The Ecological Civilization We’ve Been Waiting For
Who doesn’t like solutions? I like them, which is why I’ve spent most of the last three years working on a design for a viable ecological (and ecolate) civilization.
So here’s Spencer Scott, PhD, with his notes on: An Ecological Civilization is the renaissance we’ve been waiting for
Just read it. Or for the shorter of it: Six ingredients for an ecological civilization.
1 Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency
2. Sustainable Urbanization
3. Sustainable Industry & Consumption
4. Ecological Abundance, Biodiversity, and Resilience
5. Ecological Institutions
6. Equitable Distribution of Power and Resources
Six easy pieces. Who wouldn’t want to live in an ecological civilization? I would.
And over a billion others in China would too given that they wrote this goal into there constitution (unlike unenlightened US Founding Fathers).
The one bit that nobody mentions, however, the elephant in the ointment, is that a major population correction will have to come first (the good news is that it will).
But that said, let’s move on to the eudemonic future right thinking people know is awaiting us.
Start with the author: PhD Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering 2012–2016; and MBA 2018–2019
Self describes as ‘Climate Science & Solutions Expert’, which is odd as so am I based on reading the back of cereal boxes.
As for his vision of the future, I used to live in Tucson AZ and, as an anthropological observer, attended meetings of the Sustainable Tucson group and annual Envision Tucson Sustainable Festival. The short of it is that the area once supported about 2k indigenous farmers when the river still flowed and annual flooding, as it did in Egypt, supported sustainable agriculture provided (unlike in Egypt) plots were left fallow for years so the soil could recover enough from being cropped once. Then Indo-Europeans came with cattle and indigenous farmers were forced to farm the same land year after year.
Massive overgrazing occurred beginning in 1851 when periodic (normal) droughts forced cattle to strip-graze the land and chew bark off of trees before dying every decade or so. Massive soil erosion and stream/river cut-down followed. The mesquite forest along the river decided to go somewhere else after groundwater pumping began and the water table fell hundreds of feet below reach of all tree roots.
When water from Parker Dam on the Colorado is no longer pumped via 14 pumping stations powered by the Navajo coal-fired power plant, and planes, trains and the 24/7 flow of trucks bringing food (and lots of stuff) stop coming, I doubt the region currently populated by over 1 million prosperous humans could support 500 determined people on local environmental productivity given the vast degradation of the last two hundred years (same story everywhere, just details vary).
The concerns members of Sustainable Tucson (part of Transition Towns/Resilience Movement fork) have is whether the river will again flow by 2050 (as the Watershed Management Group promises) and whether, even after Tucson has been turned into an edible forest (thanks to rainwater collection), the area can sustainably support the projected 2 million residents flowing in by 2050. The consensus is that 1.5 certainly can, but 2 million will require extra effort (but there’ll be more people to make more effort, so…).
I confess I just read the headings, a few paragraphs, and looked at the pictures when not facepalming. To add to Scott’s pretty pictures, this is how Sustainable Tucson members (all professionals, university trained, upper-middle class minimally) envision editable Tucson:
“Those who dream of the banquet wake up to lamentation and sorrow.” — Zhuangzi, 4th century BCE
Civilization Is
About four years ago I noted my differences with Derreck Jenson, e.g. on our global endgame, despite sharing common ground. His view of what civilization is contains points of interest.
Civilizations are not a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts. They are biophysical, dynamically complex societies that range from viably complex to overcomplex as characterized by degrees of pathology related to population overdensity all the way up to lethal overcomplexity, e.g. all modern cities. I use Joseph Tainter’s ‘complex society’ (as in ‘collapse of’) as being synonymous with ‘civilization’, aka empire, to avoid the positive or negative connotations most people associate with ‘civilization’, but fighting to reimage the concept of civilization as a viable condition is to consider so as to displace the non-viable images that prevail.
