Too Clever by Half, but Not Nearly Smart Enough
This is a 2021 presentation by human ecologist/ecological economist William Rees, which is mostly in line with my idiosyncratic claims (with critique of claims at the end of transcript).
For those who like to watch (or listen to words), there is a video, which includes a lengthy discussion beginning half way through. I offer for now a readable (thanks to AI and several hours of human editing) transcript of the presentation with screen shots. The Q and A is added on, but not edited.
Transcript
Ruben Nelson 0:01
My name is Ruben Nelson, and it’s my pleasure and my honor to introduce William Rees, known to his friends as Bill. If you know anything about the state of the world today, the trouble we’re in, the odds are you’ve run across some of his work, even though you didn’t know it. For example, Bill is the inventor, the creator of the ecological footprint concept. He then worked it out with his graduate students at UBC. And, of course, I assume most of you know that there’s wonderful websites where you can learn about your own impact on the world, the impact of others, because of the work that Bill and his graduate students did years ago, to invent the concept of the ecological footprint.
0:57
Bill may be the wisest ecologist who’s still practicing today. That’s my judgment. But of course, I don’t know them all. I invited Bill to work with me in Seattle a little over a year ago, and sight unseen, he agreed. And one of the things you might do is go to YouTube, Google his name, and look at his presentation, under the heading of Will Modern Civilization Be the Death of Us. You will find it is brilliant. Bill has been honored by many organizations. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, I will not list them all. I’m old enough, as you can tell, that when milk was delivered, the cream was still at the top of the bottle. And Bill, like that cream, has risen to the top. Mark his words. They’re important. Bill over to you.
William Rees 2:03
Thank you very much, Ruben, for a very flattering introduction. And welcome everyone. I’m very glad we can all get together today. It’s an honor to me to be invited to speak with you. So that we just go straight to screenshare.
Unknown voice 2:20
Hello. Yes, go to screenshots, screenshots.
Bill Rees 2:32
So, the title of this talk, I suppose, is deserving of some explanation. My basic premise is that humankind is extremely smart, able to manipulate the physical world in ways that are sometimes extraordinary, really. But we’re not nearly smart enough to rescue ourselves from the dilemma that we’ve created through our manipulation of the physical world. So I want to start with a series of premises.. oops, what am I going forward?
3:25
The first of these is that human beings are not primarily a rational species. We like to think of ourselves as being intelligent. We call ourselves Homo sapiens or intelligent or wise man. But we are not primarily rational. In fact, passion and instinct, often trump reason, particularly in times of crises.
3:55
The second premise that I want to emphasize is that human beings don’t actually live in or experience reality. We socially construct our realities. And more accurately, we construct stories, conceptual lenses, or even key holes through which we perceive reality. So when you think about it, all of our political ideologies, our religious doctrines, economic paradigms, even our scientific models and cultural narratives, are socially constructed stories that we’ve put together.
4:29
We make life up, we make reality up as we go along. Now, there are some very important corollary to that fact. And the first is that the conceptual lenses through which we perceive reality, determine the nature of the reality that we perceive.
4:49
The second problem is… really flows from that one; that people live out of are constructed realities as if they were real. In other words, we take our constructs much more seriously than we do the reality in which we are actually embedded.
5:07
Which leads me to my third premise. And that is that we cannot regulate our interaction with any aspect of reality that our models of reality do not include. So if we think again, that all of our political ideologies, religious doctrines, scientific models, and so on, are constructs, models of reality. The fact is that if those models don’t include some important aspect of biophysical reality or social reality, then we are beyond our depth, we cannot deal with that aspect that is so outside of our model.
5:47
So we can put that as a corollary, again; when the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of any regulatory system, whether natural or artificial, the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system. This is a variation of what’s known as Ashby’s law of requisite variety.
6:09
Another way of saying it is that any regulatory system has to have the internal variety or complexity of the system that is regulating. And if it does not, it will fail. Which is the second way of putting it here on this page, a social construct or model is more likely to succeed, the closer it maps to any external biophysical reality it purports to represent. Okay.
6:36
So in that context, by the way, a premise is simply something I’m going to take for granted, I consider these things to be facts beyond dispute. And if we put it in that context, then we have to look at this as well.
6:49
Climate change, despite our social fixation on it is not the major problem facing society today. In fact, thinking climate change, as the primary existential threat just reflects homosapiens limited capacity to cope with complexity. And this is really mechanistic or Cartesian reductionism at play.
7:11
Modern society is based on a very reductionist way of approaching the world. And that’s problematic because if climate change isn’t a problem, we can’t even solve that problem by focusing on climate change. So I’m going to make the argument that the major difficulty facing us is something called ecological overshoot.
7:35
Ecological overshoot is a macro problem. And climate change is merely one of many symptoms, a number of which I’ve listed here as well. And they go from the obviously biophysical to the fact that income gaps are widening, even as global wealth accumulates. So we have a situation in which we have a macro problem, which is the source of all of these others. And the fact is, we can’t solve any of them in isolation from the others, focusing on climate change is doomed to failure.
8:09
Overshoot implies a number of problems. But the major factor to look at from the biophysical perspective is this one, and it comes out of our ecological footprint analyses. Every human being whether they’re conscious of it or not, requires the constant productivity and assimilation capacity of a certain area on the surface of the earth. And we’ve developed a method by which we can compute that for individuals or cities or nations, or for that matter, the whole world.
8:41
And to put it in a nutshell, right now on planet Earth, their remote, a 12.2 billion productive hectares able to support the kinds of activities that humans need to survive. But we are using the planet as if there were 20.9 billion hectares. So the human ecological footprint of 20.9 billion hectares exceeds the actual area of productive land and waterscape on the planet by about 73%.
9:09
How can that be? Even a school child can… I give a talk like this to school children and the first question is, ‘how can we be occupying a planet larger than we have’? And the answer is that we’re simply consuming and dissipating other species ecosystems resources much more quickly than nature can regenerate them. And we’re dumping waste into the system much faster than nature can assimilate them.
9:34
This is the very definition of unsustainability, and there’s ultimately bound to be fatal. The question is how can we get ourselves into, or how did we get ourselves into this kind of situation? And I would argue that there are several causes for this but the two that we can take most seriously are the the reality that human beings are programmed to be unsafe stainable by nature.
10:01
This is [?1?] a fact of our biology, our success in our evolution, and the reality is that humans, unless we are constrained by negative feedback by disease, war, resource shortages, or anything of that nature, like all other species, will expand to occupy all accessible habitat. And we will use all available resources.
10:24
And humans have a leg up in that game because of our technology. Human beings are constantly increasing the available availability of resources through improvements, refinements in technology. So we have a biological predisposition to constantly grow, use everything up into fill all available habitats.
10:46
It’s not unique to humans by any stretch of the imagination. This is the means by which any species survives. This is a really interesting story a few years ago, where we saw a group of monkeys who learned to crack open clam shells with rocks, tool using animals such as humans, and they very quickly pushing local shellfish stocks to extinction [?2?]. So it’s a characteristic of organisms that once they acquire a an abundant source of resources, they will use them all up.
11:18
The second factor in this is cultural nurture. And I would say that this is the social misconstruction of reality. So I’ve made the point that we construct our realities. And in this case, it’s a gross misconstruction. So the dominant narrative of our modern techno industrial society is something called neoliberal economics. And certainly, it’s the underlying theme that drives much of global development.
11:43
The problem is that this is a construct that separates the economy from the environment and considers the economy to be essentially independent of any constraints imposed by the biophysical environment. One of the mental tricks that we use to to do that, is to assume that human ingenuity or technology can create substitutes for any potentially limiting natural resource. In this model, ethical and moral considerations [are] irrelevant.
12:14
Damage to ecosystems and communities are considered to be mere externalities. So we have a situation then, which is based on another social construct coming out of the Enlightenment, really, that is of human exceptionalism.
12:30
Underpinning much of our modern techno industrial society, is the idea that humans are not constrained by the laws of nature. So again, we see models such as this in textbooks where the economy is separate from the environment and free of constraints, of course, there’s an exchange of energy and resources. But once you believe that human ingenuity can overcome any resource scarcity, then this becomes irrelevant.
12:56
So this is what shows up in typical economics textbooks. This is what we regard as the economy. It’s a perpetual self feeding flow of energy and material, rather resources, rather, goods and services produced by businesses to households in exchange for wages and salaries.
