Question Everything

Happy Summer Solstice, Goodbye and Thanks for All the Fish

The time has come to wind this blogging up. I had thought I would try the "rethinking everything" approach, but I've realized that blogging isn't a particularly good conduit. The audience is quite small now, the departed were interested in activity but I just can't keep that pace going.

The plan now is to devote everything to writing books and research papers. I've just sent off my last manuscript to Springer and no sooner got it uploaded when I got inspired for yet another book! It will be about systems science and thinking, of course but more about applying systems to real world problems.

I will leave this blog archive alive. I pay a small monthly fee so that you don''t have to deal with advertising. Nor have I asked any readers to support me through one of the on-line services. But I will eventually stop payments and the archive will, presumably disappear. The only reason I mention this is in case anyone cares to go back through the hundreds of posts and download any. I recently took a look at some of the earliest blogs on a number of topics and though I'm admittedly biased, they seemed to have aged well. Still relevant.

So my thanks to all my loyal, long-time readers. Thanks for the many comments and discussions. It's been a trip.

Regards all,

George

Hope for a Pleasant Vernal Equinox

First a note on the new blog, Rethinking Everything. I started the blog late last year with the intention of posting some possible "answers" to questions posed over the years in this blog. My thought was to start off with something somewhat limited in scope, rethinking democracy. A very thought-provoking book by Jason Brennan, a transdisciplinarian in social sciences, "Against Democracy", had reinforced my thinking that something was fundamentally wrong with the way democracy, at least as conceived in the US, was working. I had intended to further develop that theme based on the insights provided by Brennan and follow it up with some of my latest research in the systems approach to governance. Then January 6th happened.

What the events at the US Capitol did was stop me in my tracks and forced me to rethink rethinking, that is to reconsider the notion of starting off with a limited subject. The failure of democratic institutions isn't just an indictment of democracy, but of the whole nature of governments in which those institutions are critical. I had to reevaluate my plan for RE and I spent many an evening pondering a thread of thoughts about where this would lead.

Over the years, in this question asking blog, I have noted how many institutions seem to be failing. I've examined economics, education, even science itself, and more. In asking why so many social institutions were in failure mode, I eventually came to see that the one common denominator has always been human beings and their inability to make wise choices, especially when money was involved. I explored the phenomenon of human evolution that led to our current species with the brain capacity I dubbed "sapience", what I came to see as the brain basis for the capacity to gain wisdom (also see the book that emerged from those writings: "A Theory of Sapience"). What I found is that while sapience had emerged in the hominid line, it was underdeveloped relative to the species' capacity for cleverness (intelligence + creativity). Humans are good at solving problems, especially by creating new artifacts, but do not stop to consider long-term consequences. They are motivated primarily by greed, laziness, and fear, as these were necessary motivations in the context of biological evolution and the human condition in the late Pleistocene. Humans have always looked for an "easier" way, a way to accumulate more stuff (initially food), and were always primed to encounter danger.

My intent now, for Rethinking Everything, is to start with the big picture of the human condition, our social organizations, i.e., civilizations, and reconsider, in light of our general low level of sapience and the existential threats that we have ourselves created by virtue of our social organizations and behaviors, what should the human social system be like in order to integrate positively in the whole Earth ecosystem. The answer to that question will lead naturally into what the nature of our economic and governance systems should be like to support that organization. Along the way I will introduce you to a research program that I and several colleagues are engaged in looking to be able to answer the question: What is the future of the human social system?

So please don't give up on RE just yet.

Meanwhile, as we observe current events and consider how they support the notion that the current human social system is in collapse, let us try to appreciate the coming of Spring. Of course, many more of us will not be able to enjoy much of anything as the impacts of climate change and reductions in net energy per capita move apace and are being played out in the Middle East and North Africa (look at Yemen and now Mozambique) and Central America. The media continue to blame political unrest to a revolt against brutal dictatorships. They blame the migrant hoards to people escaping that brutality. But they never ask: Why are the dictators, or in some cases the rebels themselves, acting so brutally? The answer is right in front of their eyes but they are so used to thinking in terms of political reasons or neoclassical economics reasons (economies must grow to be viable) that they completely fail to look for deeper causes. And it is not really hard to see. People have lived peacefully under dictatorships before when the average person has been able to make a comfortable living within the context of the surrounding social milieu. This is not to say that political unrest or economic hardships are not playing a role in the sequence of causes. It is that they are not the ultimate causes. People cannot make a living in a region when that region is no longer able to produce most or all of its own food, clothing, and shelters. People become agitated and will tend to blame the governments for failing to make their lives livable when the capacity for the local economy fails. Foreign aid, food aid, fuel aid, etc. can delay the onset of the societal impact, but only for so long. This has been the case in much of the MENA region for decades. But eventually, with ever increasing population pressures, the cooker will explode. Unrest develops, dictators/autocrats start to repress it, and things rapidly escalate from there. Refugees from these regions are not just trying to escape repression and conflicts, they are also leaving because there is no way to support their lives. And why?

If you look at these regions you will discover that they are among the hardest, and earliest hit by climate damage. It has become nearly impossible for local people to grow food due to droughts and severe weather events are destroying whatever assets they have. Of course their situation is aggravated by the still increasing population growths and no small part of their unrest is amplified by their being able to compare their living conditions with other parts of the world (via the Internet, of course). But the single basic cause of the problems is climate change. Spring equinox means little to these people.

Then there is the growing extent of climate disruptions in more developed nations as well. 2020 saw some of the most severe weather events in history. There were more named Atlantic hurricanes than ever before. More tornadoes. More floods. More loss of life and of physical assets than ever before. Clearly, climate chaos is no longer a supposition. It is here. Crops all over the world are in jeopardy. Can much more extensive food shortages be far behind?

And then there is still the pandemic. In spite of the race to produce vaccines and get them into arms, we are still faced with economic hardships due to earlier responses to the disease. And what about the new variants to the SARS-CoV-2 virus? If any of them prove resistant against vaccines (even if marginally so), will this result in new waves and new lock-downs? We might not even need that to be the case. Look at the number of people still defying public health practices (for their God-given freedoms), the number of people who will not get a vaccine for fear it isn't safe or that Bill Gates will take control of their minds.

It is this latter point that brings me back to thinking about sapience, or rather the lack thereof. I said before that people are basically driven by greed, laziness, and fear. And when the latter begins to take over, even as a subconscious factor, whatever sapience a person might possess is submerged. Judgment is impaired. Paranoia takes hold. And QAnnon emerges.

I still think that we are observing an evolutionary event, where the pandemic is a major selective force. Those unwise enough to not moderate their greed, subdue their fear, and overcome their laziness will eventually succumb to the environment generated by the pandemic. The wise will inherit the Earth.

Get what enjoyment you can from Spring. The cheery blossoms and daffodils are popping out along with some under story green shoots. The bright green new leaves always cheer me up.

 

Merry Winter Solstice 2020

And good riddance to 2020!