A pathologically overcomplex society (civilization) selects for increasing levels of dysfunction over typically a period of 8–20 generations of living in an overcomplex society, so ‘lethal’ does not imply a sudden death, but a non-viable dynamic that selects for the overcomplex society’s dissolution, with all due feedback delays, e.g. all prior overcomplex societies (thousands of chiefdoms to city-states and over a hundred state level overcomplex societies over the last 12 thousands years).
A viable complex society (civilization) would, given human biological norms/limits, average about 28 largely self-sufficient communities of on average 28 citizens (range 5–85, typically 20–50) each. Larger groups and number of frequently interacting groups selects for psychosocial pathologies and transitions to the overcomplexity spectrum that selects for denormalizing of individuals (e.g. modern techno-industrial society). To be evermore civilized is to be more dysfunctional unto dissolutionm just to summarize the last 50k years of expansionist humans and their culture/form of civilization.
A maximum size for a viable civilization (complex society) of moderns seeking to renormalize would be in the order of 50 groups (camps, bands, hamlets, villages, settlements, communities) within an area that up to 50 groups could meet up within (being within walking distance, with perhaps one overnight camp) at a central rendezvous site to exchange memes and genes (select a mate from outside one’s group). Everyone could have two homes, and the rendezvous site would be their city occupied for a few days perhaps monthly with such food as brought in to eat, which limits stay. So the average VIABLE complex society (that no modern human would want to live in) would be 28 groups of 28 people meeting up in their city. This level of overdensity at the rendezvous site/city has short-term benefits and, if time limited to a week, benefits can exceed the cumulative harm of overdensity living, of too few repeat interactions to maintain trust.
If there were 25k such complex societies on the planet (instead of 195 non-viable nation-states), there would need to be a level of Gaian governance, or systemic management, to prevent societies that become overcomplex from transitioning to expansionistic empire builders, a pathology that selects for global failure, e.g. the world we live in today. But this level of organization (I call it the United Federation of Watersheds of which there could be 25k) is not a social organization nor complex society, but an interconnection of viable, functioning societies enabled by individuals who serve only if invited. Some select individuals would serve the Federation for a time. There would be no politics nor politicians. There would be a United Federation of Watersheds Academy (perhaps in Greece), but no one would raise children there (the ecolate educated would know better than try), though post or non-reproductive scholars may live there until dead to help educate the educators.
But enough imagining, the point is some level of control system would be needed by those who had come to understand the planet enough to live with it properly (as evidenced by persisting long term, which Gaia only determines what works to persist).
I can envision small viable cities, such as we think of them, but only if viable humans inhabit them. Assuming some level of regional and global trade, the energetics of moving people and stuff will again be by water and sail, and port cities could be supported as some food could be imported to trade hubs, which could include some inland trade cities at hubs on rivers, but none, to be viable, could be inhabited by reproductive individuals whose children would be denormalized under the overdensity conditions separated from Nature.
Normal would be for young people to visit cities as travelers, perhaps remain for a time, but those wishing to beget and raise children would go back to their watershed management unit of birth to be with and start a family, where their parents and extended family likely live, their parents to provide essential grandparenting, all under the oversight of the community’s Mothers. When dependent children are fledged, some may go to serve in a city, their children and grandchildren could visit. No children would be denormalized by remaining in a city, so there would be no multiple generations living under non-viable overdensity conditions. Those adults who live long term within a city would die within the city, and acquired pathologies would pass away with them without being passed on.
There could be some cities that form around high energy locations, hydraulic/tidal, steady wind and geothermal locations, where a remnant form of industry and industrial society persist. There could be outlying societies of a viable form, and some adults could commute by kayak/boat, bike, walking, or by wagon-bus. Solar cooking works with a bit of glass and reflective material, and wind can grind grain and saw wood, but no metals or non-metals can be mined sustainably, including those found in landfills near today’s cities. They can and will be, but not sustainably as the millennia pass. A viable form of human may come to live properly with the planet, but our form is antithetical to their form and must pass away to make room for them (a viable form of posterity). They may be genetic descendants, but our form of civilization, being non-viable, shall pass away. Failure to pass away will select for a repetition of our pattern, that of 8k years of empire building, which has no viable long term outcome (i.e. ends with human extinction).