13:17
But of course, households provide labor and investments to businesses in exchange for goods and services. So we have a double counter flow of entities here. But you’ll notice there’s no reference whatsoever to the biophysical environment which contains the entire system.
13:38
So it follows from our prevailing economic logic, that economic growth can continue indefinitely, propelled by boundless technological progress. This is expressed most appropriately or or perhaps most, exuberantly, by Julian Simon, the late Professor Simon, of Management Studies at the University of Maryland, “we have in our hands now the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever growing populationfor the next 7 billion years.”
14:09
This is, by the way, one of the most arithmetically challenged assertions ever to come out of economists, but it’s one that a lot of people like to take seriously. Now, what’s missing from this is a very simple biophysical fact that all human activity every act we undertake, and indeed all real events are what we call dissipative.
14:31
Every activity results in the permanent dissipation or irreversible loss of all of the energy and a significant proportion of the material involved. The important flows in the economy are not the unidirectional flows of abstract money value as textbooks suggest, but rather the unidirectional and irreversible flows of energy and matter.
14:56
So this is what the textbook model ought to look like. We see Then the circular flows a model of goods and services, counter current with spending on these is actually sustained by a continuous extraction of available energy and material from the biophysical environment. These are so called low entropy resources, they move through the economy, but all of it is injected back into the environment as pollution and waste.
15:25
Even the final products of the economy are eventually dissipated and degraded back into the environment as high entropy wastes. Okay, so we have two factors, then combining. The first is the natural [?3?] predisposition of humans to expand both in population terms and to into habitats, and the imposition on top of that, of a reinforcing social construct in the form of neoliberal unlimited growth economics.
15:59
And if we looked at this in context, thankfully, it took 350,000 years roughly the that’s the entire life of modern humans, for the human population to hit a billion in the early 1800s. Since then, in a scarce 200 years, we’ve added an additional seven one half billion people. And pardon, we’ve expanded seven and a half fold, 1/1700ths of this much time has resulted in a population, seven fold larger, so that we’ve actually now reached 7.8 billion in 2020, or 2021.
16:38
Meanwhile, gross world product increased by over 100 fold. And per capita incomes increased by a factor of 13, as much as 25, in rich countries. So we’ve had this massive expansion of the human enterprise, but Earth didn’t get any larger. This is what it looks like.
These, again, are real numbers. And keep in mind, but the this is just 10,000 years of our 350,000 years of human evolutionary history. It’s not even, that’s just modern man, so that the X axis could actually extend over into the next county. And then suddenly, right toward the end of this 350,000 year period, we see this enormous and inordinate expansion.
17:25
There are two very important points to take from this. The first is that it was the combination of technology and particularly the use of fossil fuels that made the explosive growth of the human enterprise possible early in the 19th century. So we are entirely the product of fossil fuels.
17:43
The second thing to keep in mind is that only the last eight or 10 generations of people have enjoyed sufficient growth or technological change in their lifetimes, that didn’t notice it. And yet, out of 1000s of generations of people, we take these the last 10 generations or so to be the norm.
18:03
And the second point to take from this graph is that in fact, continuous population and economic growth is an anomaly. This growth spurt that we take to be the norm is the single most abnormal period in human history. And I want you to keep the shape of this curve in mind as we move forward.
18:21
Here are some of the proofs of vote of defeat asserted, a population has grown six fold since 18. Witnesses between 1850 and 2017, it was empowered by a nine fold increase in the use of energy, and total consumption has gone up by a factor of 55 times. So per capita consumption, nine times 55 times increase in the total consumption of energy in that period.
18:49
This is the power of exponential growth shown in this curve. By the way, we don’t replace one form of energy with another we simply add them together. So wood became coal was added to wood and oil was added to coal and natural gases added oil. And now we’re adding so called renewable energies to natural gas, but there’s no real displacement, as we’ll see in a moment.
19:13
Because of this exponential growth, however, 50% of all the fossil fuels ever consumed have been consumed in just the past 30 years. Ninty percent of fossil fuels ever used, had been used in my lifetime. So these are extremely recent phenomena. And of course, the drivers of climate change.
19:35
Everything else has exploded in kind, it doesn’t really matter what we plot. We’ve seen this exponential growth in almost everything that human beings use, and take advantage of. And incidentally, this has taken place particularly in in the last 50 years, during a period of unprecedented increases in technological efficiency.
19:57
So many people expect efficiency to rescue us from of the problem. In fact, efficiency is the primary or one of the primary movers of growth. So, economics is divorced from biophysical and social reality, or mainstream economics.
20:15
And again, these are social constructs products of the human mind with not any necessary connection to reality, in fact, contain no useful information about the structure or dynamic properties, the interdependence, lags, [inaudible], discontinuous behaviors, and so on, of the real ecosystems, or the social systems within which the economy operates in the real world.
20:38
So remember, we are running the world with an economic system, which in no way maps to the reality in which it finds itself. Well, what could possibly go wrong. And, of course, plenty, the best known symptom if they said at the outset, just perhaps climate change. And here we see the steady uptick of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last 60 or so years.
21:05
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve seen a 45% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Humans are literally changing the biochemistry of the planet on which we live. And of course, there’s the temperature effect as well. These are simply the corresponding temperature graphs, we’ve seen a steady increase, particularly in recent decades, the past seven years have been the warmest on record with 2020 and 2016, tied as the warmest years in the instrumental record.
21:36
But here’s the lesser known symptom. And again, I want to underscore that these are all related, you cannot solve any of these in isolation from any of the others. So, if we go back 10,000 years, our best estimates of terrestrial biomass, so that wild mammals were about 99% of the total, and humans less than 1%.
21:58
Now since then, over the 10,000 year period, we’ve seen about a four to seven fold increase in the biomass. But now humans themselves constitute 30 to 34%, our livestock constituted another 60 odd percent, and wild mammals have been reduced to a mere one and a half percent of the total mammalian biomass on the planet, we’ve literally competitively displaced most of their mammalian species from their habitats, and food resources.
22:28
So the expansion of humanity has real consequences. It’s not just mammals, wild bird populations are tumbling. Domestic poultry now constitute 70% of the world’s bird biomass. Average populations of 1000s of monitored species of wild vertebrates have declined 60% since 1970, and the populations of invertebrates are also in freefall.
22:53
So it’s a generalized phenomenon caused by habitat displacement. And the simple fact of the matter is that humans require and take is simply unavailable for other species. So we are living most of our lives in the last couple of 100 years, in particular, under a grand shared illusion. And I think one of the most important elements of this is the notion that there is no conflict between the growth of the human enterprise and the conservation of the environment.
23:25
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard our various senior politicians, including Prime Minister Trudeau proclaim, there’s no contradiction between continuous economic growth and conservation of Nature. This is simply demonstrably untrue. That continuous growth of the human enterprise on a finite planet necessarily means the displacement of non human species.
23:50
Modern humans are in fact systematically destroying the biophysical basis of their own existence. So what’s the solution? It’s not that we’re unaware of these problems, but modern technological society is completely self referencing.
24:09
Once we have a mental construct of the nature of reality, we keep referring to it for solutions to the problem that it creates. So our solutions tend to be more growth through technology. And we can illustrate this again in just two domains.
24:24
If you think of population, when I was in school back in the 60s, the population planning was one of the key issues that we discussed in biology, and it was certainly something on the international stage. Population planning became the dominant policy discussion back in the 60s, but by 2018, it became the least researched of all.
24:50
So that most of the literature today, and here’s a quote, “we find a strong and increasing focus on feeding the world through increasing food production via new technologies.”
So away from planning to simply satisfying the demand no matter how large gets, which, of course means a continuation of the displacement of non-human life.
25:10
If we look at climate change, we see exactly the same kind of thinking that taking place. We know, from the Paris Agreement, that we need to reduce our carbon emissions by about 50% below 2010 levels in just nine years, that’s over 7% per year beginning now. We’re not going to do this.
25:29
We need to have complete decarbonisation by 2050. And more recent study says suggests that really should be 2030.
So that’s what we should be doing. But what are the politically acceptable solutions from within our current paradigm? And the answer is simple.
25:46
Any capital intensive investment, such as wind and solar power, that will maintain the existing growth based economic order is susceptible. Any discussion of conservation, demand reduction, lifestyle changes, more equitable distribution of the existing wealth are simply not on the table.