With the COVID-19 vaccines starting to make it to peoples' arms there has been heard an audible sigh of relief, understandably so. But what is behind that relief is the belief that with immunity we, societies, can get back to normal before too long. Numerous commentators have, over the last several weeks, described various scenarios for how that might be accomplished. But one thing they all share in common is what they mean by "normal." Remember normal.

For some people that just means going back to not wearing masks and not social distancing, to be together again with family and friends; a thought especially poignant at this time of year. For most, however, normal means letting capitalism and markets cut loose, make up for lost time in profit-taking, consumerist behaviors return, and get the economy growing again. Yet these are the very things that contributed to the pandemic in the first place. All of that economic activity meant people mingling and traveling, spreading the initially silent virus all the while. Perhaps most people think this particular virus is a once-in-a-hundred-year event, so going back to all that social activity will be OK, at least for a hundred more years. This is a fallacy. At the population size of humans and the increasing interactions with wild animal populations (providing greater probability of another zoonotic event) due to invasion of previously undisturbed environments, new potential pandemics may actually become a recurring experience. At least until the human population size decreases sufficiently.

I don't know where to start regarding this 'getting back to normal' thing. My blunt assessment is that it isn't going to happen. Or at least it won't fully happen and for a variety of reasons. When I say 'fully' I mean as things were just before the pandemic caused major lock-downs and the economies took major hits. Once COVID-19 infection rates fall below a certain threshold and governments reopen shopping and travel it may for a while seem that we are back to some semblance of normal, but that will be for a minority of people in the better off societies. Beauty salons and bars may reopen, but for a large proportion of economic sectors it is likely to remain sub-normal. The reason is that the pandemic wasn't actually the cause of many dysfunctions in the capitalist/consumerist economies. The seeds of those dysfunctions had already been planted and had already started to sprout. The pandemic merely exposed and, possibly, amplified them. Take the brittleness of the various supply chains that broke and have only been somewhat repaired by exposing workers to the virus. While for wealthy nations the disruptions seemed to have been minor and short lived. The run on and stockpiling of toilette tissues was a bit of an overreaction, perhaps. But it did show that these delicately managed chains could be broken and hard (and expensive) to repair.

The world, looked at as a system of interconnecting component subsystems and each of those as comprised on interconnected sub-subsystems and further deeper into the structure, provides a quasi-stable environment for all subsystems when each and all are performing their functions well. The global human social system (within the Gaian supra-system) has not been a team player with all the other subsystems, the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and the biosphere as major subsystems. And that is because the components of the human social system, namely the major institutions, the economies, and the governments have not been team players. And that is because the major subsystems of those, namely we sub-sapient human beings do not act wisely, which means knowledgeably, morally, strategically, and systemically. Hence, when something like a pandemic hits the flaws are illuminated.

Major flaws in education systems, financial systems (unless you are one of those believers in the so-called Modern Money Theory where governments can print as much money as they need to keep consumers buying stuff and debt is meaningless), and a host of other social subsystems showed and continue to show strains.

We still have a way to go before a significant number of people are vaccinated and we have evidence of widespread immunity. So more problems are likely to show up. We, in the US and other countries, are in the so-called 'third wave' of mounting infections and our rates of infection and hospitalization are still on the rise as of this writing. Death rates seem to have stabilized and even declined somewhat as the medical establishment is learning more about how to treat the most endangered people. Unless the vaccines are truly effective, once lock downs are lifted again, will we see a fourth wave?

More than half of the people in the US and many people around the world were relieved to see Trump lose the White House. They may be forgiven for also breathing a sigh of relief, looking for an end to the criminal shenanigans of the president and his cronies. But, just as the disruptions in our various social institutional subsystems were not caused by the pandemic, racism and inequitable capital and income distributions were not caused by Trump, his presidency, assisted by Republican senators, merely exposed and amplified them. He seemed to condone overt racist behaviors bringing the likes of the Proud Boys and KKK out from the shadows. His failure to address police killings of Black people, like George Floyd, and so many others, sparked a resurgence in equity movements like Black Lives Matter and mass protests around the world against inequities and racism. Now that Trump is out there is a sense that Biden and Harris will attend to this unconscionable situation and we can move more rapidly toward justice and equity. [Book recommendation, as much for a more holistic accounting of slavery and Jim Crow in the US as for the arguments for reparations for slavery: Darity, William A., Jr. & Mullen, A. Kristen, (2020) From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.]

Trump's tax cuts mostly benefited the already rich and corporations. This, however, was simply an extension of the program of right-wing neo-liberal capitalists such as the Koch brothers and the ideology of Milton Friedman and many more who firmly believed that social Darwinism was the right way to think about who got rewarded and who didn't, who was the fittest in the law of the jungle. Long before Trump we were moving inexorably toward producing the kinds of wealth and income inequities we see now. [Book recommendation, with a really insightful recounting of the history of the right's confiscating the airways and making up 'truth' to bend the already angry conservative working class toward their ideologies, paving the way for Trump to get as many votes as he did. Andersen, Kurt (2020). Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, A Recent History, Random House, New York.]

Unfortunately, actually changing course and correcting the wrongs may not come to fruition. Unless Biden gets a majority in the Senate (and even then some conservative Democrats may not always go along with his proposals) he may be blocked in some attempts to heal the wounds. And the very fact that the wounds have been so fully exposed may be problematic in and of itself. Trumpism, as some commentators note, will not likely go away after January 20th. There is likely to be a continuing anger among his supporters who still believe the election was stolen. We should look for continuing clashes among demonstrators and most likely violence (as already witnessed in DC).

Again, these anomalous events, the pandemic and Trump's election and failures to do the job of president, only exposed the previously somewhat hidden dysfunctions in social interactions. And owing to the sharp and deep political divides, the festering wounds, I seriously doubt (and hope to be proven wrong) that Joe and Kamala will be very effective in providing the healing salve. Any continuing social unrest will have another negative effect on our ability to pay attention to some even greater problems.

Of course, on top of it all remains our global threats from climate chaos, severe weather disruptions, rising sea levels, droughts and floods, and all other knock-on effects from our continuing emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and oceans, as well as our continuing destruction of natural carbon sinks such as the Amazon rain forest. Our patterns of activity show no signs of changing to the better. Even if the US reenters the Paris Climate Accord, and Joe promises to do so, we already know that that Accord does not really do enough to achieve the goal of reducing emissions sufficiently in time to avert a rise in global average temperature above 2 degrees centigrade, the temperature above which all sense of climate normality is lost. It is going to take something far more drastic to force actions by the nations that might lessen the long-term damage. But there are a growing number of researchers and commentators who doubt that there really is anything we can do at this point to achieve that goal. They note how the various symptoms, such as loss of ice or the irreversible conversion of the Amazon into a wasteland, are now showing signs that they are worse than originally thought and that their rate of change is accelerating faster than the models had predicted.

And let us not forget the energy situation.

