2021-11-11 - Ecological Grounding by William Rees ================================================= Excerpts from William Rees [1] interview hosted by Michael and Connie Barlow [2] [Regarding deep connection to the Earth.] It's an experience that urban people today cannot have. The whole process of urbanization tends to disconnect people both spatially and psychologically, from the natural system of which we are a part, which supports us. Everything that goes through the economy, the whole food web as we now call it, has a connection to the environment. I don't like the word environment because it already separates us from everything else. But it does connect us to nature. I wanted to work on the human dimension of this problem... It was the idea that if we could pull together all of the land needed to support not only our body but the infrastructure, technologies, and so forth, we would have a fairly good idea of the size of the microplanet that would be necessary to support this city, or this region, or this country, and then clearly the whole of the Earth. Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring dramatically, because I happened to study bird populations for my doctoral [about DDT?] understanding the dynamics of their reproduction and how the DDT [affects it?], which by the way was unknown to science until we had to find it by hindsight. This is so common in our ecological complexity. The phenomena that are emergent: I am referring here to the thin shell syndrome, that the byproducts of DDT produced, by acting as a hormone unit in birds, so that they were perfectly fertile, normal mating behavior took place, but they would lay eggs that had such thin shells that when their parents rolled them over to maintain the oxygen, the shells would break and the eggs would never hatch. And that thin shell syndrome was affected by a hormone replacement affecting the laying down apparently of calcium carbonate in the egg shell, and hence Bingo! To find that we had to work backwards. It was an unknown physiological mechanism until it was interfered with by these breakdown products... I thought that was brilliant both as an illustration of the complexity of this and why we are going to be hit repeatedly by phenomena about which we have no understanding until we discover them by hindsight. The fact that she had warned us of the likelihood of these kinds of phenomenon just was sheer [?]. I had a very naive understanding of political dynamics. But clearly now what [science community harassment] Rachel Carson went through has been experienced by many innovators since. Anyone who challenges the mainstream is going to be in deep trouble. One of the great readings that I think everyone should take a peek at is The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustav Le Bon [3]. He was the first of a long line of cognitive psychologists who studied the human mind particularly of how people behave en masse. Here is a wonder quote from it. "The masses have never sought after truth. They prefer error, for error seduces them. Whoever supplies them with error will be their champion. Those who deny their error will be despised." Something like that. His point was that once we have adopted a particular worldview way of seeing, anyone who challenges this view is going to be rejected. So Rachel Carson along with many others have been rejected, denied, kicked out, because their views simply went against the grain. They challenged what was already beginning to emerge as the growth dynamic. We're stuck in this era of assumption of unlimited economic growth propelled by continuous technological progress. That idea only goes back to the 1950's. So Rachel Carson's book emerged within a decade of the emergence of this new idea that we could solve all of our problems through growth of the economy. So to have someone who was a reasonably prominent scientist stick her neck out and argue against the perceived wisdom in that domain: pesticides are good, they are going to stimulate agricultural production, and so forth, it takes one little bit of her work, it was simply anathema to what was going on. By 1972 I was already teaching in the school of community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia. I was charged there with developing the first ever courses on human ecological planning in any university in North America. So limits to growth came out as an absolute gift to just about everything that I was trying to teach in that particular course. The degree to which it was received with utter rejection and disbelief by my colleagues in the months for up to a year or two following the publication of Limits To Growth, it was sunk by as an effective idea by mostly economists who had completely adopted the growth ethic. The primary objection was that the model was A) primitive and B) didn't take into account human ingenuity. At the time human ingenuity was regarded as the greatest of resources, so with the advance of technology we could overcome any resistance to the growth of the human enterprise, population, or the scale of economic activity. This was the kind of idea that people wanted to believe. It reinforced this confidence in our technological capacity to move forward. Here again, like Rachel Carson, here's a book that said: "Wait minute, if we continue down this trail, sometime in the 21st century