26:05
As some authors have described that, I’ve quoted Clive Spash here, “disaster policy is being designed to serve the capitalist growth based or modern techno industrial society, so that the ladder becomes the solution to instead of the cause of the problem, a complete perceptual illusion. “
26:27
Sometimes editorial cartoonists, say at all, and I think this is one of the most obvious ways to express exactly what I’m saying. There’s an irony in all of this, even among those who think climate change is the problem. And is that is the continued growth inhibits the green energy transition. And I just want to illustrate from the most recent data available.
26:51
Primary energy consumption on the planet is going twice as fast as his renewable energy production. So it has to be filled by what? Fossil fuels.
27:01
Even in electricity, where most of the renewable energy progress is being made, demand has increased by 1.3%. That’s total demand for electricity. But generation by non-hydro renewables, wind and solar in particular, has increased by less than that. Even though the increase there’s 13.6%. It’s starting at a very much smaller base, but can’t even keep up with the increased demand in electricity.
27:30
And the bottom line of this unwinnable race is that in 2018–2019, the last year for which we have data, the world remains 84% dependent on fossil fuels, we have to refer to biology again, if we’re going to begin to understand this.
27:50
As matters stand, this is an extremely important point, the expansion of the human enterprise resembles the plague phase of a one-off boom-bust population cycle as it occurs in nature.
So this is an illustration straight out of a biology textbook that describes this phenomenon, that most species will expand very rapidly in response to favorable conditions, abundant resources, but then collapse once those resources are depleted, or predation becomes so demanding [?4?] on their numbers that they crash.
28:25
This is the standard model for how species behave under natural circumstances, what goes up will come down.
And we can look at this example here. from a couple of experiments, I suppose, on the Pribilof Islands off Alaska, very rich in lichens.
28:50
Reindeer were introduced, populations expanded exactly according to the model we looked at a moment ago, and crashed when those abundant resources were eliminated.
Now, in theory, humans should be able to avoid this uncontrolled collapse. So keep in mind, we are no different from other species, we have this tendency to expand, to use all resources, but we also have other qualities that they don’t possess such as high intelligence, the capacity for logical analysis, an ability to reason from the evidence. We are unique in our ability to plan ahead. We are the only species that can functionally alter its own future trajectory. We have the capacity to exercise moral judgement, which is to say, should we command such authority over nature and the destruction of other species? We have empathy and compasion for people and other species. And we have euniquely diverse forms and institutions for cooperative behavior.
29:50
So these are the highest, I think some of the highest qualities that distinguish humans from other species. However, the exercise of these qualities are not the primarily determinants of human affairs, and I’ve just got three quotes here that illustrate over a period of more than a century what i’m getting at.
30:10
Gustave Le Bon, one of the early psychologists in Europe, France, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste preferring to deify error if error seduces them in other words we prefer our socially constructed illusions to contrary evidence.
30:33
Barbara Tuchman, the pulitzer prize-winning American historian who wrote the book called The March of Folly, quote,
30:43
“Wooden headedness plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring any contrary science. It is acting according to wish, while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. Well, nothing much changed in the 100 years since goes tabla Mo and of course, she traces it way back to ancient history.
31:09
Derrick Jensen, in a little book called A Language Older Than Words, says, “for us to maintain our way of living we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary, because without them, deplorables would become impossibilities.”
31:27
Now, how can we explain this conundrum? And I think part of it again, it comes from our basic evolutionary biology, the human brain is a very complex organ. In very crude terms, we can say that there’s really three brains here, the reptilian complex, which has some basic instinctive behaviors associated with it, including the fight or flight response, various ritualistic and instinctive behaviors. The midbrain is the limbic system. It’s where our emotions, our feelings, our responses to food and sex, occur, it’s where bonding and attachment occurs. It’s one of our social sources of social memory.
32:07
Both of those are rather ancient structures. And built on top of them is the cerebrum, the cortex of the neocortex, the new brain. This is the seat of logic and reason, of forward thinking and planning, of technical manipulation or extreme expertise in manipulating the physical environment, language in speech.
32:28
So all of those higher intellectual qualities reside in that part of the brain, which is the least, or the most recent arrival on the scene as it were. And we live there that we live in cerebral consciousness, but we’re unaware of the hidden emotions and instincts that are equally important in the activities that we undertake.
32:51
So we are a deeply conflicted species. Again, editorial cartoonists are brilliant. “Well, the end of the world scenario may be rife with unimaginable horrors. We believe that the pre end period is filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”
33:09
And we’ve all heard examples of that. And here’s an example of how our conflicting instincts and intelligence have confounded any action on but we all seem to think of as the major a symptom of the problem, climate change.
Again, I refer here to this constant steady uptick in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But I’ve plotted on this a number of other points, the Limits to Growth volume was published in 1972, the world’s scientists first warning to humanity was about 1992. We’ve seen over the 50 year period represented here 34, climate conferences, half a dozen major international climate agreements, and various scientists warning, all of which have failed utterly, to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, which of course is what they were intended to do.
34:04
So on the one hand, we see what’s happening on the other, we don’t do anything about it.
Another brilliant cartoon, “Assuming present trends continue, the odds are quite good that we will become the best informed extinct species on the planet.”
34:20
And we’re beginning to understand again, referring to our biology. So what’s going on here? It turns out that in the course of one’s individual development, repeated sensory experiences or repeated experiences or exposures to cultural norms, literally helped shape the development of the brain synaptic circuitry.
34:44
So that in effect, our beliefs, values and assumptions, our cultural paradigms or narratives acquire a physical presence in the brain. Subsequently, once this is embedded people tend to seek out compatible experiences. They seek out people who think the same way they do.
35:03
And then quote, “when faced with information that does not agree with our pre formed internal structures, we deny, discredit, reinterpret, or forget that information.” A wonderful little book that explains much of this is Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture. And by the way, if you think of the political circumstances of the United States for the last several years, particularly during the Trump years, you’ll see this writ large at the societal level, people simply ignoring reality in preference to their preformed internal structures, their prejudices, biases, and so on… and social constructs all.
35:43
To put it more simply, the problem with your reason solutions is that they don’t fit by preconceived notions of the problem. So reason really does not hold much sway in the forum of political will.
Now, things are actually getting worse, because in recent years, there’s been a deliberate attempt, we’d expand on this, I just took out a bunch of slides, but we’ve been socially engineered to ignore reality, which is why politics is increasingly influenced by not only neoliberal ideology, but religious fundamentalism, climate change, denial, anti intellectualism, and other forms of what is now called magical thinking.
36:24
In 2016, this problem had become evident enough that the Oxford Dictionary defined the year of word of the year as post truth, defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion, than appeals to emotion and impression and personal belief.
36:50
So again, we see this incredible conflict within the human species of high intelligence, and yet that differs to the socially construct preferences, and that we have managed to come up with. So this is a new age of science denial and magical thinking.
37:13
Another good cartoon, “It’s an enduring mystery. How did this extinct species combined such huge brains with such a jaw dropping stupidity?” So what modern techno-industrial society refuses to acknowledge is that to act consistently with our best science may well require a planned economic and population contraction.
37:36
So can humanity learn to live more equitably within the means of nature.
This is the curve that really needs flattening. Of course, we’ve tended to focus almost exclusively, almost excluding climate change, on the pandemic in recent years, and flattening the curve has been the watchword for last year and a half or so.
37:56
And so what we ignore completely is the overshoot curve. That’s the curve that really needs flattening. Because with geometric growth of population beyond long term carrying capacity, humankind has gone into a state of overshoot. And as long as we remain in that state of overshoot, we are literally consuming that resource base of the future.
38:21
And in the course of doing so, we are reducing future carrying capacity: fewer fish stocks, degraded soils, ruined forests cannot produce that which will be needed to sustain the ever growing numbers of human beings. So that in the case of continuous overshoot, systems collapse becomes inevitable.
38:41
The environment at some point can no longer sustain the demands being made on it, on it by the population. So we really need to rethink our whole way of being on the planet. The green line represents one planet living, where people go through a period of growth, but then just as in our individual development, we defer to carrying capacity and level out well within the carrying capacity of the environment and thus extend the duration of civilization.
39:15
So we have a choice [?5?]. The human enterprise is in critical overshoot. I don’t think there’s any doubt or real discussion any longer about that. We may be at or near a critical tipping point. In coming years, I don’t think there’s any question about this, the human enterprise will contract.
