home » evolution

Copenhagen and the price of civilization

by Paula | 12 December 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: evolution, systems

Last night I was listening to Democracy Now on my way home from my nephew’s birthday, mainly because WPSU was the only station that came in clearly on the radio, as the road from my brother’s house is sandwiched between two of those long Pennsylvania ridges. Anyway, I normally wouldn’t listen to Democracy Now as I find Ms. Goodman to be every bit as clueless and irrelevant an ideologue as her counterparts on the right; but in the interest of curiosity I gave it a listen. And I must say, I am deeply disappointed with what’s coming out of Copenhagen.

If you haven’t tried this yet, give it a whirl: track down coverage of Copenhagen from genuinely diverse sources. It’s like watching a bunch of monkeys in a burning cage battling over who’s going to get burned to death first. The rich monkeys are farthest from the flames and they’re not willing to trade places with the poor monkeys. The poor monkeys, for their part, jump and shout and shrill about the unfairness of it all. And meanwhile, not a single monkey dares voice the observation that all are trapped in a cage, that they all got in there somehow which means there must be a door through which to leave.

But no one at Copenhagen dare utter the truth: environmental degradation is the price of civilization. There’s just simply no way around this. There has never been a sustainable civilization — never, not even once, ever, in all of human history.

Without stopping to consider what they were doing, various political and economic deciders over the past 50 or so years have enlarged civilization into something that has never before happened: a global civilization that envelopes nearly every square inch of both land and water on the planet. Global environmental devastation is the only possible result.

Reallocating capital is not going to fix this. Sleek new technologies are not going to fix it. Cap-and-trade is not going to fix it, increased population density is not going to fix it — and for that matter, a massive global reduction in population won’t fix it either.

The only thing that can fix the problem of anthropogenic environmental devastation is to do away with civilization. That means either a return to hunter-forager style societies or the development of a new kind of civilization, so different it would probably require a word other than “civilization.”

Lots of people subscribe to the notion that a return to hunter-forager life is appropriate, and I completely understand why and sympathize with their desires. I personally am not too keen on permanent camping, however, so I tend to focus on the other direction.

Civilization is a system that is completely dependent upon material inputs from the environment in order to exist. Moreover, the civilization system doesn’t just simply sit on top of the biosphere and suck up its life force. It sits laterally on the planet next to the biosphere and competes with it at its point of origin: sunlight.

In any topside ecosystem, plants draw nutrients from the soil and combine these with the energy of sunlight in a process call photosynthesis. The result of photosynthesis is the building of plant cells, which we see as leaves, stems, flowers, seeds and such.

Plants are called producers because they almost magically take the invisible and make it into something material and useful. The nutrients and energy they originally used are stored in their cells, which get eaten by primary consumers — herbivores such as rabbits, deer, and seed-eating birds. These animals concentrate the stored nutrients and solar energy stored in the plants’ biomass as muscle and organs. These, in turn, are eaten by secondary consumers, which are carnivores such as cats, hawks, canines, snakes and such, which concentrate the stored nutrients and sunlight even more densely. Decomposers break down the waste from these and return nutrients to the soil. And the cycle continues.

Civilization usurps the normal flow of sunlight and nutrients through an ecosystem by wiping out all plant life on a given piece of land and replacing these with a handful of producers that serve its own ends. These of course are the cereal grains: wheat, rice, corn, oats and the like.

Then at harvest the sunlight and nutrients stored in the cereal grains are divorced utterly from the natural food chain. The energy and nutrients are converted into gold and silver, representing the sunlight and soil nutrients contained in the grain — in other words, representing their value, a thing that does not exist outside of civilization. The gold and silver are then systematically concentrated among fewer individuals at increasingly removed distances from the grains’ point of origin, a dim reflection of the flow of solar energy and nutrients through a proper food chain. And because there is no way to turn waste directly into gold or silver — it is waste because it has no value — the waste piles up with no civilized counterpart to shit-eating bugs and microorganisms. (How uncivilized!)

For this reason, any response that does not address the bifurcation point that is agriculture completely misses the mark. Even the ecovillage and/or subsistence-farming-for-all “solutions” miss the mark because these do not address the problem’s point of origin. At best, these are like monkeys in a cage who strive to keep the fires burning at a level that poses no immediate threat. That is, until some other monkey gets thrown into the cage who decides to build the fire bigger.

If there is ever to be such a thing as an ecologically sustainable civilization, it must begin by not only measuring the value undisturbed ecosystems have to civilization, but also by somehow making that value available for use within civilization. In our current global economic and ecological circumstances — arguments about “what should be” or “what shouldn’t be” are useless, we can only start where we are — that means monetizing the value of undisturbed ecosystems.

