Will Modern Civilization be the Death of Us? Have [Modern] Humans Become Obsolete?

A major reality wake up call video presentation by William Rees

53 min readNov 13, 2024

My Short Intro

If the information in this video is not the foundation for the next words you string together subvocally after due consideration, go back and retake Kindergarten 101 as taught by Mother. The persistence of the human species depends upon you doing so. Why can we modern humans not “listen to Nature” who has all the answers, O ye hubris ones? What part of “everything you think you know is wrong” that the Gaian system is telling you do you not understand?

I can read and think, but watching only works if I can easily pause, scan forward and back, check titles/graphics/hyperlinks/parentheticals, so watching videos other than for entertainment doesn’t work for me.

So, to consider a video as a source (and share it) I used to play a few seconds of a video, pause, and type from memory, then recheck, but that can take me a day or two per hour, so I now use Otter AI to generate a readable (compared to YouTube autogenerated CC text with no sentence structure) transcript.

To share, I end up spending about 2 hours correcting the AI generated text per hour of video. Adding screen shots of Power Point presentations takes longer.

Otter AI now offers an AI generated summary, which may be of interest by way of noting AI limitations, so I can/will merely cut and paste, then add the video link.

Will Modern Civilization be the Death of Us Have Humans Become Obsolete

Dr. William Rees, an ecologist and ecological economist, discussed the cognitive obsoletion of modern humans in addressing the global ecological crisis. He highlighted the inadequacy of current solutions like renewable energy, which only exacerbate the problem of ecological overshoot. Rees argued that human brains, evolved for simpler times, are now outmatched by the complexity of the modern world. He emphasized the need for a fundamental shift in cultural narratives and beliefs to adapt to the ecological challenges. Ruben Nelson, a futurist, agreed, stressing the importance of reflexivity and character formation in education. They both concluded that without a cognitive shift, modern civilization may face collapse.

Action Items

[ ] Raise awareness of these issues politically by asking difficult questions at meetings and encouraging like-minded people to do the same.
[ ] Consider ways to shift cultural narratives away from growth and toward sustainability compatible with Earth’s biophysics.

Outline

Introduction of William Rees and His Background

Speaker 1 introduces Dr. William Rees, highlighting his extensive background in ecology, ecological economics, and his contributions to ecological footprint analysis.
Dr. Rees is described as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a founding member of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and a recipient of numerous awards.
His work includes hundreds of peer-reviewed and popular articles on ecological footprint analysis and global ecological trends.
Dr. Rees is also a former full member of the Club of Rome and has a strong background in the topics he will present on.

William Rees’ Presentation Overview

William Rees begins by thanking the audience and outlining the major takeaways of his presentation.
He argues that modern techno-industrial humans are cognitively ill-equipped to handle the global ecological crisis.
Rees explains that humans socially construct narratives and act out of them, leading to destructive outcomes.
He emphasizes that the current global economic narrative is naive and socially destructive, and that the renewable energy transition is insufficient to address the real problem.

Human Cognitive Obsolescence

Rees discusses the concept of obsolescence, explaining that something becomes obsolete if it is replaced by a more efficient version or if its environment changes significantly.
He argues that human brains are cognitively obsolete, having evolved in a simpler period and being ill-equipped to handle the complex challenges of the modern world.
Rees provides evidence of simplistic thinking, such as fixating on one major problem at a time, like climate change.
He highlights the severity of climate change, citing data from climate scientists and the inability of current theories to reconcile with observed changes.

Ecological Overshoot and Its Consequences

Rees introduces the concept of ecological overshoot, where human consumption exceeds the regenerative capacity of the Earth.
He explains that overshoot is a terminal condition, as it depletes natural capital and leads to unsustainability.
Rees lists various environmental problems as symptoms of ecological overshoot, including biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and soil degradation.
He argues that climate change is a distraction from the real ecological predicament and that simplistic solutions to global heating exacerbate the problem.

Bio-Evolutionary and Bio-Social Dimensions of Overshoot

Rees discusses the bio-evolutionary dimension, explaining that cultural evolution has outstripped biological evolution, leading to a complex, rapidly changing environment.
He argues that humans are not cognitively equipped to understand or control the modern techno-cultural-bioenvironment.
Rees explains the bio-social dimension, where humans socially construct their lived realities and live out of these constructs as if they were real.
He provides an example of neoliberal economics, a social construct that promotes unlimited growth and technological solutions, leading to overshoot.

Neoliberal Economics and Its Failures

Rees critiques neoliberal economics, explaining that it is a simplistic framework that lacks information about the environment and social relationships.
He argues that neoliberal economics fails to map well to the complexity of the real world, leading to ineffective management of the economy.
Rees explains that the prevailing economic narrative is self-referencing and resistant to change, perpetuating the problem.
He highlights the cognitive dissonance between what people think they are doing and the biophysical reality, citing examples of failed climate policies.

The Climate Energy Conundrum

Rees discusses the climate energy conundrum, where rapid decarbonization risks inadequate energy supplies, or remaining dependent on fossil fuels risks more severe climate impacts.
He outlines the consequences of simplistic thinking and denying overshoot, including resource shortages, economic collapse, and geopolitical chaos.
Rees argues that the human population has exceeded the long-term carrying capacity of the Earth, leading to negative feedbacks and an unplanned economic contraction.
He emphasizes the need for a cognitive shift to address the ecological crisis and avoid the worst outcomes.

The Role of Individuals and Collective Solutions

Rees responds to a question about the role of individuals in addressing the ecological crisis, arguing that collective problems require collective solutions.
He emphasizes the importance of raising awareness and political action to address the root causes of the problem.
Rees argues that individual actions alone are insufficient and that systemic change is necessary.
He highlights the need for a reform of the cultural narrative and the education system to address the ecological crisis.

The Potential for Cultural and Technological Change

Rees discusses the potential for cultural and technological change to address the ecological crisis.
He acknowledges the existence of good ideas like permaculture and agroecology but notes that they remain at the margins.
Rees emphasizes the need for a cognitive shift to adopt these ideas and abandon the prevailing narrative.
He argues that without a fundamental change in beliefs, values, and assumptions, the ecological crisis will persist.