population will peak out, production will peak out, pollution will peak out, and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down." Well, nobody wants to hear that. So just as Gustav Le Bon said, we will reject, deny, forget any contrary positions to those that we hold dear and receive with open arms those views and people who support that which we already believe. The point is, Limits To Growth was sunk from day one largely by the economics profession who simply disregarded it as irrelevant, a sidebar, even dangerous because it intended to halt the progress of the human enterprise. I had always wanted to study something called human ecology. I couldn't do it. I could not find a university in North America that would teach human ecology as from a biological point of view. There were departments of human ecology in say geography departments, but it was all about human use of resources. The sociologists had a little sub-branch of human ecology but it was based on allegories and so on, borrowings of European plant physiology and ecology, but just transposed to the human system. So they considered the succession of vegetation in the field for example, to be comparable to the succession of land usage as a city expands over the landscape. It was a very limited perspective of ecology. Nobody studied human beings as organisms, as components of, as essential parts of nature. It simply wasn't done. The point of the matter is, to this day most ecologists study non-human beings and if we're going to look at urban ecology, it's "How does the city come up with a proper habitat for bird species, or ants, or caterpillars, or the distribution of earthworms along a pollution gradient downwind from Chicago might be a typical example of urban ecology. That's all very well, but it's really the ecology of earthworms with respect to cities rather than what I took to be urban ecology, which really ought to be all about human beings. It's amazing to me that we couldn't see that people, humans, Homo Sapiens are not only the creators of the human ecosystem but its principle architects. The ecological footprint concept is really a tool in ecological economics. The main frame of economics driving the world today is something called neoliberal economics, and it's basically that form of economics which regards the perfect market as the ultimate arbiter of all social values; there's no need for government considerations of moral or ethical questions outside the market. Just let the economy work and things will be OK. Its primary goal is, of course, continued growth. It assumes that continuous technological development is the tool by which we can achieve that. Now its starting premise is that the economy and humankind are separate systems. By the way, this is identical to the idea from ecologists that humans are separate from the rest of the world. So both disciplines, economics and ecology separate humans from everything else. So the economists have the human system over here and the ecosphere over there. There's almost no important connection between the two. They do recognize that the economy draws on the ecosystem for resources and dumps wastes back into it, but technology can cope with both of those. So we assume with technological advances that scarcity is constantly being pushed off. Initially we could drill for oil by poking a finger in the ground and it would gush out. But when those easy to exploit oil wells dried up, we learned how to drill much deeper. Now we drill for oil several kilometers below the bottom of the sea, and that may be several kilometers below the surface of the ocean. So we just keep keep developing technologies. Fracking was another one, to get new oil, excess resources that we thought were impossible a few years ago. Again, something like copper. We used to need several percent copper for an ore to be valuable. We used to think of an ore that had a trace of copper as utterly worthless. Well, today we can exploit that because we have developed the technology to do so. So the economist's vision has some support, these advances that keep relieving us of scarcity, so that growth seems to carry on. But the upshot of this is that the economy is envisioned as a circular flow of money values with no important connectivity to nature. Understand this. Once you believe that the economy is a self-generating, circular flow of money values, and it has no important connection to nature, you have an intellectual concept that enables perpetual growth with no consequence whatsoever from the natural environment. Now ecological economics starts from a different view. Instead of seeing the two as separate, the economy over here and the ecosphere over there, we regard human beings and their economies and social systems as subsystems of the much larger whole. Not only that, they are completely dependent subsystems on that larger whole. So any increase in the flow of materials to and from the economy and nature necessarily degrades the natural component. So in effect, the ecological perspective in ecological economics sees the human system as potentially parasitic on the ecosphere. Now a parasite is any organism that gains its vitality at the expense of the vitality of the host. Once you adopt the view that the human subsystem is growing by extracting resources, and in fact what it does is convert the