Over the years I have spent no few words addressing the relation between the economy and the availability of free energy, that energy component of the raw produced energy, such as in oil, that can do useful work (and trivial work such as building yachts!) I've warned that an economy based on increasingly using up finite stores of fossil fuels to power the bulk of work is headed for a major crash when the cost of extracting diminishing quantities exceeds the value of the free energy and the enterprise is basically shut down. That would deprive economic activity of more than 80% of its energy. Reports from energy and financial analysts indicate that this is what is happening right now. The fracking boom provided a brief respite from peak conventional oil. The sluggish economic recovery and diminished demand for fuels and electricity somewhat delayed the onset. But fracked wells are expensive and show signs of depletion. Drilling companies are shutting down operations because they cannot find funding for new drilling. And the above-ground supplies, which had been in surplus due to low demand, are now running down. In other words, we may be on the brink of a drastic collapse in the fossil fuel industry and that would mean a further and more dramatic crash of farming and supply chains that depend on transportation to keep things moving. "Buy local" is about to take on a whole new meaning.

As I have pointed out before, climate mitigation and adaptation are going to need a tremendous amount of energy just at a time when our energy supplies are dwindling. Not only will we not have enough for "normal" consumption, what we do have will likely be rationed (if available at all) and what we can muster will be directed toward adaptations such as moving coastal populations inland as we figure out that we have to abandon major coastal cities. We will also have to figure out the moral thing to do with respect to climate refugees from low latitude regions such as Central America and the MENA area as they will increasingly seek economic and climate-caused violence relief. Its already happening and it will only increase and worsen. The only viable destinations for these people are the upper mid latitudes of Eurasia and North America. Population densities are gong to get really high, at least until racial and ethnic violence breaks out in full swing (it already has broken out in scattered incidences globally). We might even expect good ole class warfare to turn violent as it has at various times in history.

Let me close this cheery Solstice message as I have so many before with a plea to my sapient readers to choose your next moves wisely. Buying an all electric vehicle or starting a modest compost heap will not be sufficient actions. Starting a permaculture community (at least 40 adults) in areas where we expect to have somewhat stable climate for a few years to come, might, with some good luck, make a difference for your personal future and that of your offspring (Note: I encourage truly sapient couples to have at least two children if your living in a safe(ish) environment; we need to have a future population of sapients to carry on!) There are no guarantees of success, ever. But you can improve your chances by making the right moves while there is still time. Believe me, if I were a little younger and in good(ish) health, I would be right there. In my advanced age and condition I wouldn't be very useful. Its all I can do to work our little vegetable patches where we live! But I will take solace in knowing that there are many people who have seen the writing on the wall and have already organized sustainable communities around the world.

Good luck to everyone.

George

PS. Hope you get a chance to see the Great Conjunction tonight, Jupiter and Saturn aligned. Don't know if it portends anything but it should be spectacular.

Autumnal Equinox Greetings

The smoke has cleared from the Seattle area skies, for the time being. And rains are here and in the forecast. We very much need the moisture.

Since my teenage years, reading apocalyptic sci-fi, I always wondered what the end times would be like. But like many of you I generally believed it would come after my life time. Yet here we are in the start of what is clearly the demise of global civilization and conceivably the human species. For all these years I have been writing about the increasingly dysfunctional institutions I have been attending to the rate of change as best I could measure it. We've been going downhill for a long time but it seemed to me that rates at which these institutions were changing were accelerating but not so rapidly that the collapse was imminent. But such is the nature of a chaotic system that is being steadily pushed that at some point it can instantly jump to a new attractor basin that disrupts everything. I think that is what we are witnessing now.

Being too old to act on this understanding I will continue to observe the goings-on from my home and, as long as the Internet works, offer my thoughts here. But I would recommend that if you are at all able to distance yourself from the grid and learn to garden it would be a good time to make it happen. Maybe I'll have something to say at the Winter Solstice.

Happy Vernal Equinox - 2020: A Black Swan Trigger for the Collapse

Might the SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus be the black swan event that puts us past the tipping point? The virus itself, and the disease it causes, Covid-19, is certainly dangerous in its own right (though the actual death rate is not really known because we don't have accurate data on the actual number of cases) I wouldn't worry about it decimating the population. Rather what concerns me is the so-called 'knock-on' effects or the cascade of disruptions to our very brittle economic (and political) systems. Yesterday I went to Costco for some supplies (not toilet paper thank you) and was a little taken aback at the empty shelves where some of my favorite items could generally be found. Our global economy and distributed production/supply chains are vulnerable to disruptions. Like people not working in order to avoid contacting those with the virus. As we have seen over the past week, whole countries and most of the states in the US are ordering lock-downs and self-isolation to "flatten the curve", i.e. prevent the kind of spikes seen in China and now Italy. If people don't work, the work doesn't get done. If the work doesn't get done many people don't get paid, and then they don't buy stuff or pay their rents. The economy comes to a grinding halt.

Unfortunately the way our global means of production and distribution are so strongly interdependent, and thus brittle, if you break anything you break everything. Once this virus begins to subside you cannot just restart everything. We will be lucky if this ends in a 'simple' depression.  But I really don't think that is going to be the playbook. The Great Depression was ended not so much by the onset of WWII but by the fact that we had access to cheap oil and coal to power the reconstruction of industry. WWII just provided the impetus to reconstruct industry rapidly and at the scale that took place. We do not have the luxury of having access to cheap energy now.

Watching Evolution in Real-time

Humans have, for a very long time, been able to subvert the processes of natural selection that have keep all prior animal populations in check. We have occasionally met with a plague disease that had a temporary impact on the population counts but all of these experiences occurred when populations were separated by distances that kept the diseases from spreading as a global pandemic. Today, globalization and extreme personal mobility has eliminated that checkpoint. We're now learning that the coronavirus is likely to have been transmitted widely before the outbreak in Wuhan, China. The virus has been incubating for a time longer than usual for the flu. And the symptoms of Covid-19 for most people look like colds of mild flu. Thus even when it was starting to show itself we were already behind the eight-ball. The experts are still trying to understand the epidemiological dynamics but one thing is clear, it will take extreme measures to get people to change their behaviors to provide the needed isolation. Just this morning Governor Jay Inslee announced restrictions on large assemblies which will kill a lot of concerts, ComiCon, and other events.

Which leads to another, even less well understood, phenomena that will put severe pressure on even the uninfected. The response to coronavirus is almost certainly going to drag the economic system into depression as mentioned. There is likely to be a complete collapse of the financial system since most businesses as well as most households, and the governments of the world are now deeply in unsustainable debt. Capitalism, even the Chinese version, cannot survive for long without the artificial monetary support having been given by the credit markets. Look at what has been happening to the smaller oil and gas fracking operators who have been depending on debt to keep going. Many (and by the time this is published, perhaps most) will fold for lack of cash. Their operating costs far exceed the price they get for the oil they pump. Say goodbye to the American energy self-sufficiency.

The global, capitalistic economy is an entangled mess of supply chains and labor services. As such it is primed for a domino take-down. It is brittle and resilience or adaptation to the new economic realities would come at a great price for energy, just when we have entered the peak of global production.