If this can be done, it would mean big corporations stop plundering and start replanting because it is more profitable to do so. It would mean there’d be more money to be had in reducing carbon emissions than in creating them. It would level the playing field between rich nations and poor nations, because poor nations haven’t had the money to plunder their landscapes the way we rich nations have. It would mean coal left in the ground would generate more jobs and more returns on investment than coal pulled out of the ground and burned. In short, it would erase the bifurcation point that agriculture currently represents, and align civilization with normal, natural Earth processes. It would allow us monkeys to not only open and leave the cage, but to then turn around and put out the fire properly.

This is why I focus on business. Such a re-alignment isn’t going to come from academia, or activism, or any political process. None of these can even imagine anything other than left versus right inside the cage. Business, however, is not so limited. Money, like water, takes the shape of its container, and it is business that is the container for money. It would take just one person to profit once by leaving an ecosystem alone in order for that business model to spread through the economy. It would allow civilization to evolve, to adapt, to our given realities.

Such business plans do exist. It’s very unfortunate they get so little air, and certainly will not have any place at Copenhagen. Thinking outside the paradigm is nearly impossible but there are some who can manage it. I do hope Copenhagen spurs them to start speaking up. 

An emerging, adaptive business vanguard

by Paula | 25 October 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: peak oil, evolution

Charles Smith made the observation in W&NM that in the new context of financial and resource decline, “…marketing and customer services are one… Customer service and the community of customers/visitors/stakeholders is the same interface, the same site, the same paradigm.”

Beagle Research Group, a marketing & business analysis firm located in Massachusetts, has come to very similar conclusions in its white paper Peak Oil & Sustainability: CRM’s Potential Impact [PDF]. Beagle gets down to the nitty-gritty with specific implementation strategies for merging what are currently separate marketing, sales, and customer service functions. Its focus is reducing costs internally and helping customers do the same, where Smith’s focus is building a sustainable clientele through trust and open communications.

What is so interesting here is that both envision a similar kind of digital infrastructure, though they approach the subject from very different perspectives and, as far as I know, are not associated in any way. These two works support and reinforce the considerations and conclusions of the other and offer not only the broad, theoretical brushstrokes of a low-energy business paradigm shift but also the first rough drafts of a new model for energy-constrained, outward-facing business operations.

We need to pay attention to this. These two works may well constitute the first stirrings of an adaptive business vanguard. I certainly have not seen this kind of attention from other business sources.

My narrative, or, the dawning of ‘homo humilis humilis’

by Paula | 24 October 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: collapse, evolution

As humans we are wired to navigate the world via stories and narrative, and I am no exception. My overriding motivation comes from a very clear narrative that has cobbled itself together in my head over the years, and I want to lay out that narrative here to provide context both for myself and for whoever happens by. I’m sure none of this is particularly original… it’s been very heartening along the way to discover others who’ve come to the same conclusions as me, often long before I ever had.

My narrative is simply this: the project we call “civilization” is an evolutionary dead end for the human species. It is in the process of drawing to a close, and our species’ only available response is adaptation to this reality and evolution into something new.

This view is, at its heart, both primitivist and biblical-with-a-small-“b.” In fact, for me “primitivist” and “biblical” (with a small “b”) are one in the same. Each offers the same set of observations, made by two very different and separate groups of people: one witnessed the birth of the evolutionary dead end as outsiders, and one is witness to its close from within.

Primitivists contend that the narrative of civilization we in Western culture have been taught is the view of those who’ve benefited from it at the expense of those who have not. The story that tells us the advent of agriculture gave rise to science, the arts, and all manner of imperial glory is technically correct; however, it negates the experience of those who provided the fuel for all of this to happen. The leisure time required to develop science and to produce art, and the energy required to build both the infrastructure and the wealth of empires, came at the expense of the vast majority people, most of whom toiled as slaves, serfs, and servants; or who suffered the brutal seizure of their land, resources, and families in the service of those few ruling from the top of some far-off, extreme social hierarchy.

Moreover, agriculture itself was not something people took up because of its obvious superiority over hunting and gathering. It was either a stopgap measure in the face of climate instability, or was a maladaptive cultural mutation born of a new, abstract cognition. The archaeological record clearly shows that when people switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture their health plummeted dramatically, while the quantity and intensity of their labor increased equally dramatically. It is a mystery why anyone would choose such a lifestyle unless he was compelled to do so against his will. This is why indigenous tribes universally resist assimilation into Western colonialization: they have not been inured to the misery of civilization and to them assimilation represents a living hell, a fate worse than death.

This view is substantially identical to the biblical account of the fall of mankind from grace. It is also a good entrance point into biblical considerations stripped of their obscene, bloody religious baggage. Setting aside the racism, sexism, violence, and the legions of atrocities that have been committed under the bible’s aegis, the biblical account becomes simply the oral history of a particular people who later committed that history to writing. It is a cultural artifact that carries a staggering weight for those of us who’ve inherited Western culture, if we can unpack it dispassionately.