The Future of Humanity and the Role of Reflexivity

Rees and Ruben Nelson discuss the future of humanity and the importance of reflexivity in addressing the ecological crisis.
Rees argues that modernity is emotionally adolescent and that the culture rewards successful 18-year-old males with praise, hindering growth.
Nelson emphasizes the importance of character formation and reflexivity in education to address the ecological crisis.
They discuss the need for a deep and non-trivial hope to face despair and maintain humanity’s best qualities.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Rees and Nelson conclude by emphasizing the importance of compassion, beauty, and humanity’s best qualities in addressing the ecological crisis.
They argue that these qualities have been suppressed by the profit motivation and growth ethic.
Rees calls for a return to compassion for each other and the landscape, recognizing the essential basis for human existence.
The meeting ends with a reminder of the importance of collective action and reflexivity in addressing the ecological crisis.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:11
Hi everyone. I am really looking forward to this evening’s webinar as a follow up to last month’s webinar on similar topics, and it’s my great pleasure to introduce Dr William Rees. William Rees is an ecologist, an ecological economist, professor emeritus and former director of the University of British Columbia, School of Community and Regional Planning. He researches global ecological trends with special interests in cities as vulnerable components of the human ecosystem and in psycho cognitive barriers to societal change. Professor Rees is the originator and CO developer with his graduate students of ecological footprint analysis EFA, which you almost certainly have heard of. He’s authored hundreds of peer reviewed and popular articles on EFA and the above topics. He’s a fellow of Royal Society of Canada, and Professor Rees is also a founding member and former president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, a founding director of the One Earth living initiative and a fellow of the post carbon Institute. Professor Rees is a recipient of the Trudeau Foundation Fellowship and both the international Boulding Prize in Ecological Economics and a Blue Planet Prize, which he won jointly with Dr Mathis Wackernagel. He also received the 2015 Herman Daly award from the US society of ecological economics, and in 2016 a Dean’s Medal of distinction from UBC Faculty of Applied Science. So he’s done a lot, and whatever he has to say, I am I’m all ears. Professor Rees was a full member of the Club of Rome from 2014 to 2019 so very strong background in the topics that he’s going to present on today, and going to ask him to start his video and then go ahead, Bill and take it away.

William Rees 2:13
Well, let me begin by thanking you very much for that introduction and welcoming everyone to this particular presentation, which is just something I’ve been pondering for the last, well, a couple of years, really. And I don’t expect everyone to come along with me on this rump, but it’s something that’s occupied a lot of my time, so I thought it was worth sharing it a little bit.

William Rees 2:37
So let’s get right into it. I’m going to begin by giving you a summary of what I’ve got to say, in case you want to ponder it as we go along. The major takeaways are this, that modern techno industrial humans us are not cognitively equipped to deal with the global ecological crisis. There are several reasons for this. First of all, people tend to think in simplistic reductionist terms.

William Rees 3:05
For example, world is fixated on global heating or climate change, which is just one symptom of a much larger meta crisis, the ecological overshoot. Overshoot is a symptom of profound chronic civilizational dysfunction, and to ignore it is the ultimate cognitive folly and a risk to civilization.

William Rees 3:27
Another example, humans socially construct stories or narratives, and then we act out of those stories as if they were real. So for example, we are currently acting out of a global economic narrative that is profoundly naive and both socially and ecologically destructive.

William Rees 3:46
Moreover, most of us have bought into popular hype about the existing or potential energy transition of achieving 100% green energy by 2050 and the facts are that the renewable energy transition has barely started, and even if successful, would merely exacerbate the real problem. And I’m really getting to the argument that if we keep ignoring the real problem, we put billions of people, particularly the poor and future generations, at risk.

William Rees 4:18
So what do I mean by obsolescence? Something begets obsolete if a newer version of that thing comes along that is more efficient or otherwise functionally superior to the original, something can also become obsolete if that entity’s operating environment changes so much that it is no longer able to function effectively and may even become self destructive.

William Rees 4:42
And my basic argument is that human beings are in the second of these categories. The human brain is cognitively obsolete. It’s a product of a relatively simpler period in our evolutionary history, the Paleolithic, and that period did not pose common. Complex or extreme challenges to the central nervous system, certainly nothing compared to what we’re confronting today.

William Rees 5:07
So our central nervous systems, our brains, evolved accordingly. We tend to think in simple, linear, mechanistic and immediate cause effect terms, and by the way, that was once perfectly adequate for survival. However, our contemporary operating environment has so dramatically changed that our brains are no longer able to function effectively.

William Rees 5:30
Innate behavioral propensities are on the brink of becoming self destructive. So what’s the evidence for this notion that we operate from simplistic reductionism. First of all, I think you all recognize that we tend to fixate on one major problem at a time, climate change, the covid 19 pandemic, the Russian Ukraine war, so on and so forth. And then back to climate change, global heating remains the current primary shared preoccupation of the international community, however, climate change is but one co symptom of a much greater ecological meta problem.

William Rees 6:12
Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting for a moment that climate change isn’t an issue. It’s a horrific challenge. Carbon dioxide levels at the highest they’ve been in 14 million years. Temperatures in the early 2020s are unprecedented in the past 24,000 years, and perhaps even 100,000 years.

William Rees 6:31
Last year was the warmest year in the instrumental record, and the first six months of this year are the hottest January through June on record, and the latest in a series of 13 hottest months. And we can see this graphically, showing that almost every year recently, we go further and further outside the limits of probability. So what are climate scientists saying about our current circumstances?

William Rees 6:58
These are direct quotes from Gavin Schmidt, who’s the probably the top US climate scientist right now, and the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For the past nine months, and it’s now 13 months. Mean land and surface sea temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 2.2 Celsius degrees.

William Rees 7:21
This is a huge margin at the planetary scale, and this is really important. Climate scientists, quote, “don’t really know what’s going on.” End quote, again, we are unable, quote, “reconcile our theories with what has happened.” Now, this really does illustrate what I’m getting at. Even climate change is accelerating beyond our most sophisticated human scientific understanding.