And then, on a slightly longer time scale (but within the lifetime of young adults living now) there is the spectre of radical climate chaos. Note that in spite of all of the talk of the last two decades, the greens claiming the potential of transitioning to renewable energy, and the UN insisting that all we need to do is reduce our carbon emissions, neither the energy production of so-called renewables, nor the reductions in carbon emissions have even begun to meet the promise.

These three forces, along with a host of consequent sub-forces will provide the selection that will check human growth and consumption. And that is a good thing in my opinion.

It looks like humanity might have reached the point at which the Earth will finally reign us in.

Human Nature

I must confess I have been very disappointed in Homo sapiens. We don't deserve the species name, sapiens. We are not very sapient [A Theory of Sapience] (perhaps we should have the species name, 'pre-sapiens' or even 'pseudo-sapiens'). Except for a very few people we could consider as 'wise,' the vast majority of human beings have proven to be quite foolish, and there is evidence that human intelligence and ability to learn and reason about complex issues has actually declined over the past 5,000 to 10,000 years (average braincase sizes have declined by several hundred cubic centimeters - our brains are smaller than our ancestors'). The choices we make on average have been inexorably leading us collectively down a path of increasing over complexity and increasing dysfunction in all of our major (and many minor) institutions.

We are now witness to the rise of truly massive selection forces and seeing natural selection in real-time.

I don't hate humanity. The species evolved as circumstances dictated. We became sentient, then established a foothold on the shore of sapience. We evolved tremendous intelligence and creativity. But we failed to evolve the full promise of sapience which would have provided a self-monitoring (for individuals and societies) and regulating capabilities to keep us from making the choices that led to over-consumption and unrestricted growth. While there have always been a few wise people who have observed and warned us of the dangers of our hubris, since the vast majority of humans were not sufficiently minimally sapient they did not pay attention or heed the warning. And here we are today.

Consequences

I still won't try to predict what will happen exactly; after all a black swan, by definition, is unpredictable. But, I am confident this doesn't end well for most of us. Some of us, including me likely at this point, in the pandemic. But many more are going to face conflict, expulsion from homelands due to climate changes, starvation (same cause), increasingly destructive weather events, and the list goes on. In the end, only a small population of either lucky or wise enough humans will survive. There is still the full cataclysmic scenario of complete extinction, say if the methane bomb goes off (or nuclear bombs). I still don't think it will get to that. My sense of timing tells me that this coronavirus and its demolition of the global capitalist, consumerist economy has come just in time to provide the necessary negative feedback to prevent a full on cataclysm. Of course, for those of us who will face which ever scenario it will certainly seem cataclysmic. But, this is just nature restoring balance so life can get a fresh start, with or without a species of Homo.

In the meantime, try to enjoy the springing forth of life this Vernal Equinox. What else is there to do?

I appeared on a couple of podcasts on this particular subject this last week: Collapse Chronicles at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXUgegZkI-0 and the Doomstead Dinner at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JtSyT2Zhxo

Winter Solstice - 2019

I hope this finds you well and, at least for now, safe.

When I sat down a few weeks ago to start sketching what I would write about for this post, and after several false starts it dawned on me that there really is nothing much more to say! At least there is nothing really new to say. It seems that all of the kinds of global dangers I have been concerned about for all these years are now sufficiently advanced to be visible to all but the most stubborn willfully ignorant. And there are certainly many of those. Nevertheless, we now have growing movements such as behind Greta and Extinction Rebellion re: climate chaos. There have been a steadily growing number of economists who are starting to question the conventional wisdom regarding capitalism and free markets, if not the conventional theories behind the quasi-science. The public is still being hoodwinked by the oil and gas industries regarding the future of fossil fuel energy production; they have hyped the fracking revolution and American energy independence and the majority of people do not have the physics needed to understand the consequences of fracked well dynamics. So they don't realize that the current abundance of oil and gas is going to be short-lived. But many more people are listening to the experts (some of the same peak oil guys who went underground when fracking started taking hold) and realizing that there are problems afoot. And then there are those who strongly believe that solar and wind are going to save our civilization. If they are willing to look there are a growing number of analyses and reports that provide strong evidence that the economic power production potential for these technologies is just insufficient to run an industrial (even a so-called post-industrial) society that is dependent on the kind of power you get with fossil fuels or nuclear.

Not the kind of person who says 'I told you so, but...' Ok, so I am. But now many-many more voices have been added to the growing cacophony of doomsayers. I expect more people will start taking notice.

Still the majority hold out that some kind of techno-miracle will save our society, pretty much in its current form. Again its a question of pure physics. Stated simply, the kind of society we have right now is not in any way sustainable.

I've just finished a year-long quest for applying systems analysis to a human social system (HSS) design that would be sustainable but organized very differently from what we've grown used to as "normal." The outlines will be the last chapter in my forthcoming book. The last part of the book is devoted to design and engineering of complex adaptive and evolvable systems. So I thought, why not apply it to the HSS? I have written several papers about it for both Russian and Western systems researchers. Guess where the ideas were best relieved.

There is no way we can transition our current society to this more systemic form. We don't have the time even if the general population accepted the idea. So my prediction is still that civilization as we know it will crash (hard). You can already see the dynamics playing out. We're likely just past the peak point in Ugo Bardi's Seneca's Cliff scenario. You know, the Wiley Coyote moment! I hope to get the book out before everything goes to hell, and a few more papers published with the hopes that some remnant of the notion that a systems approach to designing and constructing a viable human society will somehow survive. Some day in the distant future, perhaps a thousand years after the collapse, some survivors in small pockets of relatively stable climate might have the opportunity to do it right the second time around. One thing for sure, they won't be in a position to exploit the kind of power sources we've had. The coal, oil, and natural gas will effectively be gone. And if my theory of evolving sapience holds any water, some of those future beings will be a little bit wiser than the current species.

Enjoy while you can, being mindful to not increase your contributions to the problems (e.g. consumerist living). If you are so inclined (and young enough) join Extinction Rebellion, go out and shut down traffic, get arrested at a protest. It might be fun.

 

Autumnal Equinox - 2019

Three Books You Should Read and a Big Question

First the question. How did we get here?

Here, of course, means the impending collapse of global civilization, of technologically-based cultures, of the majority of the human population, of the great die-off of species, in short the demise of a significant portion of Earth's biomass.

Though not everyone has given up hope, nor do I suggest that would be a good idea, there is a significant number of people, influencers, thought leaders, etc. who have now publicly acknowledged the threats of global warming. Fewer have realized the nature of the energy crisis, mostly because of the hype surrounding the so-called 'fracking revolution.' But this too figures in the mix of existential threats. Just about the time people get serious about adapting to climate change and sea rise, the energy needed to accomplish the significant amount of work needed will not be available! Ironic, really.

Hoards of climate refugees seeking water to drink and food to eat, let alone adequate shelter, will increasingly find hostile locals in the regions where they seek relief. That is already happening in Europe and the US/Mexico areas. But what is going to really exacerbate things is that the water and food in those regions will be shrinking due to soil depletion, ground water loss, and, of course, increasingly unfavorable climate conditions.

