday. Now, my partner and I earn more than that, yet we still find ourselves ‘saving for a rainy day’. Hedonic adaptation describes our continual evolution to our daily environment. When we have what we haven’t had before, we feel safe, for a while, but then we consume the ‘surplus’, in various ways, and it becomes a new normal. We create stories that tell us we still haven’t got enough, or that we need more, and so we go seeking for it – ways or resources to improve an already improved standard of living.
This underlying fear of famine (whether that famine is of energy, goods, resources) will drive us, consistently, to seek more. And while there is more, we’ll use it. There seems to be no ‘enough’ in the mind of a human, no matter where we come from and how much we start with. It’s what has helped us get to so many humans, and also what may end us.
Because of the nature of complex adaptive systems, and our awareness of them, what’s been true of my experience is that I continue to accumulate ‘for a rainy day’ because one day, something might change and what I thought was enough, isn’t anymore. I’m doing this right now with ‘planning for a low-energy future’, my parents did the same in ‘planning for retirement’. I don’t know what the world will look like in 20 years, so I’m planning for scarcity. Accumulate now to create a ‘buffer’ – one that allows me to maintain a standard of living I find comfortable as I age in a world I can’t predict. I’m by no means in ‘prepper’ territory yet, but I’m mindful of the need to save. In the end, I’m looking after myself. I feel guilty about that, but I can’t help but feel I have no choice. Do we all feel the same?
And so, what now?
I don’t have solutions, all I have are components of a complex adaptive system – an ecology – that seem to allow me to think about pre-dispositional statements:
- If we keep consuming energy at the levels in which we are consuming, it’s likely that we’ll run out.
- If we end up in an energy-scarce future, it’s likely that wealthy white men living in the first world will have the most buffer and those who are poor people of colour living in ‘developing’ countries will have the least buffer.
- No matter how much any human on Earth has accumulated, it’s likely everyone will need to make do with less so the feelings of loss, across all humanity, are likely to be significant.
These aren’t absolutes, I know they can’t be now, but it’s also really difficult for my simple human brain to see or know what may come along to influence the systems we’re living in and make them predisposed to do something other than this.
The romantic, hollywood-influenced part of me instinctively feels a fast, sharp, decline in standards of living is on the horizon. A ‘collapse’ is a word often used by those concerned about the effects of climate change and a future with much fewer resources than what we have now. But, I can’t help but feel that it’s more likely to happen at a pace where we’ll evolve with it, generation after generation. It seems far more likely and realistic that it’ll be slow, banal, and a bit boring. The wealthy insulate themselves from the changes as best they can, the poor struggle to adapt. Bit-by-bit. Water restrictions in Australia have been in place for years. That’s something my grandparents would’ve seen as unthinkable. I, for example, don’t ‘miss’ the extinction The Tasmanian Tiger but I’m sure those who saw them die out thought it was a complete tragedy. In the same way, I also don’t see electricity as a ground-breaking transformative technology because it was already well in place by the time I was born. As the saying goes, ‘technology’ is a label we use for stuff that was invented within our lifetime. Anything invented before we were born is just ‘normal’.
So, it’s likely that a child born into a world that has less biodiversity than we have now and has more regular ‘extreme’ weather events isn’t likely to experience a sense of ‘loss’; that’ll be just the way it is. From our vantage point in history, this feels like a shame – a world without Koalas or The Great Barrier Reef (and the flow on effects of the reduction of biodiversity because of those things) feels deeply sorrowful to me. But, maybe someone born into that world is a bit like how I feel about never being able to see a Tasmanian Tiger? Or a wooly mammoth? Or a dinosaur? Our comparatively short human lives of about 100 years may actually be our greatest strength and asset in avoiding the deep grief related to the loss we’d feel in the human community as the planet evolves to support a new way of human life. Again, saying that out loud feels sorrowful – but maybe it’s part of our truth-seeking path.
Complex adaptation as a path to compassion and hope
If our slow, banale demise is inevitable, then the next question is obvious – what’s the point of even trying? And to that, I’ve come to think that it’s exactly why we need to try. A meteoric event like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs would be merciful. But, humans adapt, and so that very fact is the reason that we have an opportunity to make the best of it, for as long as possible – just like we do in our individual lives that are limited by 100 years or so.
It’s difficult to imagine a world without hierarchy, but a world that has less injustice and more fairness is, objectively, a good thing. I’m confident that, over time, we’ll evolve that way.
The more difficult challenge is how we deal with hedonic adaptation and abundance denial – the accumulation of wealth, resources, and energy to support what is, in all comparisons to human history, the highest of energy lifestyles we’ve ever come to enjoy as a species.
What seems true is that if we’ve got it, we’ll use it. Or, if we’ve got it, and we’re worried about the future, the most powerful among us will store it for later to help us ride out the tougher times in relative comfort. Maybe we can’t escape the planet’s inevitable depletion, but maybe we can slow it so that the energy we’ve got can ease the pace of transition we’ll need to go through to make it more comfortable than it otherwise would be.
I used to think it was about avoiding disaster but I don’t think that quite captures it anymore. I now think it’s more about knowledge transfer to future generations. Giving more future humans the knowledge, capability and awareness of our dependence on the planet rather than our dominance over it. Not to race to ‘fix’ it, because I don’t think that’s possible anymore, but to simply ‘make better’ for as many living beings as possible, for as long as possible – human and non-human alike. Why is this important to me? I don’t really know. Maybe it’s got something to do with some reptilian brain-level connection to being a member of the human species? Maybe it’s just about making me feel less guilty.
And, as I write this, it all sounds pretty dire – one part defeatist and one part incredibly selfish. It feels like the writing is on the wall for us humans (and probably a few other species we’ll take with us). But, I suppose, maybe the greater human challenge in our very short lifetimes is to occupy the most difficult of liminal spaces – one that other species probably don’t have the capacity for, as Robert Jensen describes it, “To continue trying without taking refuge in wishful thinking or succumbing to nihilism.”