ecosphere into human bodies and the artifacts of culture. This is a system in which there is a clear potential for parasitism, where the vitality of the host system is destroyed even as the parasite grows and becomes more splendid in all of its ramifications. I think that's exactly the situation we are in today. The human enterprise continues to grow and expand. Once you understand that it is a subsystem, the growth of the human enterprise is necessarily at the expense of the rest of the system. So today, if we look at mammals for example, and go back ten thousand years, human beings were less than 1% of the mass of mammals on planet Earth. Today humans are about 32% of the mammalian biomass. The [total] biomass has actually increased because people have increased the productivity of nature, but humans are 32% of that biomass. Our domestic animals: sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, and so on account for another 64%. So somewhere between 95% and 98.5% of all mammalian biomass on Earth is human beings and their domestic animals. So that wild nature has been reduced from over 99% of mammalian biomass down to just about 1.5% to 4%. That's an astonishing example of how the expansion of the human enterprise is necessarily at the expense of the rest of nature. When I go to political meetings and I see a politician stand up and say "There's no contradiction between the growth of the economy and the maintenance of the ecosphere," I am tempted to stand up and scream "Bullshit!" We have to understand that human beings don't act out of reality. Human beings act out of social constructs. We socially construct the realities from which we operate. The current social construct is this one of unimpeded economic growth mediated through perpetually increasing technological prowess. As long as we adhere to that, the reality being human beings contained within nature, the reality is then that we are consuming nature from the inside out. We are the maggot in the planetary apple. If you think of human beings as any other species, I think there are three qualities that we really have to keep in mind. The first is that we have exactly the same potential for exponential growth as any other species. Exponential growth is simply a growth process where the doubling time is constant. If you think about a bacterium being dropped on a petri dish of nutrient [broth?], one cell, bingo!, under ideal conditions with perfect nutrients, temperature, and so on, can be two cells within 20 minutes to half an hour, but a half an hour later it's four, and then eight, and then sixteen, and thirty-two, so the population is doubling in constant increments. As long as the environment is capable of providing the nutrients and ideal conditions for that growth. So that is simply exponential growth of the population. Human beings are capable, as all species are, of exponential growth. Normally, however, in nature, populations are held in check in their local environments by negative feedback. If a population inches up toward the carrying capacity of the environment, it gets slammed back by the spread of disease because of higher density, or because of a shortage of food, or because the increase in species of that population has resulted in an increased predator population so they slam it back. So normally, populations tend to fluctuate in nature in the vicinity of their carrying capacity. The point is, humans then, normally have been kept in check. The only real, substantial growth in human populations in the last fifty thousand years has been the expansion of people over the entire surface of the Earth. In any particular place we fluctuated over time. What happened about two hundred years ago is an extremely important event in our history. It ties with two other aspects that humans share with other species. The first I have already alluded to, and that is that all species will tend, this is a biological predisposition or compulsion as it were, will expand to fill all the available habitat. All the accessible habitat. Again, people go "not necessarily." I simply said "Suppose we discovered a new island the size of Australia that was pristine in all ways." Do you think governments will get together and say "Well, you know, we've screwed up everywhere else. Let's just leave this one alone?" Not a chance! We'd be in there with national flags on every peak and so on as the area is cut up and carved up and basically colonized by the human parasite. So we have the same predisposition to expand and fill all available habitat. But the other thing we have is the predisposition to consume all available resources. Every species does this. There is no difference between humans and other species. We know of cases where, for example, there are monkeys who feed on clams oddly enough, and who discovered they could crack these clams with rocks, quickly wipe out the entire clam population locally because they have learned to use tools. Well people learn to use tools. Our technology is just a word for a collection of tools. It has enabled us to expand, expand, and expand where others could not go, so to speak, because they do not have our technological prowess. So look at now what we have done. We have a finite planet inhabited by a very clever species called Homo Sapiens, with a predisposition to expand indefinitely, it has a population