William Rees 7:50
We have become obsolete in the face of the rapidly changing environment we ourselves have created. So despite the enormity of the climate problem, the present popular concern and policy focus on it is delusionally misdirected. Simplistic solutions to global heating, such as wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and so on, are actually not fixing the climate, and they are worsening the greater meta problem, which is the cause of climate change.

William Rees 8:19
So from this perspective, climate change is a distraction in the real eco predicament. We discussed the real eco predicament four years ago, but I want to reiterate here, just so you know what I’m getting at, the real existential threat to humankind, at least from the ecological perspective, is called overshoot. This means that the human enterprise, the economy of all 8 billion of us is consuming, even self producing and replenishable resources faster than they can regenerate.

William Rees 8:50
And we are producing wastes, which is often toxic and excessive of nature’s assimilative capacity. We’re literally consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence, and this, of course, is the essence of unsustainability, virtually all so called environmental problems, plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, tropical deforestation, desertification, more frequent, pandemics, soil and Landscape degradation, falling sperm counts, the pollution of everything, etc, etc. All of these things are co symptoms of ecological overshoot, climate change included. And overshoot is the overriding disease. And overshoot, if you follow the definition, is a terminal condition. We can’t continue to consume beyond nature’s production. We’re drawing down the natural capital based upon which we all depend.

William Rees 9:44
So just what’s going on here? And there’s many, many factors, and I’m just going to pick two kind of overriding umbrellas, if you will, that begin to explain this. One of them is bio evolutionary. The fact is, times have changed. Changed. So in the 20th and 21st century, cultural evolution has vastly outstripped biological evolution, a cultural evolution primarily in the form of advanced technologies, so that we MTI peoples live in a mind numbingly complex, rapidly changing rural system of overlapping cultural and biophysical subsystems, any one of which is more complex than the entire environment of our Paleolithic ancestors, this modern techno industrial or techno cultural bioenvironment constantly challenges our limited cognitive capacities.

William Rees 10:37
People today are not cognitively equipped to fully understand, let alone control, the workings of any major cultural subsystem, who really understands the global economy or how the internet works, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, or their interactions with the climate system or any other biophysical subsystem of the ecosphere, we simply don’t get complexity.

William Rees 11:01
We don’t think systematically. Even policy analysts often fail to connect the dots among closely related issues. So again, I believe our brains are functionally obsolete, no longer neurologically adapted to survival in the mega system, the complex world of our own making.

William Rees 11:21
There’s also a bio social dimension to this. It’s bio because humans are programmed, but we’re programmed to socially construct our lived realities. More accurately, human groups create simplifying conceptual interpretations of reality. We call them political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, scientific models, tribal myths, cultural narratives and so on.

William Rees 11:47
Each of these is a made up construct. Every culture and tribe generates somewhat unique perceptions of reality, which its citizens unconsciously assume to be the one and true reality. This was once highly adaptive, because the capacity automatically to acquire the beliefs, values, assumptions, norms and tribal myths of one’s group or tribe both gave the individual a sense of identity and helped create a sense of tribal cohesion.

William Rees 12:20
The potential problem is that we still do this, and we tend to live out of our constructed realities as if they were real. I have to credit Ruben Nelson for the next line, but the frames through which we view reality determine the kind of reality we perceive. Most people are unconscious of these simple facts, and sometimes it’s perfectly harmless, the earth is flat. Is a social construct completely inaccurate, but it was an adequate first approximation of reality for most of human evolutionary history.

William Rees 12:56
But many of our constructs are not so harmless, and I will just use one example of our prevailing economic narrative, modern techno industrial cultures, our society globally, is living out of an overly simplistic social construct. It’s a cultural myth called neoliberal economics as a product of the human mind. Neoliberal economics is a simplistic framework, virtually untethered from biophysical reality.

William Rees 13:26
So this is a diagram taken from any standard economics textbook. It gives the so called starting point for economic analysis, the circular flows, or exchange value. It’s a self generating circular flows model and contains really only two entities, businesses and households. There’s no social relationships, and there’s no environment, and we have then socially constructed as the starting point for economic analyzes.

William Rees 13:55
The economy as a self producing, growing system, completely separate from and independent of anything outside of itself. And for those reasons, neoliberal economics promotes unlimited economic growth. If you believe the economy is separate from the environment and that technology can overcome any potential limitations, then there’s no limits to growth. So any exogenous constraints will be overcome by continuous efficiency gains and technological advances.

William Rees 14:27
And just to give a couple of quotes from very prominent economists to support this, Lawrence Summers, at the time, he said, this was the chief economist of the World Bank. Went on to become the president of Harvard University. “There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future.” Julian Simon, Professor of Management Studies at the University of Maryland, and famous for such statements as “we have in our hands now the technology to feed, clothe and supply energy to an ever growing population for the next 7 billion years.”

William Rees 15:03
Well, these are social constructs that give people great confidence in human techno ingenuity and our capacity to just carry on, carrying on, and it reinforces humanity’s innate biological propensity to expand. Obviously, all species have the potential to grow exponentially, but we are unique in that we’ve developed social paradigms that reinforce this innate propensity, so that the tendency toward overshoot is being driven unconsciously by compound positive feedback.

William Rees 15:37
There’s a big problem here. If anyone understands cybernetics, it’s the science of control systems control the Stafford mirrors a famous cyberneticist, he said, and I think this is a very simple way of putting it, that we cannot regulate our interaction with any aspect of reality that our models of reality do not include. So keep the economic models in hand or in mind, rather that contain no information about the environment, or, for that matter, social relationships.

William Rees 16:08
More importantly, Beat Ross Asprey, the law of requisite variety. This is a simple version of it, but it really gets the essence of what I’m trying to say here, when the variety or complexity of the environment, think of that as simply the number of possible system states that can exist. When the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity, which means the variety or complexity of the regulatory system, the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system.