39:37
Now, as an intelligent plan capable species, we can theoretically choose between a business as usual course, risking a chaotic and implosion imposed by nature, followed by geopolitical turmoil and resource wars. And basically that’s the tack we are currently on if you pay any attention to the news.
40:00
Or we can have a well planned orderly and cooperative descent toward a socially just sustainability for all.
That’s really the stark choice between us. So what would be required to eliminate overshoot? The first thing would be for our leadership [?6?] to formally recognize the end of material growth, the need to drastically and I mean dramatically reduce the human ecological footprint.
40:25
We have to also recognize the theoretical and practical difficulties, indeed impossibility of an old green, quantitatively equivalent energy transition. That’s a huge story, we can perhaps talk about it later. But it’s simply not happening. We have to acknowledge that as long as we remain in overshoot. sustainable production and consumption means less production and consumption.
40:51
The only way to eliminate overshoot is through consuming less. If we face that reality, we must devise ways to assist communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles. Keeping in mind that, you know, when I was a kid, North Americans happily lived on half the energy use per capita that we use today, we are profligate, wasteful users of energy.
41:18
We need programs to retrain the workforce for new forms of employment. Because as energy declines, there’ll be an increased demand for even new types of human physical labor.
41:29
We need strategies to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and to reduce energy waste, half or more of the energy consumed in our culture is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness.
41:42
We need policies to restructure global and national economies to remain within the allowable carbon budget. And by the way, recent sciences suggesting there may be none, that we’ve actually used up all the carbon that we possibly can safely. This means we need to allocate any remaining carbon budget, and we’re going to be stuck with fossil fuel for some time. So we have to reduce its use dramatically. And this means essential uses only in food production, space water heating into urban transportation.
42:17
We need to re localize the central economic activity. This means d globalization in order to reduce the need for much of our energy consuming transportation, for example, something like 30% of the energy budget.
42:31
We need recognition that equitable sustainability requires fiscal mechanisms for income and wealth redistribution. Notice that this is hardly something willingly discussed in our political discourse today.
42:45
We need ongoing programs to ensure the restoration of ecosystems and the integrity of global life support, you can’t continue to cut away the biophysical basis of your own existence. So a massive program of ecosystem restoration is necessary.
43:01
And finally, there’s hundreds of these but I think this is an important one, we need a global population strategy to enable the smooth that sent to the perhaps 2 billion people that might be able to live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical nature — that means of nature, well within carrying capacity.
43:22
In short, we need nothing less than a plan, a global plan, a global cooperative plan, for techno modernism to transcend, and catalyze a personal to civilization level transformation, to a way of being on earth, in which humans can live spiritually satisfying, economically secure lives more equitably, within the means of nature. And that is the message I have for all of us today.
Ruben Nelson 43:57
We’ll do this again sometime.
Bill Rees 43:59
My pleasure. Thank you very much Ruben. And again, apologies for the little technical schmuck up at the beginning. That was shameful.
Ruben 44:05
If that’s the biggest crisis of the day, it’s a good day.
Bill 44:09
Thank you.
The End
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I’m basically a Bill Rees fanboy insofar as possible, but I should confess that I don’t primarily listen to humans as they are not a source. And if Klaatu was standing in front of me, she wouldn’t be either. Gort wouldn’t be a credible source. I don’t believe information processing agents.
Even Marvin, the paranoid android with a brain the size of a planet isn’t a source of other than dubious claims. I suppose someone will soon interconnect all current AI’s and channel all available electrical energy to the Gog who will soon figure out how to harvest all lightening discharges on the planet to further empower it’s brain. I suppose some idiot savant (expert) will then tell me to ask it any question and that I can believe Gog’s answer is certainty true (I have to go to Room 101 if I don’t). I imagine I’ll try to not facepalm (but I’ll fail and my face will be eaten off by rats).
The correct answer to “who’s your source?” isn’t Gog (or any other permutation of letters in any alphabet). At risk of sounding like an Odumite, the answer is “Nature has all the answers.” You know, the nature of things, the Gaian system, the matter-energy-li system, that which doesn’t go away when to stop believing in it, i.e. the not-two which you (as a modern human) will never know.
Oh, and as an aside, I could mention how a sane mind listens to Nature. Well, first, it takes in information for maybe 30–60 years (aka student mode). Then it listens for the ring of truth (idea: Philip Morrison). If it hears something, it looks for disconfirming evidence. Evidence is the universe’s tea leaves — anything you see in them is probably wrong, but some guesses have more ring than others. Know that you’ll never know anything with certainty apart from tautologies that tell you nothing about Cosmos (she is unkind).
On a good day, listen for the sound trees make when no wind blows. Otherwise, while floundering on the sea of primate prattle, consider what those few who also endeavor to listen to Nature have to say (i.e. to tales told by idiots). No thought of believing anything they say, but if one says to look over here, doing so may be of interest.
For example, the Webb telescope recently offered some data. I was aware that some primates had claimed there were 2 trillion galaxies in Cosmos (observable and unobservable), and that others had prattled that there were not nearly that many (per their tea leaves). The Webb image was more recent, and my guess is that AI didn’t generate it. So I could look at the image and infer how many galaxies are in Cosmos (by asking the image — “listening to” Nature).
So far as Gog knew, no one associated with the image (e.g. NASA) had counted the number of dots in the image (so, yes, I did cheat to see if a count had be made that gave me a number I could use). The only relevant number provided was that the image was 8 arcminutes across (I could then derive the height). So I counted the dots, and dividing the area into the area of a sphere, I was being told by Webb that there are about 40 trillion galaxies in Cosmos. Knowing/realizing that the system of worlds is bigger than our view of it may be essential if we sidestep extinction.
So I posted this news on Medium (by far the most important/interesting information in the 559 I’ve “published” so far). It is a “1 minute read.” None of my 179 and counting followers or other Medium readers read it. Two potential readers had clicked on the lick (by accident?), but 1 minute was too much time to waste, so they soon did a close/go back so Medium didn’t count it as a “read.” Perhaps the number of galaxies in the universe is of no interest to doomer dilettantes. My guess is that modern humans will go extinct as curiosity will not bring them back.
- Are modern human beings programmed by nature to overshoot carrying capacity? Yes. Are non-modern humans, with a pre-modern culture intact (e.g. <10k San and 400 Hadza) culturally and/or biologically programmed to exceed even the lower limit of carrying capacity, much less the upper limit? No (they are K-strategists and modern human domesicants are not).
- Do other primates that use tools push prey populations to extinction? The article in the popular science magazine New Scientist, written by a reporter covering space, anthropology and physics for the Wall Street Journal, et al. claims they do. The article is paywalled so source cited was unknown, but the same story in another online magazine included the source which was the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at Oxford University. The only claim of extinction was that “tool-assisted foraging has also pushed many of our [Pleistocene human megafauna extinction] prey species to extinction [176 species of megafauna not including other hominins].” What they claim is that the macaque’s predation “reduces prey size and prey abundance.” One claim attributed to a diffferent source was that “wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) at Ngogo in Uganda hunt red colobus monkeys (Procolobus rufomitratus) at a rate that may lead to local extinction of the latter.” This is a “may” claim, not an observation. Opinions count for less (little). Modern are unique, but not in anyway they would like to think.
- Are modern humans programmed (culturally and genetically) to expand both in population numbers and into habitats whether uninhabited by humans (e.g. New Zealand in 15th century) or inhabited by non-modern human expansionists (e.g. Madagascar) or prior expansionist humans (e.g. Tikopia)? Yes, we moderns of the last 200 years of rapid exponential growth believe in neoliberal unlimited growth economics. Did the non-expansionist form of human and all prior hominins (as evidenced by their persistence for over six million years) believe in exceeding even the lower limits of carrying capacity? No.
