The Monkey Trap
Can we just let go of our favourite treats even as the danger is clear?
From the wonderful Book — Transition Engineering(Chapter 1) author Susan Krumdieck describes how bush hunters catch monkeys with a surprisingly simple trap. Simply a jar with a small opening tied to a tree with a large piece of the monkey’s favourite food inside. When the monkey reaches to get the food they cant pull their hand out of the jar as long as they are holding onto the fruit. Even seeing the danger of the hunter approaching is not enough to scare the monkey into dropping the fruit and making an escape.
Krundeick uses this analogy to compare to our current dependence on fossil fuels — particularly oil.
Your future depends on what you do right now. There is one future where you let go of your favourite food and run to safety. There is another future where you don’t.
There is no question that fossil fuels are the best energy source and always will be. There is no question that using fossil fuels lets us have lifestyles more comfortable and convenient than most of the kings in history. There is no question that we need fossil fuels to keep our lives going in the ways we expect. And there is no question that the risks are real and present. We know that if we down-shift the production of fossil fuels dramatically it would mitigate the risks. There is one future where fossil fuel use is curtailed for consumption and used only as an essential work fuel. There is another future where we don’t let go of doing what we want until it is too late
One important thing to keep in mind is that there are no solutions to a monkey trap.
A monkey trap is not a problem; it is not a thing that happened to the mon-key. A monkey trap is a situation that resulted from a series of choices and a set of realities.
Transition Engineering is best described as strategic change management.
The solution already exists — curtail fossil fuel production. Transition Engineering is the work of discovering how.
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Get in touch… — https://tomconnor.me/
More like this from 10x Curiosity
- Moving out of the Death-Zone Quadrant? Introducing the Sustainable Futures Matrix — The next decade will see historical business models requiring significant overhaul and reinvention.
- Moving to an economy within the earths limits — Donut economics — Is it time to begin moving to a more sustainable model of running the world?
- Life Implications of Exponential Growth — “If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.” — Yuval Noah Harari
- Systems Archetypes- Places to intervene — An advantage with using systems archetypes as a problem solving methodology is that places to intervene in the system can be thought through and played with.
- Wealth for Future Generations — Are you burning capital or spending currency?
