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A note from 2013
I wrote this six years ago, and posted it on FB. How am I doing so far?
August 27, 2013
Here's the human story-line I'm using these days:
The potential for a human dieback beginning by 2030 is rising dramatically as the following crises all come together:
> The Arctic Amplification effect of climate change is disrupting the polar jet stream and causing weather destabilization through the Northern Hemisphere. This is already disrupting agricultural output.
> Potential for methane bursts in the Arctic is rising as the region warms. This could induce runaway warming;
> Ocean acidification will have multiple ecological impacts, from loss of biodiversity to coral and phytoplankton loss;
>Ocean acidification introduces a potential for additional warming due to decreased dimethylsulphide release from the oceans (this is a very recent finding);
> Fresh water supplies are declining;
> Soil fertility is declining;
> The oceans are almost fished out;
> Terrestrial species are going extinct at a ferocious rate, with a rising possibility that a vital keystone species might join them;
> World oil and food prices are high and still rising;
> Some oil-exporting nations like Egypt are already destabilizing politically as their exportable oil resources run out;
> Fossil fuel use is still increasing;
> Population is still growing.
IMO there is little realistic chance that the world will be able to resolve any of these problems, let alone the entire interlocking predicament their convergence represents. This is largely because of the evolutionary bequest of human risk perception, social-conformity bias, and growth orientation. All of these are a result of our evolutionary past - they have been programmed into our neural behavior circuits by natural selection over hundreds of thousands of years in response to distant past, not present, environmental and social conditions.
The main human evolutionary advantage has been our incredible analytic intellect. It has allowed us to become the undisputed, indisputable dominant species on the planet. This is possible because our intelligence operates as a limit-removal mechanism, not a limit-acceptance mechanism.
Whenever we run into a roadblock to continuing growth in any domain, our evolved response is to figure out a way around it. It is virtually impossible for humans to see a problem and not try to solve it. Unfortunately we are very good at seeing problems and opportunities, but very, very poor at seeing consequences. As a result most of our solutions end up creating worse problems a little later. As Sevareid's Law states: "The chief cause of problems is solutions."
These human qualities (poor long-term risk perception, social-conformity bias, growth orientation, problem-solving compulsion) all have an evolutionary origin and are not easily circumvented at the species level, individual examples notwithstanding.
As a result, I really don't think we're going to get out of this one. Matters have long since passed out of our ability to control them consciously, if indeed our sense of control was ever anything more than an illusion. Most of our previous problem-solving attempts have either made matters worse by enabling yet more growth, or have merely kicked the can down the road a little.
There is no reason to expect our behavior to change in the near future. That is because much of our behavior springs from evolved brain circuits of which we have little conscious awareness and over which we have very little conscious control.
Those of you who have read a bit in this field may recognize a similarity to the "Vicious Circle Principle" of problem-solving described in Craig Dilworth's recent book, "Too Smart For Our Own Good". What Dilwotrth didn't address, though, is the question of WHY we are compulsive problem-solvers in the interests of growth.
Seeing our growth-hunger as the evolutionary residue of the spontaneous self-organization that created life in the first place, as described by Stuart Kauffman. The self-organization is in turn driven by the operation of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics (aka the Maximum Entropy Production Principle or MEPP).
I view our predicament as the result of a very long-term historical constructive process. Thermodynamics drives the creation of life with its imperatives to survive and reproduce. Those drives are encoded in DNA as the fundamental shapers of the organism's behavior. Subsequently, the elaborated, human-specific behaviour has been encoded in our evolved neural circuitry through natural selection processes over the last two million years.
This view has clarified for me exactly how insoluble the conundrum really is. Perhaps it's time we showed a little humility in the face of Mother Nature, and admit that we've painted ourselves into an evolutionary corner. Perhaps such an admission would liberate us enough to see what else we might be doing at this suspended moment in history.