William Rees 16:42
So if your management system doesn’t map well to the complexity of the system you’re trying to manage, you just can’t manage it. And so neoliberal economics fails miserably the test of Ashby’s law. It’s simplistically reductionist. It lacks essential variety. Its basic models contain no useful information about the structure or functional dynamics of the ecological or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.

William Rees 17:12
What could possibly go wrong? If neoliberal economics is utterly incompetent to guide MTI cultures interactions with the biophysical or social realities within which the economy is embedded. So we can add a very simple thing to the circular flows model, and that’s the fact that it’s intimately connected to the environment.

Goods and services are produced by extracting available energy and material from the ecosphere, and 100% of it moves through the system and returns to the ecosphere as pollution and waste, even final products ultimately are degraded and dissipated into the environment.

William Rees 17:56
So the economy is a high entropy creation machine. It takes low entropy, energy and materials and change changes it into high entropy, or disorganized pollution and matter. Another way of looking at this is to recognize that far from being separate from and independent of the ecosphere, the economy is a growing subsystem, fully contained and utterly dependent on the non growing, finite ecosphere.

William Rees 18:24
So this is a completely different way of looking at the same relationships. The growing economic subsystem extracts energy and material from the ecosphere, converts it to itself and dumps the waste products back into the ecosphere. And therefore, essentially, human beings are converting the rest of the living planet into human bodies and artifacts as we disintegrate or dissemble the earth.

William Rees 18:49
So the prevailing cultural myth, this is another thing economists talk about the decoupling of the economy from the environment, or the dematerialization of the economy, because we tend to use a fewer energy and material resources per unit output. But that’s a relative term. It’s not an absolute concept at all. The fact of the matter is, the reality is that Homo sapiens has become the dominant consumer species in every significant accessible ecosystem on the planet.

William Rees 19:20
We’re not decoupling. We’re expanding our ecological niche by becoming bigger and bigger at the expense of everything else. Humans now constitute, humans, plus our domestic animals, 97% of mammalian biomass on Earth. That’s up from 1% 10,000 years ago, and wild nature has been displaced from 99% to just 3% wild mammals, at any rate.

William Rees 19:46
So to think that we’re decoupling or dematerializing is an absolute mental fabrication that has absolutely nothing to do with the biophysical reality. Now there’s another problem here, and it comes from a. A concept that almost nobody has ever heard of, called autopoiesis, which is the tendency of complex systems to self produce. And I would argue that our culture, our way of thinking that emerges as culture, is an autopoetic system.

William Rees 20:15
So like all cultural constructs, our MIT culture is a self organizing, self producing assembly of interacting and mutually dependent components and actors. It’s an autopoietic system.

Autopoietic systems are highly resilient, but sometimes just counterproductively resistant to changing circumstances, in generating new paradigms and narratives or specific solutions.

William Rees 20:41
MTI culture is typically self referencing. It tends continuously to reproduce itself in its own image. Responses to problems are developed from the same beliefs, values, assumptions and cultural norms that created the problem in the first place. That’s the essence of autopoiesis. In particular, powerful actors with vested interests in maintaining the status quo continuously push back against fundamental change, including adaptive change, and we continue to teach from our failing cultural paradigms. David Orr recognized this in a wonderful paper, way back in 1994, which emphasized that, quote, The depletion and pollution of the planet is not the work of ignorant people. It’s largely the result of people with Bas, BSCS, llbs, MBAs and PhDs. What we he was really trying to say is that our schools and universities keep reproducing maladaptive cultural narratives and paradigms, and particularly the increasingly global myth of perpetual growth driven by continuous technological development.

William Rees 21:52
This is particularly catastrophic, since our global growth is almost entirely a promotion proportional rather to the consumption of energy, and that really means fossil fuel energy. We’re still 81 and a half percent dependent on fossil fuel energy. You cannot decouple the growth of the economy from the consumption of energy. There’s many, many graphics of this kind.

William Rees 22:16
The consequences are, of course, continuous upticks in carbon dioxide emissions. So again, we have to understand here the enormous cognitive dissonance that is generated by the differences between what we think we’re doing and the biophysical reality. So we have seen since 1990 for example. Well, let’s go back to the beginning. Here, Limits to Growth.

William Rees 22:43
A great warning was published in 1972 shortly after we had the first meteorological conference on climate James Hansen’s testimony to Congress. There’s been many other events since then. The UN framework on climate change came into being in 1992 the same year as the world scientists first warning to humanity. There’s been since 1992 28 comp meetings all oriented toward reducing carbon emissions.

William Rees 23:12
Yet during that entire period that we’re looking at here something like 60 years, including 32 years since the Framework Convention on Climate Change, we’ve seen a steady increase in carbon dioxide emissions. At the last top conference in Dubai in 2023 we had already exceeded 420 parts per million, which is 20 or 50% above pre industrial levels. So despite all of our intellectual activity, if you will, at 50 years, 28 climate conferences, a half dozen major international agreements and various scientific warnings, all of these things have failed utterly to reduce our atmospheric carbon concentrations.

William Rees 23:56
Things might have been worse if these things hadn’t happened, but if the goal is to reduce emissions and to de couple from carbon fuels, we’ve been utterly failure, and this is what the consumption of fuel or energy looks like.

We’re still 82% fossil fuel. Solar and wind together provided only 6.7% of our energy requirements in 2023 you can see this as exponential growth, which means, by the way, that with exponential growth, half the fossil fuels.

William Rees 24:29
And by the way, many, many other resources have been used, ever used by humans, have been used in just the past 30 years. And by the way, given this enormous remaining dependence on fossil fuels. You’ve all heard the protest movement say, Stop fossil fuels. If we stop fossil fuels now, the results would be catastrophic. So the hard reality about overshoot that we’re trying to cure equilibrium.

William Rees 24:59
Global Warming. That is to say, if we stopped emissions right now and maintained carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere at current levels, the equilibrium warming would actually be 10 degrees. That’s after positive and negative feedbacks have kicked in global warming, quoting James Hansen and his colleagues, again, global warming in the pipeline and emissions in the pipeline assure that the Paris agreement to keep global warming well below two Celsius degrees is already dead.