Where we are is in a system (all the parts are connected through various feedback mechanisms) that is suffering from multiple failure modes all at once. But, that begs the question: Why?

To get some background and context there are two books that might be of interest to you. They are actually only representative of a growing literature on the anomalous conditions in our civilization. These books do not answer the Why question, but they do examine the dysfunctions in major social institutions which, in turn, may point to the answer. And, then there is one book that might be seen to provide some response to the Why question.

The first is "Against Democracy" by Jason Brennan. From the book jacket: "Jason Brennan (Ph.D., 2007) is Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business, and by courtesy, Professor of Philosophy, at Georgetown University. He specializes in issues at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and economics." Basically Brennan provides some very reasonable arguments for why democracy, representative or otherwise, fails to deliver on the promises it supposedly makes. He does not suggest that any other forms of governance that have been tried, historically, have done any better in terms of providing a social milieu in support of the citizens. In fact, quite the opposite. Rather he promotes something he calls Epistomocracy, meaning governance by the knowledgeable. In order to hold office or even vote for office holders, citizens would have to be provably knowledgeable in subjects of economics and civics (at least). This is not too different from what Jefferson claimed, that democracy depends on the participants to be well-educated, where "well" meant having a grasp of the humanities and not just some technical knowledge. Brennan is a little more specific in terms of what kind of education, but the sentiment is the same. Of course, the problem is that the majority of people in any society are generally ignorant and, it would seem, increasingly stupid as well. They certainly show no propensity to learn from experience, let alone textbooks.

Brennan paints a pretty bleak picture about the prospects of anything we would recognize as true democracy, where all citizens get to participate in politics and governance, if they want. Judging by the political evolution of the major world democracies, with so-called hard-right strongmen winning elections and promoting things like effective plutocracy, it can certainly be argued that Brennan is onto something.

Remember: stupidity and ignorance (including downright rejection of science) prevail.

The second book tackles another sacred cow of the modern world view, capitalism. Capitalism is bigger than democracy. Capitalism can thrive under regimes of autocracy, even presumptive communism! But according to Wolfgang Streek, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research and Professor of Sociology at Cologne University, in "How Will Capitalism End?", capitalism everywhere is already in serious decline and will, as is happening with democracy for political power, fail to deliver the goods. Moreover, capitalism is self-destructing. Marx, of course, famously claimed the same thing. And much of Streek's arguments align with some aspects of Marxism. But there are significant differences and Streek does not see some version of socialism replacing capitalism when the latter falls (Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez notwithstanding). In fact Streek seems to be saying that while something might eventually come along that restores a social political-economy of some kind, he doesn't see anything on the horizon.

The book primarily examines the multiple internal inconsistencies within neoliberal capitalism (as practiced in the West), some of which are also present in, for example, the Russian oligarchic and the Chinese collectivist versions. [Another major problem with capitalism is presented by Naomi Klein in "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate".] The bottom line in all cases is that the continued production and expansion of capital inherently leads to its own destruction. A simple example of this, one I have written about frequently, is the notion that endless economic (capital) growth is a physical impossibility simply because resources are not infinite and wastes accumulate.

Capitalism and democracy, in the end, should be about the governance of an economic system that supports human existence and they are diametrically opposite in terms of the distributive functions of either. Democracy seeks to distribute the wealth, capitalism seeks to concentrate it in a few hands. They both interact in complex ways (so does plutocracy and collectivist autocracy). Their inherent deficiencies and dysfunctional designs as well as their natural antagonism contribute to each other's destruction. They are holding hands tripping down the path that leads to a cliff in the fog. The so-called leaders are completely clueless - some actually think, for example, that a Green New Deal is a possible solution!

What both books highlight is the role of human stupidity and ignorance as the underlying causal factors in the failures of these two realms. The third book I shamelessly recommend, is my own that attempts to answer the question as to why are human beings so stupid and ignorant? The answer, I claim, has to do with a retardation in what had been the evolution of the cognitive capacity that makes us as human as we are, our capacity for gaining and using wisdom, or sapience. The title is: "A Theory of Sapience: Using Systems Science to Understand the Nature of Wisdom and the Human Mind."
 [note: this penultimate draft will be available for free download for several more months, but Cambridge Scholars Books will be publishing a revised print version shortly and the MAHB library version will be removed. Also you can catch my interview on Doomstead Diner in which I talk a bit about this book.]

My thesis is that there are not just three mental domains, intelligence, creativity, and affect, the classical ones psychologists have studied. There is a fourth (more recently coming under scrutiny in psychology), wisdom. The latter is characterized as superior judgment and intuitions with respect to complex, messy, or wicked social problems. My research found that sapience, the brain capacity to attain wisdom over one's lifetime, depends on several styles or modes of thinking (especially subconscious thinking). These are strong moral sentiments meaning a sense of conscience, strategic, and systems thinking. In a broad survey of the literature on the psychology of wisdom these factors stand out as common to most studies in one form or another. When all four of these factors, judgment, moral sentiment, strategic, and systems thinking are in full bloom, the individual is in a good position to learn from life's experiences and to use that knowledge, that is wisdom, to provide the most helpful solutions to problems. They have learned deep mental models of how the world works, can think in terms of the long-term and the broadest space (strategic), can think systemically about all of the factors and interactions that are involved in the problem, and are strongly motivated to help their fellow humans.

Wisdom is what puts intelligence and creativity to positive work for other humans' benefit. Without it, intelligence and creativity are left to be used as maliciously as we witness in practice. Some of the most evil people (meaning selfish, self-centered, greedy, etc.) who are successful, in a financial sense, are often very clever. They have to be to be devious enough to take advantage of their fellow humans. And those taken advantage of are just not clever enough to recognize it.

Sapience can be dulled and thwarted. The designs of our capitalistic system does a great job of that. But its strength is based on strong genetic influence. Given a sufficient level of sapience, an individual can overcome the programming of society and learn to use their intelligence and creativity to not be stupid and ignorant. Unfortunately, high sapience is a rare commodity in human mentation. The average human possesses just enough to possess vague consciousness of being conscious. Just enough to possess the typical traits of our species such as language and an ability to solve not-too-complicated local problems. Just enough sapience to call our species Homo sapiens. But that isn't enough.

The problems humanity has created for itself come directly from exercising cleverness to gain convenience and power. No thinking about future consequences. No concern for egalitarian ideals, No sense of how everything affects everything else. We just plow ahead full speed to find new ways to dominate the planet. And so here we are.

Happy Equinox

 

Summer Solstice, 2019 - How the Problem Could be Solved

There Is a Technical and Feasible Solution to Reducing CO₂ - But...

This is not a claim that we can solve the climate change problem. It certainly isn't a solution that will allow us to continue BAU. I cling to the belief that civilization as we know it will collapse. But just as an exercise in contrastive argument to show how improbable our taking action would be I offer this tidbit.