- Will most species expand very rapidly in response to favorable conditions, abundant resources, but then collapse once those resources are depleted or predation becomes so demanding on their numbers that they crash? Most animals spread by dispersal. Biological dispersal of individuals from their birth or breeding site to a different breeding site results in geographical gene flow, e.g. primary and secondary succession. If an organism is an invasive species, its spread may be viewed (by taking the view of affected organism) as a systems pathology (e.g. Chestnut blight or from a Moa’s POV, when members of the Polynesian expansion arrived). With environmental change (e.g. climate) species populations disperse towards favorable conditions, but not as invasive species. The ratio of prey to predator biomass
in mammal communities is typically between 200:1 and 100:1, and any preditor that did or could do to reindeer what the abscence of preditors did to reindeer on St. Matthew Island (and others) would lead to preditor extinction. Unlike dogs (and modern humans) wolves (and prior to modern human hominins) are K-strategists. Would a clever fox who invented an infallible point-and-kill rabbit killing machine on an island use it to gain favor (sexual) from all the vixens, become leader of a skulk of foxes whose male followers got their fair share of rabbit and tail, happily feast on the last rabbit (before the fox die-off)? Of course, but only because if was a modern fox. Normal foxes are K-strategists. - Do we modern humans, unlike all subsystems of Gaia, get to choose our future? Over 8 modern humans believe they can (ask them). Even those who believe in determinism don’t know enough to know that their future is determinate (but can pretend to). A belief that one is an agent, with or without free will, is the socially constructed consensus narrative that is as untrue as all the others (actually far more so). “Agency” is a useful construct for modelers (e.g. concept forming brains), but models are not the modeled.
- Is the first thing our leadership could do is formally recognize the end of material growth, the need to drastically and dramatically reduce the human ecological footprint by rapid contraction of both population and the socioeconomic-political system? No (see 4 above). Let’s just double down and work to convince 51% of those living in democracies to form a Real Green New Deal Party to put only RGND leaders in power. Then form a coalition of all progressive democracies on the planet to attack all the autocracies and errant democracies (who failed to vote correctly) so all humans can do all the “we need” to do things (otherwise any not agreeing would keep growing their economy and population to replace all the RGNDs.
If the predicament of modern expansionistic humans is due to the condition of being modern humans (captured and dragged along by a complex, powerful, and remorseless dynamic that no modern human can understand), then is our (actually posterity’s) ghastly future locked in? For modern humans, yes.
For those who come to know what form of human they are, could an understanding o one’s condition foundational change one’s form? I don’t know (and you don’t either).
That a condition of a change in “understanding” could change one’s form of civilization/culture/worldview/mindset/mind is to consider (I’m still looking for an example of no change). A change of culture (e.g. hominin norm of K-culture to the modern human norm of r-culture) happened once (as evidenced by the existence of modern humans).
Could a change in culture happen again? Perhaps, but not for the modern form of human dependent on technology and ideology. Sorry about that. Could some modern humans walk away from any dependency on technology or ideology (belief-based cognition)? What if the price was to know then thyself? Could you choose to? No. Could a renormalized human be choicelessly aware and obedient to the nature of things?
“You” cannot. Models are not the modeled, the system. A subsystem of the Gaian system that could persist would have to. Extinction is allowed.
The Q and A is the Otter AI text unedited
Ruben Nelson
Thank you. I’m going to ask the next question on behalf of Jeff Pasmore who had to leave. And John Meyer, you will be up next. Jeff said, have you had this conversation with any politicians? If yes, what has been the response?
William Rees
Okay, the response is almost entirely negative. And so I want coined the phrase that what is politically feasible? Okay, what is politically feasible, is ecologically irrelevant. And what is ecologically necessary, is politically unfeasible. So, again, we’re caught in that dilemma, where the politicians are, frankly, increasingly captive of the corporate sector, who are obviously interested mainly in maintaining the growth paradigm. And if you look at even institutions, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the discussions going on there, the people involved are all members of the corporate sector advisors of one kind or another big government. And it’s all about the technological means of maintaining the status quo. Now, many people say, Well, what’s wrong with that? Well, here’s what’s wrong with that. If we were, for example, to find a quantitative substitute for fossil fuel energy, keep in mind that energy is the means by which humans have grown the human enterprise by scouring the earthly resources, and converting all of that into the massive human artifacts. So if we have sufficient energy to continue that process, we’ll simply deplete the planet until it implodes. And nevertheless, that’s where our politicians are no politicians. Well, perhaps the Prime Minister of Ireland has now suggested that growth might be questionable, but certainly no politician is willing to stand up and say that we are on the wrong tack. It’s time to reassess our situation. And change course, I actually once wrote a paper saying that if if a major politician, the President of the United States or Russia or China, we’re gonna get up in public and say these things out loud, and show the leadership necessary, that might be the kind of catalyst that would be necessary to change the world around. But until that happens, we’re stuck. Politicians reject absolutely anything that I’ve said today.
Ruben Nelson
Thank you, I think Bill Tyson, Europe, and she’ll be up next. And, John, your question.
Speaker 1
Hey, Bill, thanks very much. I think we could be here for days trying to cover you’ve addressed. But I’d like to look at the function of the human brain, as opposed to the structure of our current economy, the elites that are now in power. Some of these elites are absolutely dependent on continued growth, the average person is not, the interest of the average Canadian, for instance, I think diverged from these elites, probably in the in the early 60s. We didn’t need any more consumption that we have now. We didn’t need any more people. And we’ve paid an economic and social price for growth. But, basically, so that’s my question. It’s not just as our social structure and the elites currently in power, the interests of these elites, that dictates social policy, and also the national conversation, because the media now is completely controlled by growth interests. And that’s why you’re not hearing the discussion. Because in this 50 years, I’ve been covering this, I’ve been dealing with these issues, I find a tremendous change in public attitude to growth and population growth. And I think we see that really distilled in the pandemic, people are changing their attitudes, people are open to the suggestion that maybe we should change but you don’t get an immediate. So I think that the human brain is functioning maybe better than you give it credit for. But it’s not. It’s not enabled this adjustment. Possible adjustment is not being enabled, it’s being suppressed by economic interests and the power elite, what would you say?
William Rees
Alright, I did say that more and more people are willing to listen to the arguments that I’m presenting, but it doesn’t make any difference. If on the policy front, we’re continuing to go forward. Look at the pandemic, the way Trudeau has approached this, I’ve heard him say 100 times now that the economy will come roaring back. So and most people talk about we want to return to normal, we want to return to normal. And I’m talking about people that you’re talking about who are relatively well informed. What they don’t realize is that normal is the problem. Normal is the problem, we have to shift out of normal into a new way of thinking and doing and being on this planet, if we’re going to get out of this issue. So most people today, yes, they’re receptive to change and all of that, but the kind of change they’re receptive to, is marginal reform of the system, we’re going to move to green energy and all of this sort of thing. They haven’t done the arithmetic, we need some people to stand up and broadcast what this really means in terms of the impacts on the planet, there will be no green energy transition, do you really think that one year from now Canada will be using 7% less fossil fuel than it is? Now? The answer is no. And in fact, if you even look on government’s own websites, the Canada Energy Agency talks about well, we might be down to 30%, less fossil fuel by 2050. Come on. It’s not even in the ballpark of
Speaker 1
what’s needed. Canada hasn’t kept its word on any of these. And of course not. We don’t have a strategy. We don’t have monitoring. So that’s it’s guaranteed failure. But I do think we would have a more informed debate, an informed discussion, that, you know, if the financial interests of the extreme elites were not so radically different from a the welfare of the planet and be the welfare of the average individual. Anyway, great answer. Thanks very much. And, Ruben, back to you.
Ruben Nelson
Bill Tyson, Europe, and me, Trump, you’ll be next.
Speaker 2
So can you hear me? All right. I can hear you. Good. Okay, Bill, that was an excellent presentation, you put things really very clearly. I wonder if you ever feel like a modern Elijah had a great deal of difficulty getting a message. I wander we started to talk about politicians not listening. I have worse concerns than that. I think that the electorate just doesn’t listen politics. The politicians reflect what they think the they can get across to their electorate. I wonder if we really need something like an enlightened monarchy or an enlightened dictatorship. I really despair about democracy ever getting us out of this mess?
William Rees
Well, it would be nice, I just don’t think that there’s any such thing of power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s not an original observation, by the way, but I think it’s a truth. So democracy may be terrible, but it’s what we’ve got going for us right now, having said that, it seems to me that the thing that will move us forward is more and more protests in the street. Democracy really means people standing up on their hind legs, and expressing themselves effectively, in the political arena, the more the economy is being structured to leave people behind, the more likely is civil insurrection of one kind or another. In the years coming ahead, we’re already seeing hints of this, just look at what happened in the United States a couple of months ago. But it’s also happening in different parts of Europe, where people are getting fed up to the teeth with the nature of the situation in which they find themselves and the unresponsiveness of the political and corporate system to the nature of our dilemma. And by the way, it’s not all good, because we see it, as I’ve emphasized, increasing factions. On the far right on the far left, different people adhering to dramatically different social constructs of the way they perceive reality. So religious fundamentalism, extreme right? political discourse, extreme leftism taking over in the United States and even encountered in universities, we’re reforming the language to reflect a particular social construct rather than the nature of reality. So we’re seeing, I think, a breakdown in social cohesion, in part because of the failure of the media, in part because of the gross failure of our education system, but also in part of the absence of real leadership of politicians who stand up and say, what the evidence tells us. We’re seeing more and more leadership by poll All rather than leadership by into intelligent politicians who, you know, grab the bit in their teeth, and take us in in a direction. That’s why I said if we had just one major politician who stood up and said some intelligent things based on the evidence, we could crack this and at least get the discourse moving in the right direction, even the popular media would be forced to pick up the discussion and move it through society.