William Rees 25:33
And policy, if policy is constrained, the only two emissions reduction plus uncertain and unproven CO2 methods. In other words, we’re failing miserably in our climate things.

Well, don’t worry, there’s lots of good news. And this is another of our socially constructed myths. 100% renewable energy by 2050 these slides are freely available with anyone, so I’m not going to read this stuff, but the bottom line is that any number of sources, all of which are accessible here, make the argument that the goal is 80% by 2030, and by 2050 we can have 100% renewable energy across the board, and therefore displace fossil fuels and carry on.

William Rees 26:19
However, let’s look at a reality check. And these are data from the recently published, the 2024 version, which, of course, is that you’re just using the most recent data the statistical review of world energy. 2023 actually that should be 2024 but in 2023 fossil fuels still provided 81 and a half percent of global energy wind and solar were most of the money is going to divert our energy supply to renewables, only 6.7% this means that fossil fuels powered the world for 297 days, and wind and solar gave us only 24 days.

William Rees 27:00
Fossil fuel still generates 60% of even the world’s electrical energy, which is what wind and solar do. Wind and Solar produce 14.3% but we’ve got a problem, because we’re fixated on growth, so that the growth in demand for electricity alone increased by 736, terawatt hours. The growth in the contribution from wind and solar was 449.6 terawatt hours.

William Rees 27:29
So despite the spectacular growth of wind and solar, they’re not even keeping up with demand growth in electricity alone. And since electricity is only 19% of final energy consumption and 14% at 14% of final supply, wind and solar gave us only 2.6% of consumers energy in 2023 so we’re far, far away from The Promised total transition by 2050 and simply not biophysically possible.

William Rees 28:05
Well, the problem is that politically acceptable, which means culturally self referencing, solutions to global heating simply reproduce the problem. Simplistic thinking can lead only to simplistic solutions. Present approaches are socially constructed to maintain the existing growth based economic order.

William Rees 28:25
That’s the nature of an autopoetic system such as modern techno industrial society. I’m going to quote now from a very well known political scientist, any capital intensive investment such as wind and solar power, EVs, non existent carbon and capture technologies, etc, serve the status quo. Here’s the quote, “disaster policy is being designed to serve the capitalist growth based economy, so that the latter becomes the solution to not the cause of the problem. “

William Rees 28:58
It’s a continuation of our massive self delusion. I call it business as usual by alternative means. And of course, business as usual is the cause of the problem. I’ve changed the captioning this cartoon, but basically, we agree to replace the coal powered engines at the Titanic with electric motors. In effect, society is electrifying the Titanic, a wonderful little book by Bill Ofels, while ignoring the icebergs the reality of our circumstances, or ecological overshoot, quantitative replacement of fossil fuels would merely perpetuate overshoot in the continued degradation of the ecosphere. So I will argue that we really created a climate energy conundrum, from which retreat is increasingly difficult because we aren’t even aware that this is the circumstance. We really have two options if we rapidly decarbonize.

William Rees 29:56
That’s the stop fossil fuels model. We. Risk inadequate energy supplies, broken supply lines, food and other resource shortages, local famines, reduced production, declining incomes, rising inequality, widespread unemployment, civil unrest, abandoned cities, mass migration, collapsed economies and geopolitical chaos. In other words, we risk the well being of billions.

William Rees 30:22
Our second option is to remain largely dependent on fossil fuels, and this is our default position. It maintains the growth based paradigm. But if we do this, we risk more and longer heat waves, extended drought, desertification, melting permafrost, methane releases, water shortages, failing agriculture, famines, rising sea levels, the flooding and eventually loss of many coastal cities, cities, uninhabitable regions, mass migrations, collapsed economies and political geopolitical chaos, once again, we risk the well being of billions.

William Rees 30:58
So the consequences of simplistic thinking or denying and ignoring overshoot put us in a really difficult situation. Pursuit of unlimited growth on a finite planet has raised the human population far above the long term carrying capacity of the ecosphere. We are deeply in overshoot. We’ve depleted so much or much of our so called natural capital, which is essential for the survival of Homo sapiens and countless other species.

William Rees 31:27
We’ve made techno industrial society excessively dependent on fossil fuels, and we’ve triggered the onset of negative feedbacks that will force an unplanned economic contraction and population correction by the end of this century. For example, a recent paper shows that climate change has already put about 9% of the people on earth outside the historic, safe human climate niche.

William Rees 31:51
In other words, the livable climate on Earth, 2.7 degrees of warming, which is where we’re headed at present, could push a third of humanity outside the climate niche, that means more than 3 billion people are at risk from global heating alone, and it’s just one of the many equal problems that are part of the Eco crisis of overshoot. So and this is my final slide, you may be relieved to know.

William Rees 32:18
Back to our hypothesis in the future, the evidence, from my perspective as a population ecologist, supports the hypothesis that contemporary members of Homo sapiens are cognitively impaired relative to the environment in which we find ourselves. The human brain has made itself obsolete by creating this complex, mind bogglingly complex environment with which we are failing to cope.

William Rees 32:45
We are inevitably or evidently rather incapable of generating individual or tribal behaviors that are adapted to or responsive to today’s rapidly changing ecological conditions, including global heating. There is, in my view, an increasing Darwinian probability that absent a dramatic cognitive shift, MTI civilization will be selected out by a chaotic environment of our own making. This does not mean that Homo sapiens is in a immediate danger of going extinct, at least not from this cause, but the human future may unfold in ways that resemble our pre agricultural past. Thank you very much for your attention.

Speaker 1 33:30
Thank you, Bill, that was that was persuasive. I don’t know if you can see people are applauding using icons. We’re going to do something a little different tonight, instead of a respondent, where we’ve asked Ruben Nelson, who was our presenter last month, on a closely related topic, to just be in conversation with Professor Reese.

Bill.
And Bill’s teacher.
To think is to listen. Listen.