According to the 2018 IPCC Report: 1.5 Degrees Centigrade, not only must we get to zero carbon emissions but we will have to actively remove CO₂ from the atmosphere so that we have what are called negative emissions. This will be necessary (maybe not sufficient) to avoid the worst catastrophes from climate change. I will take it as a given that we all understand the proposals for reducing emissions. Longtime readers will know my skepticism regarding the use of alternative energies to replace carbon fuels and go on happily producing junk. I maintain that that side of the equation will involve significant changes to our way of living and especially our beliefs in capitalism's magic. The latter will come to be seen as waving the magic wand and kill a planet!

So, taken as a given that we could somehow significantly reduce our use of carbon-based fuels, the other factor in the equation for negative emissions is the removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Here is an outline of a feasible technical solution. I claim it is feasible only in the sense that the resources and technology to accomplish it do exist in sufficiency to get the job done. However, naturally, there are caveats.

First let me give some background for the solution. When I was a sailor on board a nuclear submarine I was responsible for keeping the CO₂ scrubbers functioning. This machine absorbed the gas directly from the ventilation system via a chemical process. There are several different chemical methods for capturing CO₂ from air and new approaches are being investigated. The actual absorption is the easy part, takes little energy to blow air through a mist of the chemical. But then you have a chemical that can no longer be used for that purpose. What you need to do then is to heat the chemical to a high temperature after which the CO₂ is released again, but in high concentration. On the submarine we had two great advantages for doing this. First we had a nuclear reactor to provide all of the heat we needed to recuperate the absorbent. And to dispose of the CO₂ we just pumped it overboard into the sea. At the depths we generally ran, the CO₂ would harmlessly bubble upward but get dissolved in sea water so that no bubbles reached the surface. For CO₂ capture and sequestration of the gas in the atmosphere an different scheme needs to be found.

People have looked at sequestration methods such as pumping the gas into caverns or oil wells to dispose of it. But this is risky. And we don't know for sure that it would stay put. An alternative is to mineralize it by combining the CO₂ with other chemicals, such as calcium to form calcium carbonate, which is a solid and can safely be disposed of.

The major reason that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) schemes are not being put into use, say for removing CO₂ from coal-fired power plant chimneys, is that it takes considerable energy to restore the absorbent and compress the gas, about a third of the total produced by the plant. Schemes for direct air capture (DAC) would take considerably more energy since they would need to be designed to circulate considerably more air per unit time than a simpler CCS approach would. They would need to run huge air compressors and that would take a lot of additional energy.

Thus if CCS is not practical, one should ask how could DAC be practical. It was the association between the submarine and the CO₂ scrubbers that triggered a thought.

Between the US, Russia, and NATO, there are perhaps four hundred operational submarines in service (most are meant to be missile deployment platforms) and perhaps half as many decommissioned sitting around. The nuclear reactors on-board are primarily used for propulsion and internal electricity generation. The scheme for marine-based nuclear plants is feasible because the boats are surrounded by cold water, used as the heat sink. But what if you didn't use the power for propulsion? What if you parked the boats in permanent locations out to sea and used the power to run really large CO₂ scrubbers?

Ballistic missile subs would be ideal. Take out the missile silos and build in the scrubber plant. Fast attacks would have to be outfitted with a side-barge to carry the equipment. They should probably retain their propulsion systems in case they need to move to get out of a big storm. But otherwise the heat and electricity generated from the reactor would be used for DAC (note the subs would not sit fully submerged of course!)

Other surface nuclear ships could be similarly repurposed. Either some of them could run scrubbers and minerilzation plants, or be converted to cargo ships to transport supplies to the subs and calcium carbonate back to land.

In other words, "make clean air, not war." It is altogether likely that the other militaries of the nation-states will similarly have to be repurposed to fight climate change. They may have to also maintain internal order when things get really bad. [To see that DAC is in the realm of feasiblity, check out the research at Arizona State U. on "negative carbon emissions."]

The nuclear navy has been going for over fifty years with an incredible safety record (short of a sub sinking) with respect to the operations of the reactors. They are of a design that keeps them working for years before needing refueling.

But...

It is hard to imagine a world in which militaries are so repurposed to fight for the survival of humanity when it isn't an alien invading force that they are fighting. This is especially the case in today's political climate where complete idiots seem to be taking over the governments. The US's idiot-in-chief still claims global warming isn't an issue.

We will do nothing to avoid catastrophic climate chaos, I am pretty sure, as long as such clowns and fools are in charge, and as long as there are enough less-than-sapient citizens who want them in charge. Even the so-called progressives (Democrats, social or otherwise) still buy into capitalism in some form and economic growth as a goal. Out ideologies are going to be our undoing.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but consider that in order to make the above scenario possible it would probably be necessary to have a mass uprising to throw out the current cadre of politicians and put a cadre of scientists who actually understand physics and reality in charge. A complete breakdown of civilization would almost certainly mean that the subs would either be used for their current purpose (firing missles) or be lost to access for the repurposing suggested.

You can, perhaps, see why I am not optimistic about the future of civilization. This kind of analysis, consider what might actually work in the real world and then ask if we humans would actually be willing to undertake the actions necessary, consistently ends with of a resounding, of course not. Every day I witness human behaviors the keep reinforcing my view that we humans, collectively, are seriously lacking in the mental ability to have and use wisdom. Instead of adopting and using the Precautionary Principle or the Golden Rule as guides for living, we are stuck in "what's in it for me" mentality. If I make as much money as I can I won't have to worry about anything. It will be interesting to watch Wall Street bankers chewing on their dollar bills and stock certificates for food.

It is somewhat encouraging that climate change is taking center stage for a number of the Democratic candidates in the US presidential race. Finally (perhaps too late), some politicians are realizing that we have a problem. But their visions are still constrained by their ideological commitment to capitalism, even Bernie, for example, still advocates for economic growth. He just wants to redistribute the wealth more "equitably". Since they are politicians they have to tell people what they want to hear. Note that the "Green New Deal" doesn't even come close to solving the problem that we have. Generating more wealth by building a bunch of solar panels is going to come to be seen as the cruelest lie of all.

Could There Be Any Hope?

My thanks to Paul Chefurka for his comments that have prompted me to share some of my more recent thinking. As with Paul's thinking, mine has been evolving. So for what it might be worth...

The hope of which I speak is for the genus Homo, not our current civilization. The later is almost certainly going to collapse and likely come to completion within the next two to three decades. The collapse has already begun as evidenced by global events [some of my earlier musings here]. It is amazing to me how the mainstream media continue to consume the political/economic story about how the economy is doing so well even if growth is slow by historical standards. I take it as just a reflection of how so many people hold out a sense of hope for civilization as we have it today to continue, albeit as a green new deal or even business as usual.