predisposition to do so exponentially, and the technological capacity to continue to provide the resources to produce that expansion AND to defeat the negative feedback that would have otherwise held us in check. So about two hundred years ago as modern medicine got a better grip on technology and so on, we discovered germ theory, and could suppress disease, and modern medicine helped us increase our survival rate without much affecting the birth rate. In fact, the use of fossil fuel, we're going to get into more depth on the extent to which our civilization is a product of fossil fuel. Fossil fuel is the means by which we have acquired all the other resources necessary to build the human enterprise. So look, here's the species with the potential for exponential growth, with the capacity to modify the environment so that it ensures a constant flow of resources, and the ability to suppress any negative resistance with that disease, scarcity, and so on. So just two hundred years ago, for the first time in the history of our species, we began a truly exponential explosion, realizing our full biological potential. Just two hundred years ago. So put this in context. If you think of anatomically modern humans going back at least two hundred thousand years. It took two hundred thousand years to reach one billion people. Then [it took] two hundred years, just 1/1000th of that time to blow up to almost eight billion people today. That's an astonishing event in history. Not only that, it's completely anomalous. Yet we take growth to be the norm. Maybe ten generations of people at most have experienced the growth of technological change in their lifetime even to notice it. This is profoundly important to get a grip on our current situation. So this period, this last two hundred years that we take to be The Norm, and which defines how we define ourselves, is really the single most anomalous period in the history of our species. So it would be an absolute error to suggest that we can go back to the norm after, for example, the COVID virus pandemic has resolved. All people can think about is "How soon can we get back to normal?" And what I'm arguing is that "Normal" generated the problem in the first place. Normalcy being humans packed together in cities where disease can be rampant and we've freed ourselves of the conditions for the negative feedback to start coming on full time. So, climate change, biodiversity laws, land degradation, soil degradation, the breakdown in ocean chemistry, COVID-19, all of these are examples of incipient negative feedback ready to come in and correct this anomaly that has occurred in the last two hundred years. Now in theory, we have the intelligence to recognize that this is what's going on. In theory we could bring it under control. But so far there is very little evidence that we've realized that at the level that counts. You may understand it. I may understand it. Every morning we're being treated in Canada now to an hour long lecture by the Prime Minister on how we're doing everything possible to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and I think that's a little bit short-sighted. There's a wonderful little book by Bruce Wexler titled Brain and Culture [4]. The bottom line is this, that in the course of the development of the human brain, repeated experiences, repeated ideas, the constant repetition of anything, forms synaptic circuits in the brain, it shapes the development of our thought patterns. So that over a period of time, one can acquire a set way of thinking, you can call it an ideology, it could be a political ideology, it could be a doctrine, it could be an academic paradigm, even a scientific theory, it becomes imprinted in the brain in its own synaptic circuitry. So once a concept associated with that whole idea comes up, the whole circuit fires. So if I am a neoliberal economist with a profound belief in globalization, as soon as I hear "trade theory" that whole circuit begins to ignite and reinforce itself and so on. But once we've acquired through this experience a particular way of thinking, human beings tend to seek out other people who think the same way, and to seek out experiences that reinforce our habitual way of thinking. So a particular ideological framing of events becomes embedded in the brain. We tend to deny, reject, or forget any contrary information. This is profoundly important in terms of trying to move beyond the current situation. It requires an enormous shock to get people to think outside the box. This is thinking outside the box quite literally. The brain box, with its predesigned synaptic circuitry has to be shattered before we can really latch on to the idea that there's a different way of doing things. I think we're at one of those critical points in our existence right now. So it is conceivable, if there were sufficient shock to the global system, that we could sit down and rethink how to restructure more in conformance to the nature of reality than the current system has been structured. Again I have to emphasize that we socially construct our reality that becomes embedded in synaptic circuitry in the brain. We then act out of that synaptic circuitry far more than we do out of the reality. If there's a mismatch between the way we think about things and the way things really are, [then] we are headed for trouble. That's