The story of the fall is a tale told from the point of view of an observer, a narrator, someone not involved in the events as they unfold. It is the story of something that happened to someone else, and this someone else’s story is, literarily speaking, exactly the same as the story we Westerners tell ourselves about our origins. It was this someone else who once lived as wild tribes; this someone else who took up agriculture; who began to settle into villages, towns and cities; who experienced the rise of deities and kings; who created a system that eventually became the grand empires of the ancient near and middle east. Westerners, and Christian Westerners in particular, like to identify with the biblical observer and to think of this “someone else” as, well, someone else — the pagans of old against whom the righteous God has set his judgment. We fail to see that we are the “someone else;” we are not the biblical observer, we are the observed. The pagans of old are our cultural forebears, and our culture is the continuation of theirs. We are the irredeemably fallen. Our empires are not the shining, crowning achievements of our species; they are instead the manifestation of a deep illness first identified by the biblical observer.

The biblical story symbolizes the moment of our infection in the image of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit: upon eating it, they experienced shame because they were naked. This is not related to sex as the church has insisted for millennia. Rather, it is a fairly simple illustration lost on us today. Shame occurs only in the presence of an other; Adam (the adama or “first man”) suddenly perceived an other where there had been none before. He perceived himself as separate from the living world around him, and, for the first time in Earth’s multibillion-year history, introduced a massive fracture into the unity of our planet’s natural systems.

This is indeed the fruition of a new knowledge, just as the biblical account states. It is also a self-chosen death sentence, again in line with the biblical story: “On the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” No species can survive apart from the natural systems of Earth. And yet all of Western culture’s frenetic empire-building has been little more than an attempt to stave off the inevitable death this separation ensures.

However, the very fact that we Westerners have glommed onto the outsiders’ account of the beginning of our own demise indicates that somewhere in the recesses of our cultural memory, and perhaps coded into our DNA as biological memory, we understand the truth. We do have an idea of what it means to be a part of a living, evolving, unified, organic, self-organizing natural system; we can intuit what participation in such a system would entail, and we can feel in our bones that an animating force really does flow through everything, propelling us to seize hold of life and joy. But in our culture fallen so far from the graces of the natural world, our inclination to join in the rhythm and flow of Earth’s living systems is tragically thwarted without our realization, and instead manifests as free-market capitalism.

Capitalist economies function in ways strikingly similar to ecosystems. Money parallels the solar energy that producers turn into the materials which primary, secondary and tertiary consumers consume, concentrating into denser quantities as it rises up the food chain. Innovation parallels mutation and gives rise to new industries, which parallel species, even to the point of displaying features of punctuated equilibrium. Our drive to accumulate money is ultimately the same drive that propels salmon upriver or that bends a plant in the direction of sunlight — except our fallen culture has perverted this drive into greed. The “invisible hand” of the marketplace bears a far greater resemblance to indigenous and tribal peoples’ conception of an animating spirit-force than to the avenging judge in the sky to which critics liken it. Environmentalists wish to leave ecosystems undisturbed for the exact and precise reason free-market capitalists wish to see economies unregulated: both are dynamic, self-organizing systems that will achieve homeostasis on their own, if only they are allowed to do so.

It is an understandable mistake that economists should think markets are an all-encompassing arrangement larger than ourselves, from which come every last thing imaginable and in which we must compete and cooperate to survive. Humans evolved and are genetically programmed to thrive and grow within such a system; it’s the only thing we know or even can know. Economics has simply mistaken markets for the natural world.

I find great hope in this dim reflection of natural systems we have created. Clearly capitalism in its current state is as corrupt and fallen as the civilization that spawned it. But the proliferation of open-source companies and the drive toward entrepreneurship that the internet has inspired represent a potentially serious competitive threat to those institutions that maintain a stranglehold on the economy as civilization shifts into decline. These massive institutions will either fail or radically change in coming years due to resource depletion, climate change, the loss of government legitimacy, and financial crises; and there will not be enough of any of these left to reconstitute new behemoths where the old ones once stood. Only those decentralized companies based on open-source models and very small individual businesses will be quick enough to maneuver the changes. It is not too far a stretch to envision natural selection operating as both an economic and ecological force in the affairs of humans once again. Those businesses that adapt will by necessity evolve into the basis of truly sustainable economies that emerge from the wreckage of decline.

Thus my hope is that what is now a dim, corrupted reflection of participation with the natural world can serve as a bridge from our evolutionary dead end, across the chasm and back into unity with the rest of Earth’s living systems. I believe that the emergence of the internet and the legions of small businesses it has spawned presage the economic changes to come and are a manifestation of what we all know in our collective unconscious. Homo sapiens sapiens is about to evolve into homo humilis humilis — doubly humble man — and I believe entrepreneurship to be the most likely vehicle to carry us there.

So that is my narrative, for better or worse.