As promised, here is a short list of books I think would help orient Mr. Obama to a reality he may not now perceive. As his transition develops he certainly appears to be gathering conventional (though liberal) thinkers around him. One might reasonably infer that he is therefore convinced that conventional (if liberal) thinking is what is needed. As I have been asserting in these blogs the world is fundamentally changed with a new and developing relationship with the energy flows we have available to do economic work. Conventional thinkers think that when a resource gets too expensive (as oil will surely do over the next ten years due to the combination of peak production and falling EROI) you simply substitute. That, after all, is a law of economics as understood by conventional thinking. But energy flow is fundamentally different from material flows. Sunlight, in real time, is not a substitute for the energy density of oil or coal. The latter got their energy density by millions of years of cooking and compressing organic matter that resulted from sunlight and got buried. I am continually stunned by the seeming lack of understanding (sometimes even by engineers who should know better) of this time vs. energy density issue. People really believe that covering the dessert with solar mirrors to boil water is going to replace all our coal fired electricity plants. See Al Gore's editorial in today's New York Times. What is worse is that people actually believe this can be done virtually overnight. In fact we do need to reduce our carbon emissions virtually instantaneously if we are to reduce the CO2 concentrations below the 350ppm that James Hansen has called for (see this article). But how realistic is this?
The core problem is our belief that we can have all the energy we need to build all of the toys we desire and produce all of the foods we want (and transport them any distance necessary). This is the crux of the whole climate change/energy crisis situation. Our steadfast belief that we can have it all — no limitations — because capitalism and the unfettered markets of classical economics has already given us such marvels as cell phones and flat panel TVs. We now feel entitled. We have an irrational faith in technology. And when the truth finally catches up it is going to lead to grief and anger at scales such as we have never known on this planet.
This is a turning point in history, as much so as the agricultural and industrial revolutions were. We have to learn to accept limitations on our physical wealth and turn to spiritual/mental wealth as our raison d'etre. We have to learn to live in balance with the rest of the Ecos. There is simply no other choice, other than extinction of course. The President of the United States is the one person who can manage this transition for the planet. And Mr. Obama may rise to the occasion. But he will need to understand what needs to be done. And conventional thinking isn't going to do the trick. So here are some suggested readings that may help orient toward the new thinking that might just get us through this with our souls in tact.
I've divided the readings up into three categories. These readings may disappoint some because they do not include books covering the primary environmental and economic problems themselves; I've assumed that the president-elect has become very familiar with the problems. Rather I am focusing on consequences he may not have considered. They reflect the systems thinking that will be needed to integrate the various problems to see what those consequences might be. The one exception is the category of human nature and lack of wisdom in human mentality. This is an area that actually very few people really think much about. We assume we are smart enough to handle the problems once we understand them. That is why we rely so much on technology to save us. It is also why we have so much difficulty giving up our cherished beliefs in our political/economic systems. A much better understanding of human nature (and I don't just mean how to play the crowd to get elected!) is absolutely prerequisite to any planning for the future.
So let me start with human nature — some things you might not appreciate!
Gary Marcus, a psychologist at NYU, has written a delightful book that might actually cause you depression! He writes clearly and directly to the point that there are a number of less-than-optimal aspects of our minds/brains and consciousness that most of us are happily unaware. The book is called "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind" (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008). Many psychologists and neurobiologists have been exploring the miss-workings of the brain under various circumstances. What we know today is that our memories are not as good as we would like to believe. We know that our judgment is often badly biased in systemic ways. To put it simply we are not such smart apes after all. We did learn a few good tricks that have made us stupendously different from all other animals and other apes in particular. We learned to represent things and relations with symbols, we developed language and mathematics. These are nothing to sneeze at, of course. Michael Gazzaniga has another book you should read to explore both the good and not-so-good aspects of our uniqueness: "Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique" (Harper Collins, 2008).
Daniel Gilbert's work, "Stumbling on Happiness" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) similarly shows us that we really don't know our own minds! Gilbert explores the nature of happiness or what we think happiness is relative to what we actually experience. Things that we are sure are going to make us happy (like winning the lottery) one day seem to fail to deliver in the end. We imagine how happy we will be if we just had XYZ (like a huge flat panel TV) only to quickly acclimatize to its presence if we get it. And then we want more. Understanding this phenomenon in human mental life is critical to grasping why the current economic philosophy we live under is just feeding our failure to find happiness.