Speaker 1 33:57
So let me say a little bit about Ruben. He’s a Canadian and a futurist, and he was our presenter last month. He’s one of a handful of Canadians who, in the 60s and 70s, pioneered serious futures thinking and its application in the practice of strategic foresight. He was educated at Queens and Kingston and United Theological College in Bengal Bengaluru, India, and today he’s the executive director of foresight Canada, and he’s a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and the World Business Academy.

Speaker 1 34:29
So I’m going to turn off my video and just let Ruben and Bill converse about this topic, and in a few minutes, I will begin introducing questions from the Q and A so just a reminder to our audience, if you have questions about anything in this presentation, go ahead and put them in the Q amp a the chat function is turned off, so that won’t help. Use the Q amp a button and I will bring those questions into the conversation. Go ahead, gentlemen.

Ruben Nelson 34:57
Just so that folks know, Bill and I came to know each other initially by being on listservs together, the way that people do, and when Iris asked me, in 2019 to organize a session for the triple AS meeting in Seattle 2020 the condition was that there only be two speakers, I would be one, and Bill would be the other. So I phoned him, sight unseen, and invited him to think with me about this question of, would modern civilization be the death of us?

Ruben Nelson 35:35
And God bless him, he rapidly agreed, and we have become colleagues and friends since that time. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some differences between us, but they’re really minor. So I want to just, what I found myself wanting, Bill, was to be able, in a sense, to shut all this off and to have half an hour lying down, possibly with a cup of coffee or sipping some stuff and and let it wash over me and then come back to it.

Ruben Nelson 36:13
But of course, these webinars don’t allow that. This is a modern technology. So into the conversation. The thing that for me, I want to just first start by reinforcing, I want your comments on it, and that is that you really are saying, at least that we who are modern techno industrial people and modern techno industrial cultures are incapable, as modern techno industrial people and cultures of making reliable sense of who and where we are in history, what we’re up against and how to respond to it is, you’re really saying that.

William Rees 37:01
You said it much more. It took me a whole half hour. You managed in 15 seconds. Yeah.

Ruben Nelson 37:07
Not all of that, but, but see, the interesting thing, Bill, do you know any institution that has a professional staff bigger than a philosophy department. Philosophy departments tend to, these days, be about six people. Economics departments are anywhere from 25 to 50. Do you know of any institution who is dedicated their research, their work, their endeavors are premised on that point of view anywhere in the world.

William Rees 37:44
I’m not aware of any, to be honest with you. Mind you, I’ve been out of academia for a decade now, so I may have lost track, but certainly nothing I have read and I try to keep up with the relevant bodies of literature suggests to me that there’s any widespread coherence or recognition with the kind of premise I’m putting forth today.

Ruben Nelson 38:10
And you see for me, that is almost breathtaking when you literally think we have $100 trillion global economy, we spend 1% of that, almost 1 trillion, on advertising, almost all of which reinforces the mythology of modern techno industrial cultures. So we’ve got a trillion dollars a year to keep us nicely walking down the MTI lanes. But there’s, if you think of all the universities, there are the think tanks, the whatever, the fact that none of them of any significance are dedicated to this in a way that raises their head above the noise. In other words, they’re not loud enough that their signal is separate from the noise.

William Rees 39:09
That’s basically the way I would look at it. I look there’s lots of people, obviously in departments and universities everywhere, concerned about the problem, but none of them, to my knowledge, define it in quite the way that you and I would would discuss it as a fundamental. Well, look, I’m sure there are individual philosophers here and there who are fully cognizant of the fact that that we’ve created a mindset of worldview, a cultural narrative that is completely out of whack with reality.

William Rees 39:43
But in my own university, all of our efforts to raise this to consciousness, in the sense of trying to get curriculum development to look at this in any department, has been a failure thus far. In fact, I was once taken aside by the. Vice President of Research at my university, when I was raising these questions at a monthly meeting, we used to have monthly heads of units meetings that shouldn’t the university be dedicating itself to revising its curriculum to confront the major eco problems and so on that simply seemed to be contributing to creating.

William Rees 40:26
And I was told I was mistaken, that the idea that universities provide leadership was a falsehood, that in fact, in that individual’s entire career, he had been led to understand, and he was an older person than I at the time, that universities really serve the role of reproducing the culture, or representing the culture, or reflecting cultures that has produced them, and so education as whole. One of my slides tried to say this. So I’m tied up in a wire here.

William Rees 41:05
Our whole education system is founded on certain principles that tend to reproduce the principles upon which they are founded. That that’s this recursive self reference I referred to earlier. So if we are going to really resolve these kinds of problems, it requires raising to consciousness the fact that we are products of our own imaginations, in many respects, at least, the form of our cultures are that we should make explicit what those foundational principles are and then abandon them.

William Rees 41:41
We have to start over. It’s conceivable that the human being is capable of creating a cultural narrative that would not be as utterly ecologically and socially destructive as the prevailing narrative today. But to do that, you have to break from the prevailing narrative, which means literally, abandoning all that which you have ever been informed of and taught in the course of one’s whole life.

William Rees 42:08
And of course, we’re talking about an entire culture, and the fact that it’s worsening. You know, neoliberal thinking, if I can blame it, it’s not the whole problem, but it’s a big part of it. It took off in the 60s, 70s and 80s in North America, later Europe, but it’s now sweeping the world. So if anything, we’re seeing the situation deepening in the wrong direction.

Ruben Nelson 42:35
I’m, one of two images come to mind for me. One is an eight year old. We’ve all been with mothers with reasonably newborn babies, and the cooing and the loving and the smiles and all of that is great, but inevitably, somebody in the room will say, Just wait till she’s 14. I’d have enjoyed enjoy her now and and at eight, I was told, enjoy your kids at eight, because they still have just an utter love for you and as if you’re God.

Ruben Nelson 43:18
And so there’s no chinks in that and your daughter will crawl up in your lap and say, Daddy, you’re so wonderful that when I get married, I’m going to come and live with you the rest of my life. You don’t dare say to her, No, you’re not You little rat, because she can’t see this is the point. Cognitively at eight, she understands in some vague way that she’ll be bigger because she’s seen bigger kids, but she has no capacity to understand how she’ll be different.