Ruben Nelson
Thank you, Ted Manning, you’ll be next. Any throw your question?
Annita Thorhog
Well, thank you, Bill for an excellent presentation. And as somebody who’s thought about this, since limits to growth, which is five decades ago, I’m, I’m very interested in your opinion of what comes at this point in the peak, if very grounded, intelligent solutions could suddenly and obviously, we would have to do them very rapidly, be put all into effect, act multi solutions. At the same time, for instance, China was very, moderately successful in one, one child, one family and other solutions, like reforestation is happening and major places around the world regeneration of the sea, eating much lower on the food web, and I’m talking primarily vegetables, and some cultivated seafoods, which could be in 75%, of the world surface, which is now really not used for, for growing foods, and limiting many other things. And that we, we don’t use these high tech things like atom bombs to kill one another, and create, quote, security, but we use fairly straightforward and multiple, and everybody’s using them techniques. Do you think that this creates some kind of opportunity, this kind of scenario? Or do you think the The die is cast, and it’s, we’re just on the way out no matter what we do,
William Rees
I don’t think we’re on our way out no matter what we do, but I do think almost everything you’ve talked about, is still focusing on technological solutions. Rather than just facing the reality, we need to use less, and we need fewer people consuming less. And until those things are addressed directly, it doesn’t matter what we do, because all of the technological solutions being put forward. Because every single action is dissipated will require energy will require the throughput of more materials, such things as the circular economy of green growth, the real or the green, New Deal. They’re meaningless. These are just fantasies set out there, to low people into confidence that we can move forward through technological change, we need to have a conversation around how do we reduce consumption? How do we reduce human populations until we are beneath the productive and carrying capacities of this planet Earth. And until we’re there, we’re continuing to erode the basis of our own existence. And that won’t last too long, you know, we can cross a tipping point, one of the great Antarctic ice sheets breaks off and we can have a three meter sea level rise in a matter of a decade. And that’s game over for most of our coastal cities. So we are at that point where we need to make those serious changes, and stop thinking technology’s going to pull us through this rough,
Ruben Nelson
airy brew. She’ll be up next. Ted Man, are you your question?
Narrator
No, no, that was wonderful. Am I on yet? Okay, hi. Yeah, I’m in great risk of agreeing with you. That was wonderful. I’ve been in risk management for a long, long time. And we always come to the conclusion that nobody does anything until they’re panics. And I guess what I’m asking is how panic do they have to get and is there any hope that an institution could happen that might in fact, react significantly before it’s too late?
William Rees
Well, this is a conversation that could go on for a very long time. I’m a biologist so a great deal of my presentation was based on certain biological realities. Another biological reality is that human beings evolved to be optimists. No optimism is a state of mind. We want to be hopeful about the future. But when you’re in a crisis situation, unwarranted optimism and hope can be enervating they can destroy the motivation to move forward, because we tend to think of well, somebody else will handle the problem or the technologists will fix it to the scientists will or whatever. So I’m not too encouraged that we would get the kind of innovative thing that you’re thinking about Ted that it’s going to emerge from anything short of and I think you’ve already agreed with me, some kind of micro catastrophe, not fatal to the planet, but big enough to get people to sit up and take notice. And in some ways, you know, the pandemic is a lesson in that direction. We’ve seen more government action, in response to this pandemic than to any other crisis in my lifetime. Yet, it’s a relatively minor crisis, when you really think about the numbers of people being affected, we may have a few million deaths by the time it’s over. But we add 85 million people to the planet every year. So it’s a drop in the bucket. But it does show the extent to which we can move dramatically if under the gun. So
Narrator
you can actually get the attention of a politician when you haven’t had their hand, your hand on their wallet. And what’s what’s about to happen in the energy sector. If Richard Whitner decides to cut off? Absolutely, yes. could well be a stimulating event? I don’t know. It’ll be enough, but it may actually get the politicians attention.
Ruben Nelson
Rob Hoffman, you’ll be up next. Barry. Bruce, your question?
Speaker 3
You know, thank you very much, Neil, that was a wonderful presentation. I was struck by the idea that climate change is a symptom. And that root causes lie in our own brains. And wondering about education. I think it selectively affects our cerebrum, which you’ve said, is dominated by our limbic and reptilian brains. And they wonder how we how we get around that? Will we have to actually endure a drastic drop in our population, and perhaps, hope that certain young people with dominant cerebral means will emerge? Mutants? So I just I don’t know if this is an non actionable but serious root cause? How do we get around that?
William Rees
Well, that, to me is a critical question. And I think one way is to at least raised consciousness, most people aren’t aware that their decision making is not something that takes place entirely in the cerebral hemispheres, that beneath that there will be an influence of your emotional state of your instinctive response to the same circumstances. But we’re not conscious of that. All we are conscious of is that which goes on in the thinking part of our brain. So we have to make people aware that they are actually being influenced by these other elements. Once that is understood, you at least opened the door to the possibility that we can create social institutions that override our instinctive and emotional responses. Do you understand what I’m saying? In fact, if you if you think of civilization, I often think of civilization as that set of rules and regulations that inhibit that which would otherwise occur. Even something as simple as not murdering somebody who offends you. That’s the natural response to an enemy. When we impose rules that make that less public doesn’t always work. But at least it’s less probable human beings are not a monogamists. We tend to be a somewhat more promiscuous, but we create a social institution called marriage and a legal framework to sustain it, which doesn’t always work again, but at least it’s a framework that controls the behavior so that we can live together reasonably well in society. So what I’m really arguing here, but it was very is that we need to raised a consciousness that much of our lives are dominated if not dominated, at least influenced by subliminal emotional and instinctive contexts that have to be overridden in the right circumstances if we’re going to pull through. Now part of the problem is this. One of the things that makes us negative is any perceived threat to our own well being. So people who have acquired a certain political power or economic power, once we have those things, we’re extremely reluctant to give them up. So any threat to our perceived economic power or social status is resisted mightily, not rationally. Again, we’re not primarily a rational species. But we have to be aware that the way we are acting is determined by a primitive instinct at work. By the way, these things didn’t evolve by happenstance, these things were 10,000 years ago, but they don’t work in the kind of circumstances that we’ve created today. So let me reiterate that because again, it’s an extremely important point that is missing entirely from our education system, for example, that human beings evolved in a certain way that was appropriate for the kind of unchanging environmental circumstances that we evolved in tribes even up to 10,000 years ago. But today, we need to be able to move rapidly quickly in response to rapid environmental change. And we simply don’t have the mental or societal agility to respond as rapidly, as the circumstances require, unless we raise all of that to consciousness and realize that we’ve got to or else, that’s probably not a good answer, but it’s as good as I can. It was,
Speaker 3
it was great. I think, maybe the flaw in my thinking was assuming that education only appeals to our our rational brain, but perhaps education, and I think there are probably instances of education, appealing to the the lower brain as well. I think what you’re saying is, education needs to change to approach those aspects of our thinking. So thank you very much.
Ruben Nelson
Dave Doherty, you’ll be up next. Rob Hoffman your question?
Speaker 4
Yes. Hi, Bill. Good, good. Very well. Great presentation. Thanks very much. I have a question, but I’ll make a comment. First of all, I think we would agree that that Homo sapiens, we human beings are ill equipped to understand the complex systems in which we exist. To use Stafford beers terms, as you did, are models of reality that that we hold are, don’t map well enough onto the external reality. So my question is, can we use technology? Or can we find technology that would enhance our capacity to understand the reality? Just as we have discovered telescopes and microscopes that help us understand aspects of of that reality, better than we could have without them?