I like Daniel Goleman's "Social Intelligence" (Bantam Books 2006) for its comprehensive view of how we get along and sometimes fail to get along. He explains a lot of tough neurobiology in a very readable way. Most people would be surprised to learn that so much of their social interactions are mediated at a very deep and non-conscious level.
Marcus makes the point that we are really very flawed thinkers (compared with our self-image as rational creatures) but he doesn't delve into another evolutionary innovation that might be keeping humans from making terrible blunders, at least under the conditions of their evolutionary environment (more than 50 thousand years ago). Sapience, as I have written about, is the brain basis for wisdom. Now I have contended that it just emerged as a potent mental facility not that long ago (between 50 and 150 thousand years ago). Wisdom, itself has been explored over the last two decades by a number of psychologists and neuroscientists. My favorite book on this is Robert Sternberg's "Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized" (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Sternberg is an eminent psychology researcher who has done a masterful job at distinguishing the nature of wisdom as a mental construct (like intelligence). I also like Howard Gardner's work along somewhat similar lines. If you had to read only one of Gardner's books I would recommend "Five Minds for the Future" (Harvard Business School Press, 2007).
The fundamental idea is that the human brain has evolved a more comprehensive capacity to think about the future and to make judgments (particularly about social situations) that are morally inspired (in the sense that Gilbert explains). Wisdom is based on a special processing competency of the brain (sapience mediated by a patch in the prefrontal cortex) and gaining a lifetime of experiences (a knowledge base, so to speak). The problem for modern man is that the capacity of sapience is still very limited compared with the need for global-scale social life and the complexities of modern life. Humans evolved enough sapience for the tribe but never developed what is needed for the whole planet. Fortunately, like all traits and capacities, sapience is highly variable and is stronger in some and weaker in some. The real question is are there individuals in the population that are sapient enough to tackle our modern world and its problems.
Economics next. As with human nature there are quite a few books I would like the president-elect to read, but we need to be economical here.
If you read nothing else read " An Introduction to Ecological Economics" by Robert Costanza, John H Cumberland, Herman Daly, Robert Goodland, and Richard B Norgaard (CRC, 1997). This book may be described as the systems science approach to economics, with ecology forming the backdrop. But any book where Herman Daly is an author would be good. Daly's influence is to consider the human economic system as simply a sub-system of the whole ecological system of Earth — what I have called the Ecos. His work was heavily influenced by Howard Odum (another must read!) who showed the relationship between energy flows and economic work (among others).
Bill McKibben's "Deep Economy" is another, perhaps more readable, look at the whole issue of a steady-state economy (advanced by Daly). It also ties in with the issues of what true human well being and happiness would be (as mentioned above).
The absolute must read for the consequences of our current conventional thinking about economics is James Gustave Speth's " The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability" (Yale University Press, 2008). Speth is the Dean of the Environmental Sciences and Forestry School at Yale. He has a long and distinguished career in environmental issues and has written about global warming and climate change.
Finally (I promised, only ten) " The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization" by Thomas Homer-Dixon (Island Press, 2008) provides an incredibly insightful analysis of what happens to civilizations under the threat of energy restriction. He analyzes the Roman Empire from the perspective of how their central civilization required increasing flows of energy yet were constrained by the distance and kinds of energy sources available at the outskirts of the empire. He opens the question of how this relates to the whole earth under conditions of restricted oil flow. It is something that a president should think about. Former presidents have indeed thought about oil supplies, from the perspective of maintaining the American lifestyle (America's interests, the rest of the world be damned). But now it is time to think about the world's interest because it is the same as America's interests. We are all on this tiny blue dot together.
I hope the president-elect is a speed reader. These should just whet his appetite. And there are plenty more where these came from. People deeply engaged in a particular activity, like running for offices, have little time to think outside the box, or even to realize that it is necessary to do such thinking. They have little incentive to read outside their realm of interests. The world looks, at a glance, pretty much as it did ten years ago so there is little to prod one to even consider alternative realities to the one we have been used to. But now we know that there are insidious processes at work to undermine our very existence. Yet, until the world starts really looking differently we don't have much prodding us to think more deeply about what may be going on. I would hope that with the energy crisis, the economic crisis (and growing realization that they are related), the financial crisis, and the climate change crisis (among many more) that the world would look different enough now that the leader would begin to question conventional wisdom. Let's hope so. Would that be too audacious?
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