Such hope is misplaced in my view. It will allow people to avoid planning for survival and how to reorganize some semblance of a future social system. Humans are necessarily social creatures and some kind of social system is essentially mandatory for human beings to maintain their humanity. Of course, also in my view, this lack of forethought by the majority of humans will solve the overpopulation problem, painfully. So those persons who do not harbor a false hope, can see that any civilization remotely resembling what we have today is doomed to collapse, will be considering what actions they should take to survive said collapse (or see to it that their offspring have a chance) and be ready to execute their plan [Collapse 3.0]. Realize that neither I nor anyone can tell you what that plan should be. Collapses are, almost by definition, chaos. And in any chaotic dynamic one cannot predict exactly what will happen, or when. The best advice I can give is that one should be vigilant, observe what is happening in the world and, particularly pay attention to the rates of change, and maintain an ability to proactively adapt to the consequences.

I strongly suspect there will be survivors. I also believe the best general approach to survival will involve a group effort; strength in numbers as it were. In all likelihood these groups will survive in pockets. And the most successful will have preserved a variety of hand tools with which they can construct some form of social center. I do not believe humans will return necessarily to pure hunter-gatherer groups. Some form of agriculture will be involved (as long-time readers will know I promote the concepts of permaculture).

Despite the inevitability of collapse of our technological civilization, there are a number of things that society should be doing right now to moderate the rate and severity of the collapse, thus giving some better chances for survival of some. Bear in mind, I do not believe these actions will actually be taken because the extent of true sapience, and the wisdom it entails, in the population, especially the ruling class, is at an absolute minimum. If it were otherwise, these actions would already be undertaken. Or, perhaps, the predicaments we face wouldn't even exist in the first place.

I divide these actions into near-term, intermediate-term, and long-term periods. Some things we need to be doing right now. Others need to be started now but will not show results for a decade or more. And some things, like reorganizing our social systems and our political-economy, represent a transition to a new kind of organization of life itself.

Near-term
These are pretty radical, but absolutely essential just to slow down the rates of change that will be principle drivers of collapse. They all need to be done in parallel. They are all priority one.

The first, and most radical in light of the predominant economic paradigm, we need to cease capitalism and profit-making. That also means ceasing consumption-based commerce. Yes it will destroy the economy. Jobs will be lost but see below for new jobs that would be created. The point is, the economy depends on energy and we get the vast majority of that from burning fossil fuels. This is a simple fact. If you grow the economy, or make profits, you will be producing more greenhouse gas. The economy has to slow way down [those of you familiar with the concept of 'power' will recognize that it is the rate of energy consumption per unit time that is the real culprit here: a slower economic process will consume less overall energy and lower the rate of carbon emissions.] Capitalists must relinquish their cherished notions of growing their wealth. Indeed...

What wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the 10% needs to be confiscated (or at minimum heavily taxed) and used to provide minimal incomes for the bottom 25% and used to help finance the other steps given below. All governments would need to coordinate their tax policies, but all citizens will need to pay up to their abilities. Its gonna cost.

Start building and deploying CO² scrubbers powered by nuclear reactors that produce mineral-absorbed solids, calcium carbonate, for example, that can be safely buried. I know all of the arguments against nuclear given by my green friends but I can't see anything else that can be done from a technological perspective that can begin to have an impact on reducing the carbon loading that already exists. We know that this is actually feasible since we have a whole fleet of nuclear-powered submarines that use such scrubbers to purge CO² from the air so that the subs can remain underwater for months at a time. Building a set of dedicated reactors, like those in the submarines, should be a straightforward job. Deploying these units will be a little more problematic but is not insurmountable. What would be needed for this as well as the other near-term projects (below) will be a super-WWII mobilization effort. It would require diverting much government spending away from current programs. And it would need to be an international cooperative effort. France, the US, and Japan can build the reactors, Germany, Russia, and China can build the scrubbers. And many other NATO and southern hemisphere countries can provide logistics support in getting them transported and installed, operations, and then burying the minerals. There are many additional aspects that would require attention, such as training nuclear engineers and operators.

And, most of all, it would require substantial sacrifices from the citizenry. But it is all technically, logistically, and operationally feasible. Tactically, it is another question. And since there is no strategic thinking going on anywhere in the governments of the world... You can see why I am so pessimistic.

Cease all timber operations, especially in the tropic zones. Begin a massive effort to replant forests in both tropic and temperate zones. Cease all beef production. Allow some dairy but only with grass-fed cows (to reduce their belching and farting!) Start a massive project to restore soils to natural fertility. The forest and soils restoration will involve significant manual labor and lots of jobs. These projects need to be started immediately since their beneficial impact will take time to realize.

There is no way in hell that the political system is going to make these things happen. In all likelihood it will require a takeover by the militaries, a suspension of some liberties, and the establishment of a council of wise elders to provide the strategic leadership that is needed. Anyone know where we could find such people? Hint: with a few notable exceptions don't look at the current class of politicos. They have all pretty much been corrupted by money and power.

Intermediate-term
One of the primary tasks for the next several decades, if not centuries, will be to ensure the continuation of the work started in the short-term. A key to this will be the revamping of the education system to focus on training for skills needed for survival and for continuing the operations of the CO² abatement and ecosystems restoration projects. Many of these jobs will involve a considerable amount of manual labor, to be sure. But some number of workers will need more advanced technical knowledge and this will help keep our scientific and engineering knowledge relevant and preserved.

Long-term
Over the next century mankind must undertake a project to completely restructure the form of the human social system. This means the structure of how we form communities, how we produce material goods and services, how we exchange these, and, most importantly, how we form a governance subsystem to apply social self-regulation to the whole system. This latter is absolutely necessary in order to maintain a proper relation with the whole of the Ecos. To do this we have many hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is our own innate nature. We are still substantially great apes. Our species did cross a threshold of consciousness in acquiring sapience to the degree we have. But that is not enough. For many centuries now we have been experimenting with forms of governance, cultural norms (mores), and institutions meant to apply social self-regulation in order to reduce our penchant for cut-throat competition and our natural tendencies to let our emotional states be bent by in-group/out-group psychologies [The Evolution of Governance]. We have had some partial successes, thankfully. But so much more needs to be done. The extent of our failings are enshrined in the rise to power of right-wing strongmen like Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil (to name just a few). These people are motivated by deep-seated hatreds for out-groups and some kind of sense of (delusional) superiority. They, and their followers, are prime examples of the relative weakness of sapience in a large number of our species, a large enough number to have a negative influence on our social discourse.

In the long-run humanity's only real hope is to work at increasing the level of sapience for the majority. This is in contrast to the typical notion of increasing intelligence in the population. Intelligence is not the whole story of good decision-making. Some creativity is needed as well (intelligence + creativity = cleverness). But it is cleverness that has gotten us into our current predicament. We can invent clever solutions to problems, like rapid transportation of people and bulk weight by burning fossil fuels, but never wisely ask what of the long-term consequences of doing so. It takes superior sapience to acquire superior wisdom. And it takes the latter to even ask the right questions about long-term consequences, let alone come up with veridical scenarios of the future.