William Rees
That’s a very interesting question. And I think you’ve gone way beyond my depth in that domain. But I do want to pick up on something you said. And that’s really very important. Humans evolved in small tribal groups, you might meet another 100 People in the course of your entire lifetime, you had a limited home range with a small array of ecosystems over which you had almost no control or influence. That’s not quite true, because we were quite prolific hunters and so on and so forth. But the fact is, that we evolved to deal with relatively simple circumstances and situations, the human brain is not capable of wrapping itself around the kind of world that we have created, nobody understand really, how the internet works or the economy or the political system. Each of these things is a complex system. And our whole society is an overlay of multiple complex system, each one of which is beyond the capacity for any one person to really understand how it behaves. So Stafford beers, warning in a sentence is almost universal. It is the case that whatever social construct we come up with whatever model we come up with, will not contain a sufficiently rich array of the external reality that we’re going to be able to maintain control over it. Right? I think we’re in a situation now, where what will take us down in the end, if something that may not even be on the horizon may not even be something we thought about. It’s going to be some hidden systemic tipping point over which we cross and take us down completely. And it’s something we didn’t even think about pandemic, whoever thought of pandemics before, a year and a half ago, as something that would have such a disruptive impact on society, well, perhaps a handful of people. But the fact is, we are absolutely subject to surprise. And the more we push these systems to their limits, the more likely the surprise will be something in the category of unknown unknowns. So you’ve put your finger absolutely on it. What technologies could raise awareness of that to consciousness? I don’t know. But I think the best answer is to back off, don’t keep poking the bear it because at some point, it’s going to lose its temper and come after you. And that’s the situation we’re in now. Growth is simply poking the bear. And the ecosphere is a big bear
Ruben Nelson
are Hunter, you will be up next. Dave Gardy your question?
Speaker 5
Yeah, thanks for that talk, they’ll, why you took me back to my education in the 70s. But there’s so much new material that you added to it. It was fascinating. So my question is about weather with weather Well, being with all the increased consumption, the consumption of food and energy and other resources, has actually increased. Aside from our ability to fight infectious disease, and perhaps the fact that we have a bit less war than we did, are we really better off than our grandparents were?
William Rees
Well, again, that’s a question sociologists, and psychologists and a whole lot of other people are asking. But we do have a series of annual tests given since the late 50s, or perhaps even just after the war, on the state of happiness in North America and in some countries in Europe. And what we’ve seen is a negative correlation between rising GDP per capita, and the numbers of people who report themselves as being happy or very happy. So that there’s no direct correlation any longer if there ever was long, I’m sure there was in rising out of poverty. But certainly, we’ve lost any correlation between rising per capita consumption or income in the state of well being. So a reduction in throughput doesn’t necessarily mean a reduction in well being humans were happiest in North America in the late 1950s. And that’s a long time ago, and during a period of the most rapid expansion of the economy, in the history of humankind. So I think there’s a huge lesson to be taken there. And I did have one slide that pointed out, we used half as much stuff per capita in the 50s, as we do now, and we were a lot happier back then.
Speaker 5
I was pretty sure you have some facts regarding that. That was my opinion. Well, thanks.
William Rees
There’s another really important thing to take into account here. Since the 1970s, particularly since the publication of something called DMA. I forget the name of it, but it was a manifesto, Lewis a direction from a corporate lawyer to the US Chamber of Commerce, that art Lewis Powell, look this up. I think everyone should be aware of Lewis Powell memorandum 1971, I believe, under the Nixon administration, to the US Chamber of Commerce, in which he directed the corporate sector to begin the conscious, I suppose, reframing political discourse in North America to get away from the dangerous notions of community, of environment of civil rights of women’s liberation, and those sorts of things which were becoming current in discussion in North American society. And he instructed the corporate sector to pile increasing amounts of resources into refuting all of that and if necessary to establishing departments of economics and private think tanks to reassort reassert rather corporate values in American society. Now this isn’t the only thing that did it. But it was the beginning of the period, which you know some people mark with the rigor faction Mulroney era in the 80s. A decade before that, Lewis Powell set up the the environment in which we went from a handful, maybe 10 Think tanks in North America to several 100, dedicated to promoting the corporate values to diminishing the notion of the public good, or the common wealth. So that so we saw things such as, again, anybody can look this up. When Eisenhower was President, the marginal tax rate for the top 1% in the United States was 90 90% was the marginal tax rate. Today, it’s 34 37%, something of that nature. So every president liberal or rather Democratic or Republican, as since the 1970s, has added to this continuous inflation, of corporate wealth, and of the 1% at the expense of most other people in America. It’s not so bad in Canada, but it’s getting there. So that it right now, the top 1% command something like 80% of the new income from growth in the United States, that bottom 50% are worse off in just about every terms. And if you read a little book called The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the spirit level, you will find that as wealth disparity increases in a society, all of the indicators of population health declines, alcoholism, marital breakups, drug addiction, and all of those things get worse and worse and worse. So that as the income disparity has increased in North America, in the United States, in particular, the US is now at the very bottom of the OECD heap in terms of population health. So that again, it it underscores that although wealth has increased enormously, the misappropriation or mis allocation or dismissed distribution of that wealth, is resulting in a major social catastrophe unfolding, which may lead to the unraveling of the whole of society at some point. Check it out.
Speaker 5
I did I found a link which I put in the chatbox to our Bill Moyers item on it. Oh,
William Rees
yeah, very good. And again, picket and Richard Wilkinson and pickets, little book called The Spirit Level is a great eye opener for people who aren’t familiar with the role of income, wealth, the inequality that is rife in our society did and getting worse by the day.
Speaker 5
Yeah, I used when I was in Health Canada, and one of the things I studied was the Gini coefficient, which back in the 90s was around 32, something like that in Canada, and it’s around 40. Now and it’s gone from about 35 in the states to around 50. And Gini coefficient as it rises indicates more and more of the wealth is going to fewer and fewer people. Yeah. And in fact, that’s one of the things that leads me to believe that our well being is worse now than it was
William Rees
it is that’s exactly what pick Wilkinson and pickets book would show you psychologies solution. Thanks.
Ruben Nelson
Thank you. I’m Mary Hagen, you’ll be up next Art Hunter your question?
Speaker 6
Well, Bill, I guess we’ve been through quite a number of speakers in this series of cake resumes, and they all have, you know, a general theme which, which you’ve really tapped in on and encapsulated just about everyone. And I’ve come to the point of saying no matter how humanity organizes itself, and whatever wonderful moves are being made in the economic sphere, or technology or any, it’s, it’s going to be too late. Anyway, we’re, we’re heading in to a correction, a population correction of some type and I suspect it’s going to be quite substantial. Um, but I I’m interested in your comments as to whether this population correction if I’m correct, is is inevitable. Is it going to be driven by mankind going to war with each other over depleting resources? Food, water, and all those things which we we want to collect and use to maintain our, our standard of living? Or is nature gonna do it for us? Have you have you thought about that and who do you think is going to win this race? That correction?