the trouble we are in as a global civilization now. The economic paradigms, the political paradigms from which we operate have no useful information whatsoever about the nature of the biophysical reality within which we are parasitically embedded. So as long as we operate from that way of thinking, we have no choice [and] there are no options available to us to change the nature of this destructive relationship. So the first thing, and the reason I keep battering away at this, is hoping we can create enough glimmers of light, cracks in the system, that at some point it bursts open and people get that A-Ha! moment where they realize [?] in some way that we can do this differently. What if we developed an economy based on the idea that we are utterly dependent on this other system that we are currently draining. How could we devise a way of allocation and distribution of the goods and services of nature so that a much reduced population might live sustainably within the means of the biosphere that supports it. All of this is possible. It's another human construct. It would be a construct based on the nature of the reality in which we find ourselves. Again I emphasize, we are currently operating from an economic system that has no form of internalization of the structural, the temporal, or the physical properties of the ecosphere that the economy is parasitizing. Hence, it cannot be anything but pathological. We have to break from pathology or we go nowhere. All of my work has been simply to understand, to open eyes to a different reality, or in fact THE reality as I see it and enable us to crack open the current system in ways that enable human beings to live more equitably within the biophysical means of the ecosphere. That's the whole mission [?]. Complexity is the biggest problem. Human brains evolved in small group contexts. We are capable of coping reasonably well with a few dozen other people at most in relatively confined habitats over which we could do no significant damage, short term perhaps, as we rove around over our home range, but the point of the matter is that human beings evolved to cope within the lifetime of a person with an unchanging environmental context dealing with relatively few other people. Now in those circumstances it became adaptive, if in the course of individual development one came to very quickly assume the beliefs, values, and assumptions: the cultural norms of one's tribe, because once one acquired that set of beliefs, values, and assumptions; the mythology of the tribe, so to speak; it normally added to tribal coherence, a sense of social coherence. But it gave one a sense of personal identity because one could identify with that group psychologically very healthy and [?]. It also, by the way, created a barrier: the in-group, out-group concept. In human nature, every culture that has been studied has some in-group, out-group concept. We are over here, they are over there. Again, [this is] highly adaptive ten thousand, fifty thousand, two hundred thousand years ago. Thus the beginning of the problem that we are in here. Another natural quality of humans is what economists call spatial, social, and temporal discounting. People naturally tend to favor the here and the now, close relatives and friends, and so on, over distant places, future times, and people they don't know. That's the in-group, out-group thing again. So it's perfectly natural to be myopic. We are short-sighted by nature. Again, there is good reason for doing so. If you don't have refrigeration, you had better eat all that food right now because it will go bad and if you didn't get it then somebody else would. It would be a typical way of reacting to that circumstance ten thousand years ago. Today, of course, we could in theory abandon that short-sighted way of looking at things, but we don't because it's part of our nature to be social discounters, temporal discounters, and spatial discounters. So people naturally prefer the here, the now, close relatives over someplace else, some distant future that may not effect them in any case as people. So this tends to cause us to have a very limited view and capacity for imagining the future. But there's another thing that comes out of all of this, and that is that we've come from a place of very simple systems that were at least understandable if not controllable, to a place where we have created a degree of complexity that is far beyond the capacity of any human mind to wrap itself around. We look now on a world of overlapping complex systems, not just the spatial systems, but the Internet. Who REALLY understands how the Internet works? Nobody. Who really understands money, let alone the entire economy? We've got international mechanisms of global trade, massively complex systems that nobody is capable of understanding in and of themselves and yet they all integrate in some way that is beyond the capacity of the human imagination. So these systems all tend to evolve. What we have to get at here is that we've now created a world that is vastly beyond our capacity fully to understand. Systems seem to go through a cycle. They are fairly simple to start with. They grow rapidly. They are easy to understand. They reach a point of maturing. They become a little less complex in the sense that they share redundant systems. They become more and more