How sapience might be increased in the course of time is a somewhat complex proposition. Some of it has to do with culture and acculturation. We humans are already past the threshold of sapience, but how far past that threshold is not known. My claims are based on observations of the current foolishness that I witness in the world. It may be possible that the average human is actually more sapient than I give credit but is hindered in development by the kind of culture in which we live. In that case, there is hope that more people would develop more wisdom in life, if they grew up in a culture that valued and lived wisdom (ancient cultures, for example, venerated elders for their wisdom). Instead of being fed on the promotion of material wealth, if children and young adults lived in a culture of wisdom, perhaps more people would gain wisdom themselves. The problem is the lure of materiality that draws cultures away from that ideal. Modern day Japan is an example. Not that long ago young Japanese children were taught to venerate the elders. But a quick look at the developments in modern Japanese culture suggests that the promotion of wisdom is a thin veneer in a society. Japanese young adults are being very quick to adopt Western cultural standards, which are about as far as one can get from wisdom.

So a cultural environment might help to some degree. Nurture might provide part of the answer. But I am strongly of the opinion (not, I should hasten to say, backed up by data but only observations!) that the genetic propensities for the biological aspects, the genetic basis for brain development of sapience, is at fault. You can read most of my arguments for this position here which is a short version of my forthcoming book on the subject that will be available soon - announcement shortly).

In the long-run, we humans will need to address the genetic basis of sapience and explore the potentials it has evolutionarily. I have become convinced that our brains can evolve further to produce a much superior form of sapience and, thus, a much greater capacity for acquiring wisdom - veridical knowledge of how the world works. This does not necessarily translate into an increase in overall size (childbirth is already a painful act). If my conjectures regarding the part of the prefrontal cortex responsible for the management of sapience is correct, then it will be the relative sizes of that area (called Brodmann area 10) compared with other cortical areas that will produce the increase. This can be managed not by necessarily evolving new cell types, but by the developmental program governing that area either starting its development sooner in fetal life, or keeping it going longer, or both. That means that a minor change in the governing network of genes would be all that is necessary.

In the future, humanity needs to become involved in its own evolution such that it supports the further development of the qualities of sapience. The benefits should be quite profound. We do not need a planet full of clever geniuses or athletic Adonis-like people. We need, desperately, a planet full of people able to see reality as it is and lay plans for behaviors that lead to sustainable life for ourselves and for the rest of the Ecos. We need true wisdom. We need a new species of humans that is eusapient, truly wise.

How this is to be accomplished is subject to much conjecture. I am not in a position to prescribe a pathway. It may entail genetic engineering (now that we have the CRISPR technology!) or selective breeding (assortative mating). Who knows? It may involve all of the above and more. But one thing is very clear to me. Humanity must actively seek to further its own evolution beyond mere sapience. Its great that we have language and can talk to one another. But the content of our speech must be valuable and lead to better outcomes with respect to our service to the planet and consequent sustainability as a genus.

These days my interests have turned to thoughts about what an ideal social system for humanity might look like and how it might evolve. This comes out of an exercise to systemically analyze our current condition and apply some of my findings from a systems analysis of things like naturally occurring "economies" (e.g., metabolism in cells) and "governance" (brains) systems. Nature is replete with examples of evolved organization that we should consider when thinking about the human condition and future.

Let me recommend an excellent book by Tyler Volk at NYU called "Quarks to Cultures: How We Came to Be", Columbia University Press, New York. Tyler paints a very clear picture of the universal evolution of higher and higher complexity in stages of organization that is very similar to what I have termed "ontogenesis", he calls it "combogenesis". He and I have started a conversation about what we think the next stage (after nation-states) might entail, what kind of humans will be involved, what sort of social system they will have, and how the collective of humanity might actually provide something like a planet-scale consciousness (become the brain of Gaia!).

I'll be exploring this more in blogs to come, I think.

Spring Equinox - 2019: Climate Chaos and More

I honestly did not expect to be a witness to the end of civilization when I started blogging those many years ago. Though I thought I could clearly see where the trends (energy, climate, social) were heading and tried to lay out the arguments for why we needed to change our ways, I thought that the really bad outcomes would post-date my life. I grieved for my children, of course. But never really thought I would be witness to the end game itself.

Now I'm not so sure. In fact I think that recent developments in climate science, energy science, and political science make it clear that we have entered the end game already. My Italian colleague, Ugo Bardi, speaks of the Seneca Cliff phenomena (Seneca the Roman philosopher who noted that prosperity builds gradually and then declines rapidly as if falling off a cliff). My own simulation models of civilization show a gradual build up of wealth with a sudden falling down once the limits of growth are reached. I just didn't realize how close to the edge of the cliff we were.

We will not be able to save civilization as we know it by any kind of technological magic. The rate of onset of climate change (notice the weather anomalies of late?) and the catastrophic collapse of fossil fuel energies (fracked wells are falling in production as we speak) not to mention the collapse of fisheries, soil depletions, and the insane left-vs-right political strife all mark the clear signatures of collapse, but this time on a global scale. 

On the energy front, the hope was that alternative energy sources such as solar or wind would replace carbon-based fuels to provide the kind of power we would need to carry on with civilization as we understood it. That is not happening. Not only is the rate of conversion from carbon to green insufficient, relative to the rate of climate disruption, for example, but we still have no real certainty that these alternatives would ever be able to provide the substitute power needed to keep civilization going, even if in some reduced material form, and provide the energy needed to adapt to the new climate regimen (and provide clean water, etc.). Its a race and humanity is losing.

I'm calling the game over. I just cannot see a solution that has humanity going on in any kind of lifestyle that we have grown accustomed to in the 21st century.

Its all about the trends and relative rates of change. Its all about the momentum. Global warming is baked into the cake at this point. Even if we were to miraculously find a way to extract and sequester CO² from our atmosphere we still could not prevent catastrophic warming. We waited too late to react.

I've taken as many factors into account as I can. I've processed the data as best I can. I hope I am wrong in my conclusions, but so far I haven't been (except for thinking I would be gone before all of the s**t  hit the fan). Go back in the archives of this blog if you don't believe me. I've called it and it is coming to pass. I'm very sorry I could not have been more effective in convincing more and more influential people that these systemic issues were coming to a head.

My advice is head for the hills.

On a more hopeful note, those that do head for the hills may find ways to survive in spite of a civilization collapse. I'm not predicting the near-term extinction of our species, just the loss of a technological society. Indeed, such a collapse would be necessary to save some of the biosphere for future efflorescence of new species, as has happened in previous major die-offs. What I sincerely hope is that some of the survivors will attempt to preserve knowledge, key knowledge (as in systems science) with which to restart the social process, but the next time, with understanding of the mistakes we have made, like blind belief in capitalism, materialism, and economic growth.

I'm certain I won't make it through a collapse (too old). But I hope some of my offerings in this blog and in my book with coauthor Mike Kalton do. The principles of systems science hold the key to re-discovering the other sciences. Survivors and their progeny will be well served by that knowledge. A straightforward example is the nature of permaculture. Systems science is built into the concepts and practices - treating a self-sustaining community as a system. If you want to enhance your progeny's chances of survival, start a permaculture commune. The descriptions can be found in the archives of this blog.

And, good luck.