Here's the human story-line I'm using these days:
The potential for a human dieback beginning by 2030 is rising dramatically as the following crises all come together:
> The Arctic Amplification effect of climate change is disrupting the polar jet stream and causing weather destabilization through the Northern Hemisphere. This is already disrupting agricultural output.
> Potential for methane bursts in the Arctic is rising as the region warms. This could induce runaway warming;
> Ocean acidification will have multiple ecological impacts, from loss of biodiversity to coral and phytoplankton loss;
>Ocean acidification introduces a potential for additional warming due to decreased dimethylsulphide release from the oceans (this is a very recent finding);
> Fresh water supplies are declining;
> Soil fertility is declining;
> The oceans are almost fished out;
> Terrestrial species are going extinct at a ferocious rate, with a rising possibility that a vital keystone species might join them;
> World oil and food prices are high and still rising;
> Some oil-exporting nations like Egypt are already destabilizing politically as their exportable oil resources run out;
> Fossil fuel use is still increasing;
> Population is still growing.
IMO there is little realistic chance that the world will be able to resolve any of these problems, let alone the entire interlocking predicament their convergence represents. This is largely because of the evolutionary bequest of human risk perception, social-conformity bias, and growth orientation. All of these are a result of our evolutionary past - they have been programmed into our neural behavior circuits by natural selection over hundreds of thousands of years in response to distant past, not present, environmental and social conditions.
The main human evolutionary advantage has been our incredible analytic intellect. It has allowed us to become the undisputed, indisputable dominant species on the planet. This is possible because our intelligence operates as a limit-removal mechanism, not a limit-acceptance mechanism.
Whenever we run into a roadblock to continuing growth in any domain, our evolved response is to figure out a way around it. It is virtually impossible for humans to see a problem and not try to solve it. Unfortunately we are very good at seeing problems and opportunities, but very, very poor at seeing consequences. As a result most of our solutions end up creating worse problems a little later. As Sevareid's Law states: "The chief cause of problems is solutions."
These human qualities (poor long-term risk perception, social-conformity bias, growth orientation, problem-solving compulsion) all have an evolutionary origin and are not easily circumvented at the species level, individual examples notwithstanding.
As a result, I really don't think we're going to get out of this one. Matters have long since passed out of our ability to control them consciously, if indeed our sense of control was ever anything more than an illusion. Most of our previous problem-solving attempts have either made matters worse by enabling yet more growth, or have merely kicked the can down the road a little.
There is no reason to expect our behavior to change in the near future. That is because much of our behavior springs from evolved brain circuits of which we have little conscious awareness and over which we have very little conscious control.
Those of you who have read a bit in this field may recognize a similarity to the "Vicious Circle Principle" of problem-solving described in Craig Dilworth's recent book, "Too Smart For Our Own Good". What Dilwotrth didn't address, though, is the question of WHY we are compulsive problem-solvers in the interests of growth.
Seeing our growth-hunger as the evolutionary residue of the spontaneous self-organization that created life in the first place, as described by Stuart Kauffman. The self-organization is in turn driven by the operation of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics (aka the Maximum Entropy Production Principle or MEPP).
I view our predicament as the result of a very long-term historical constructive process. Thermodynamics drives the creation of life with its imperatives to survive and reproduce. Those drives are encoded in DNA as the fundamental shapers of the organism's behavior. Subsequently, the elaborated, human-specific behaviour has been encoded in our evolved neural circuitry through natural selection processes over the last two million years.
This view has clarified for me exactly how insoluble the conundrum really is. Perhaps it's time we showed a little humility in the face of Mother Nature, and admit that we've painted ourselves into an evolutionary corner. Perhaps such an admission would liberate us enough to see what else we might be doing at this suspended moment in history.
I missed food supply disruptions due to jet stream disturbances, and rising wet bulb temperatures. And I hadn't found out about the Saharasia hypothesis yet, so I was still ascribing consumption growth to principles of physics and genetics rather than culture.
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