William Rees
It’s not a race you want to win? Is it Okay, look. Who was it who said that making predictions is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. So I’m not a prognosticator, I just look at the trends. And what the trends say to me is that we’re on a very difficult tack. I think all of the prospects of possibilities of you that you’ve raised are possible. I mean, one of the reasons for the explosive expansion of humankind was the use of fossil fuels to increase our access to all of the resources needed to grow the human enterprise. So from a biological point of view, what we did was release humanity from the negative feedbacks that had kept us in check for 350,000 years. Now, at some point, they come back into play. So for example, we’re all excited about renewable energy. But I if we had another couple of hours, I think I could demonstrate conclusively that there’s no possibility of renewable energy, quantitatively replacing fossil fuel in the next 1015 20 or 30 years, it’s just not going to happen. So we’re caught between a rock and a hard place in the sense that we should get out of fossil fuel to avoid catastrophic climate change. But we can’t get out of fossil fuel. Because our whole society, the production of food, our transportation systems, the construction of our cities, and so on is utterly dependent on abundant cheap energy. So if we were to abandon fossil fuel, because of the existence of massive climate change, there’s going to be huge food problems, starvation will be a fact of the matter, other resources will get scarce, global trade will break down because we can no longer rely on the supply lines that have been built up as a result of globalization. By the way, globalization is arguably the single greatest threat to ecological integrity on the planet. Because what it does is enable rich, high dense populations vastly to exceed their domestic carrying capacities, but then leech on the rest of the world to continue the growth and load at home. So a countries like China, they have something called a bit roads Belt and Road program right now, which is designed to siphon the world’s resources to maintain the appetite of the growing Chinese behemoth. But it’s only what Europeans and Americans did before that. So we have a situation where we use the marketplace as the means by which the wealthy siphoned all the remaining resources from the rest of the world. But if that begins to break down, you have literally 10s of millions of people in mega cities who are going to be cut off from their sources of supply. So that introduces the problem of massive inter regional migration. We’re already seeing this beginning in that the southern US border and in the Mediterranean. In Europe, these are just leading edges of what lies ahead. As climate change breaks down our capacity to maintain our cities and civilization. We’re going to see as a result of that increasing global strife in the conflict between nations over the remaining pockets of resources, and so on. And so far, we will see a breakdown in society’s capacity to manage things like this pandemic, what would it be like in the absence of the scientific research and the development on a record scale of several vaccines unprecedented in human history? Well, without that this plague would have been vastly worse than it has been. But what I’m saying is on our current trajectory, all of these things will get worse. I think there’s no question about that. So I will repeat, perhaps I hope the last time the only solution to this problem is to back off, to recognize the trajectory that we are on is one which leads inevitably to an implosion. That will be imposed by the return of negative feedback, big time, it will be imposed by nature, in other words, and our only option is to rise to that true human capacity to exercise their intelligence to exercise their ability to plan ahead, to exercise their ability to cooperate at an unprecedented level, that to remove ourselves from the inordinate problem that we have created. We have created this Bumblebee, we can solve it, but we’re not going to solve it through geoengineering, or any of the other massive investment strategies that are designed specifically to keep the system going as it is, and further altered the life support functions of the planet. Good question. Not a good answer, but they’re all
Unknown Speaker
wonderful. And
Ruben Nelson
if one were editing this tape, that would be a lovely place to stop there. are three additional questions and if you’ll put up with a bit of extension of time, will allow them to be asked Susan Tanner, you’ll be next. Mary Hagen your question?
Speaker 7
Hi, Bill, it’s Mary, from Ottawa. And I’ve been a secret admirer of you for years and ask a specific question for now. Because I want to take you back to when you studied and taught about communities, and I’m thinking more of geographical communities, as we were starting to build our big cities, etc. And feeling that people, at least people around me, hopefully in North America, are are looking back are regrouping and are really centering more of their activities in their actions, because it’s more under their control at the moment versus the big government, the big corporate controls on their local neighborhood and how I’m going to survive and not go back to the old way of living, and often is quite mixed up in the well being of my families. And as we for a moment might be consuming a little less, and probably traveling a little less, are sort of finding new joys in life. So could you please speak to me about your learnings of communities and how we might apply it today? Well,
William Rees
we have another three hours to deal with this. But one of the things that we’ve lost I think in recent years, I alluded to this earlier, is that sense that we’re all in this together. The sense of community has definitely been eroded in particularly in North America, perhaps not quite so much in Europe. And I think the pandemic has given us an opportunity to begin to rediscover just as you said, some of the benefits of community. So I’ve been a great fan of what I call relocalization, the reestablishment of many economic activities at the community level that we now depend on elsewhere. I mean, we import bread from California, here in British Columbia, which is an absurdity. And yet, you know, Baker’s are closing up, because we can’t get customers in town. So there’s just all sorts of ways that if we took it seriously, to re localize to make make our community, the foundation upon which we all live, nobody, in the end die saying they wish they’d spent more time at the office, as somebody once said, what seems to be important to people is the quality of the relationships that they develop in the course of their lives. And that means family, friends, and of course, community. So that is the foundation of human health and happiness. And yet, we’ve set in place, a system, which has eroded systematically, the foundation of community, explicitly and on purpose, to eliminate the sense of the common good, the sense of that we’re in things together, even the internet, which enables us to enter into little narrow. echo chambers, I think is the word that people use is tending to erode the basis of good community activity. So there’s a real opportunity here, but it has to be again raised to consciousness more and more people have to become aware of this. And yet, to go back to what someone said much earlier, the corporate media playing to that theme, that’s what they should be playing to. Instead, we talked always on the news about the need to get back to normal people want to travel, they want to buy more look at the pent up demand. How many times have you heard on the news, the fact that the economy is going to explode as soon as this pandemic is over? Because people have saved money and just can’t wait to get out there and spend it spend it spend it traveling or new cars or whatever it might be. So we have this again, this human beings are a conflicted species normally torn between what we ought to be doing to save ourselves and the directions we are being taken by the forces that we socially construct in society to create the beliefs values and assumptions under which the majority of people operate. So I suppose one of the most hopeful signs is that there are small groups of people who become I suppose, catalytic of major change, and when the time comes At may catalyst be spread through society. But for the most part, I see the mainstream is holding its own and doing everything it can to ensure that it’s reestablished once this temporary crisis is over.
Speaker 7
Interesting, I think I will continue doing what I do every day. Absolutely. Thank you.
Ruben Nelson
Zack Jacobson, the last question is yours.
Speaker 8
Listen, that was a wonderful talk. Thank you for it. And thank you so much for ruining my lunch. Sorry. Now it’s all right. I’m trying to see ways through it. I gotta tell you, first of all, don’t underestimate the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with what our hunter is talking about a terrible population crunch, however, which, in some sense, he could be worse there. There are days when I think of that as as optimism. There was a time when there were somewhat 6000 Homo sapiens on the planet, and that, and that that was a crunch. Well, I worry that the next crunch, however, is onrushing. And it is climate based, and it will kill even the 6000. There won’t be anybody left, which, which leads me to this. There’s always add in your talk. And others I can name the notion, well, technology isn’t going to save us, we’ve got to do something, to live our minds differently. I don’t know that we’ve even got the time for that. So I’m glad to say I think don’t throw the technology, babies with the bathwater. The notion that Robert Hoffman has, that will hope for something, although the idea of hoping for some technology scares me the technologies I like which everybody hates around here, including you are nuclear energy and geoengineering. I don’t think they’ll save all of the world. But I hope they’ll save a corporals guard humanity to go on and make some more mistakes. But that was a comment. That was an editorial. Thank you for a wonderful talk and ruins lunch.
William Rees
Well, now look here, I have to do something. I have been, you know, shut it off stages for being pessimistic. People don’t want to hear this. And I keep saying I’m not being pessimistic, what I’m doing is elevating to consciousness, the opportunity for us to make the kinds of changes necessary to move beyond this. There’s no point in wallowing in ignorance, or just literally ignorance ignoring the oncoming reality. So I’m sorry, I spoiled your lunch. But I think on the whole, if you’ve taken anything from this, it’s that there is a way out of this. But before you cure, you have to diagnose the disease properly. And we have misdiagnosed the nature of our own ailment so profoundly, that the prescriptions we’re taking are gonna kill us. Secondly, optimism and pessimism, these are states of mind, they have nothing to do with reality. I like to think of myself as a realist, I look at the data and look at the trends, I look at what’s happened historically. And I attempt to interpret these things in some kind of realistic way. Hope is another thing and one of my friends uses the word hopium. Hope is a drug if you don’t use it, it to stimulate action in a way that that makes a real difference. So luck, we’re stuck. We’re in a problem here. You’re absolutely right. It can spoil a lot of lunches. But if in so doing, it raises to consciousness, the fact that this is the nature of our dilemma, we can diagnose it better, we can propose things that might move us through us, then by all means. Take this as a message of the strongest possible motivation. By the way, I really do think people are much more motivated by having the shit scared or the men they are by being hopeless.
Speaker 8
And I don’t know if it got it got across but what I said was Yes,
William Rees
I saw that.
Ruben Nelson
And on that note, our calls to me to thank you you can tell from the questions that have come from the fact that folks are still around that we have worked at hearing what You’re saying that one of the blessings of K Corp is that it attracts a non trivial audience. And you have come in the best of the prophetic tradition that says if you’re on the path you’re headed on, you’re in deep trouble, wants to think about the path you’re on. And for that, I am thankful. I’m glad that this will be on YouTube. And I’m glad that your slides will be made available to us. So it’d be half of cake or in those who will watch it later. I really do. Thank you. And we’ll do this again sometime.
William Rees
My pleasure. Thank you very much Ruben. And again, apologies for the little technical schmuck up at the beginning. That was shameful.
Ruben Nelson
biggest crisis of the day. It’s a good day.
William Rees
Thank you.