Ruben Nelson 43:54
And it seems to me that that’s where modernity is. I As you know, place great stock in reflexivity, in in learning to self critically be reflexive, to see what the assumptions are. But I mean, it’s taught for those of us in the Hebrew Christian tradition. For some of us, you learn to pray to say, God teach me to see myself as others see me. And then, along with Augustine, you’re hurry to say, but not yet, but that sense of to see with eyes that are not glazed over with all the comfort and the gooeyness of the mythology, but in age, it can’t happen.

Ruben Nelson 44:45
I think of Weinstein in jail in Los Angeles, who, as long as his consciousness is the same consciousness that got him there, which is to say, All his life he and others, he. Your men in in Hollywood had taken advantage of women, and just assumed this was normal and that there was no big deal about it, and therefore it was clear in his trial that he was puzzled. He did not understand why he was going to jail, and he could not understand it… got him there. And my concern is that that’s what we’re up against, and we don’t have the kind of energy to break us out of it.

William Rees 45:37
Well, put.

Speaker 1 45:38
Back on that, okay, if I may. There’s a question from Susan who says, other than the obvious of reducing global population, she says, I did my part being a childless cat lady. She asks, What would be the most important steps individuals could take towards having a future for Homo sapiens?

William Rees 46:03
You know, that is such a profoundly important question that would take hours to answer, but let me say a couple of things just very briefly. First of all, I don’t think it matters a damn what individuals do. You could live with a hair suit, and most of your neighbors would simply think you’re crazy.

William Rees 46:27
What we’re dealing here, we’re dealing with a collective problem. This is a problem at the civilizational level, certainly the societal level, and collective problems of the scale require collective solutions. So for example, this would be trivial about it.

William Rees 46:45
Many people think, Oh, the real problem is we don’t have a high enough carbon tax. Well, you as an individual, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that carbon taxes would solve the problem pushing out of fossil fuels and forcing the, you know, the rethinking of our whole economy on whole different ground. If that were true, you as an individual cannot do anything to bring about the necessary action.

William Rees 47:14
You cannot control the tax system. This is a collective problem. You as an individual cannot ensure that your city has an adequate transportation system so that people don’t have to use their automobiles and so on. You as an individual can’t pass laws making it obligatory for every person have access to birth control and the necessary education. You as an individual can’t ensure an economic system that enables women to have a degree of independence of so that they can make their own decisions about their bodies.

William Rees 47:48
So this is a collective problem. It requires collective solutions. So in many respects, I think the most important thing that individuals can is to raise bloody blue murder at political meetings, ask the embarrassing questions, try to get as many of your friends and colleagues who think the way you do to join you in that enterprise, because until the political system is aware that there’s more votes in understanding the nature of our reality than there is In kowtowing to the corporate sector, or the look at the US political system right now, all people can talk about is how much the two presidential campaigns have raised.

William Rees 48:31
You need millions and millions and millions of dollars to become elected. These days, that’s what we’re up against, and neither of the present candidates are going to do anything about the achieve we’ve been discussing today, is Ruben still there?

Speaker 1 48:48
I think so. I think he thought because I was starting to introduce questions, that was supposed to come off, but he’s welcome back at any time.

Ruben Nelson 48:55
I’m still here. There are two questions in the chat, at least two, there may be more that suggest, in effect, that there may be ways of achieving the energy we need, and would that deal with the condition that you’re raising that if, let’s assume that it’s not magic, but that in some way or other, whether zero point energy, or, you know, some other form, we can continue to consume energy at the rate we have been. Does that deal with the condition or that that you’ve raised or not.

William Rees 49:41
No, it does not. Again. This is a very difficult thing to look at, but if we think about the whole of human population history, it took 250 or 300,000 years of anatomically modern humans to reach 1 billion. In population that was around 1918, 1810–20, in that range, and since then, in a mere 200 years, we’ve reached 8 billion. So there’s been an eightfold expansion of the human population since 1810 or 1820 it’s entirely correlated with our consumption of fossil fuel energy, and it happens to have been fossil fuel historically, is the means by which we acquire all the other resources necessary to grow the human enterprise.

William Rees 50:36
So again, it’s this combination of social and biological reality for 99.99% of human evolutionary history. Our populations were held in check by the standard balance between positive feedback, our potential for exponential growth, and negative feedback, resource scarcity of food, problems, competition, disease and so on and so forth. But with the scientific revolution and the introduction of fossil fuels, two things happen simultaneously. The first was an enormous improvement in public health standards, our understanding of the basis of disease in germ theory, for example, so that we greatly reduce the death rate. This freed us for exponential population growth, assuming we had the necessary food and resources to enable it to happen.

William Rees 51:29
And that’s precisely what fossil fuel energy has created. Virtually unlimited supplies in the short term of everything required. But in the course, of course, in the process, we’ve depleted the planet, so substituting some other form of energy for fossil fuels, without changing the fundamental beliefs, values, assumptions and behavior of our culture solves no problem at all. We simply continue down the present track of depleting the rest of the planet, ultimately resulting in the collapse of the ecosystems necessary to sustain us.

Speaker 1 52:08
This may be related to that Patrick asks, regarding obsolete humans, the only hope for our derelict civilization is the emergence of bodhisattvas who have attained the next stage of evolution. I’m not sure what he means by the next stage of evolution, but I think, I think in some way, what he’s asking is, is it possible for us to gain the cognitive capacity to to survive this.

William Rees 52:40
Again, these are hugely important questions, not through the normal evolutionary process, simply because human beings have a very, very long lived species. It takes many, many, many generations for an evolved trait to show up in any significant proportion in a population, and there’s only been a few 1000 generations of humans since we got, you know, to be human.

William Rees 53:06
So it’s going to take something other than that ultimately. I mean, I’ve written a couple of papers where I say we have to give ourselves the chance to take the next step up the evolutionary ladder, but that requires this reform of our cultural narrative if we don’t consciously listen. It’s not impossible. I mean, Ruben can talk better about this than I can. There are peoples on the planet who live compatibly with their ecosystems.