brittle, but they get bigger and bigger. At the same time, if we are talking about a human system, we see an increase in corruption at the top, we see increase in income disparity, we see increase in inability to look ahead, a greater tendency to protect the way things are and so on. So eventually, the system... the human system is a problem solving system. Its growth through this trajectory is one that gets increasingly complex. Every time a problem comes up, we solve it. So we get really efficient with our new metal hunting and gathering gear, but we deplete our ecosystems, so we have to invent agriculture, and that's wonderful, but then we deplete the local soil, so we have to invent irrigation, and that's wonderful, but then we have to expand, and now we have dams, oh by the way with such a big land base we now have to get an army to defend it against all these invading tribes. So the system gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more expansive until some problem comes along that we simply can't cope with. Because by this time there's the division of labor, the priesthood, the governing class, peasant classes, they become disenchanted because they're being overtaxed by those who collect taxes at the top, and so on. Then a big issue comes along and the whole thing can come tumbling down. It might be climate change, it might be a bigger pandemic than this one, it could be biodiversity loss, who knows? But that's the trajectory that every civilization has ever followed. We seem to be on that trajectory one more time. There are some problems that may simply not be solvable. We've created a system of such overwhelming complexity, there's no precedent. Rome was complex. Mesopotamia was complex. Perhaps even Easter Island civilization was complex. But they pale to insignificance compared to the complexity of the global, integrated systems that we have created. We not only created globally integrated systems, but we have purposefully, because of the mental models on which we operate, have simplified it by creating, for example, just-in-time delivery. So if I manufacture medical equipment here in Chicago, or Toronto, or wherever, but all the parts are made in Japan and China, and they arrive exactly the day I need to put them together, except when the pandemic shuts down the global transportation system. So we've created this enormously complex [and] at the same time simple system that is absolutely fragile. There is one thing that is sometimes difficult for scientists to talk about. That's the need for love and compassion. Human beings do not, will not, protect that which they do not love. One of the great regrets that I have, and I acquired this from years and years of planning school, is the complete dissociation that most urban planners have from the landscape, from the ecosystem. There's no cognitive sense that we are literally a part of nature, that we are made of star-stuff if you want to use that old [saying?]. So we have no love for nature. When I say "we," I am talking about the majority of society, the governing systems and all that. Some individuals do, obviously, but for the most part we are an alien on our own planet until and unless humans acquire some sense of compassion for other species, some sense of compassion for other human beings in other places. So please, let us have some compassion for other humans, for the rest of nature, and for this planet upon which we live. ----- [Ben's notes follow] Later i ran across information about Gregory Bateson's views [5] and they reminded me of this interview. > Gregory Bateson saw the world as a series of systems containing those > of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Each of these systems has > adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control balance > by changing multiple variables. He saw the natural ecological system > as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis, > and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and > its environment. > > Bateson, in this subject, presents western epistemology as a method > of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic > rule over all cybernetic systems and in doing so he unbalances the > natural cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual > dependency. Bateson claims that humanity will never be able to > control the whole system because it does not operate in a linear > fashion, and if humanity creates his own rules for the system, he > opens himself up to becoming a slave to the self-made system due to > the non-linear nature of cybernetics. Lastly, man's technological > prowess combined with his scientific hubris gives him the potential > to irrevocably damage and destroy the "supreme cybernetic system" > (i.e. the biosphere), instead of just disrupting the system > temporally until the system can self-correct. ... In Earth system > science. Geocybernetics aims to study and control the complex > co-evolution of ecosphere and anthroposphere, See also Planetary Boundaries [6] ----- [1] Interview with William Rees [2] Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow on postdoom.com [3] The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustav Le Bon [4] Brain and Culture by Bruce Wexler [5] Cybernetics in Philosophy [6] Planetary Boundaries tags: collapse,notes,podcast Tags ==== collapse notes podcast