William Rees 53:37
It’s possible for mainstream society. We’re, you know, if I could snap my finger so that suddenly everybody came awake to our person predicament. It’s conceivable in those circumstances for people to begin to think about, what are the beliefs, values and assumptions that we must dispose of, and what do we replace them with to enable us to live compatible with each other and with the ecosphere that sustains us.

William Rees 54:04
Now, if you make that kind of cognitive shift, you can buy sufficient time for bio evolution to to catch up. But there’s no sign, in my humble estimation, that we’re making that cognitive shift. In fact, as Ruben said a moment ago, with the trillion dollars of advertising every year, reinforcing the existing mythology. We’re spreading it around the world. We’re raising material and energy expectations.

William Rees 54:31
We’re creating myth on myth, including the 100% renewable energy energy transition, to keep this system going at all costs, both Canada and the US are coming up with the elections in the next year, years, in the next few months. My goodness, how much of the political debate will focus on any of the issues we’re talking here about today? My guess would be zero. Well, that’s that’s pretty close to the truth. I would think. And yet we’re talking about the single most important and most powerful nation on Earth,

Speaker 1 55:07
Richard asks, well, he mentions permaculture, which, to my limited understanding, represents not only a change in how we relate to to the biospheric environment around us, but also a much more conceptual, even, I would say, a spiritual and worldview shift. Can you speak at all to changes like that? There’s, there’s a lot of talk about the the the merging of Indigenous ways and scientific knowledge. Just recently, read about seeing with two eyes, which involves incorporating indigenous wisdom with scientific understandings. Is there? Is there any hope there?

William Rees 55:52
Look, permaculture, agroecology, and any number of other novel ideas are compatible with the kind of vision that I’m talking about, but I’ve been hearing about them for the entire of my entire academic career, my whole life, basically. And unfortunately, despite, you know, bubbles of interest here and there and from time to time, they still remain at the margins of popular interest, and they’re up against an enormous wall of resistance.

William Rees 56:26
Various European groups have been trying for years to abolish this or that pesticide, and they’re always thrown back by massive investment by biochemical industry to overthrow any attempts to move toward a permaculture in agriculture, to get rid of the chemical that are just not only destroying the soils and making our food impalpable in some cases, but you know, probably the it’s the cause of fallen male sperm counts.

William Rees 56:55
Maybe that’s a good thing. But my point is, so far, despite there being a plethora of good ideas out there, they’re at the margins. They have yet to really begin to have a significant influence on mainstream thinking. And again, the evidence is in the current electoral debates in any country on the planet. I suppose there’s more hope in Europe, because at least the European Commission and the European governments of one kind or another have begun seriously to look at the notions around what is called the degrowth movement.

William Rees 57:31
So this is an organization in France and Spain in particular. It’s not an organization, but it’s a movement started there which talks about the need to abandon the growth ethic and to begin to shrink the global economy more equitably toward something compatible with the biophysics of earth. No focus on population. They eschewed the population question. But at least degrowth has gained some traction in some circles, and that, I think, is very encouraging, but it’s not going far enough. It’s not going fast enough. It’s been around for a couple of decades, and I suspect 90% of people have never heard of the degrowth movement.

Speaker 1 58:13
Douglas Perry asks, If collapse is inevitable, what do you envision after that collapse? And actually, I would love to hear both of your responses to that, Ruben and Bill.

William Rees 58:24
You go first.

Unknown Speaker 58:25
What are we likely facing?

Ruben Nelson 58:28
Well, my sense is collapsed that we are already past peak modernity. We don’t know that about ourselves in the same way that an 18 year old boy, and I’ve been one doesn’t know that he’s still emotionally an adolescent, because the culture rewards successful 18 year old males with lots of praise, and there’s no, very little of that is also a nudge to say, grow up.

Ruben Nelson 58:59
And so most males and modern cultures are emotionally adolescent, whether they’re in the corporate world, the political world, even in the church world. And so we’re already we don’t know it yet, but we’re already past peak modernity. We’re already feeling, beginning to feel what it’s like to live in a culture that slowly disintegrating. And I and I use that language carefully. It’s not collapsed like all of at once.

Ruben Nelson 59:31
It’s more like a sweater that you’ve had that’s really tightly knit, that used to keep you warm and dry, but 10 years later, you realize that it’s raining just enough that you can’t wear that sweater anymore, because that sweater is now disintegrated enough that the knitting isn’t as tight. The water gets through, the wind gets through. And if you have a problem with your kid and are at an emergency unit almost any city in North America, unless you are unduly rich, you know what collapse feels like.

Speaker 1 1:00:09
I think he was asking more like two centuries from now, what does humanity look like 200 or 300 years from now?” What will be left over?

Ruben Nelson 1:00:18
Depends what we learn that’s interesting. Now, what Bill’s talking about is that culturally, our modern, techno industrial culture is unable to learn beyond the framework of modernity. And if that’s the case to if we stay within that and collapse, then 200 years from now, we’ll be at each other’s throats. The all the AK 47 ammunition will be gone. So all of that stuff’s done but with pack knives and sticks and stones and god knows what else.

Ruben Nelson 1:00:53
So it depends what we learn. And the interesting thing is that in my lifetime, the institutions that we charge with the responsibility of being the made instruments for cultural learning have abandoned the task that they subjected me to because all of my teachers, from kindergarten through high school and at university understood that character formation was a major part of education, and now you can get a PhD in virtually any subject, and your character doesn’t even get touched.

Ruben Nelson 1:01:35
The last Society of Alberta has a letter from the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary that says, don’t let the fact that we’ve given them a law degree confuse you that they are fit to be called to the bar in Alberta, we do not judge their character at university. That’s your problem. Now, when I was at university as an undergraduate, everybody in the faculty would have been horrified at that, and now it’s normal. So we become is entirely, in that sense, what we’re willing to learn. And at the moment, the evidence is not it’s not encouraging if you’re have a 10 year old grandson.

William Rees 1:02:22
What, what you know, the idea of collapse is a it’s a bit ambiguous. Collapse can be a slow unraveling, a gradual simplification of society. And if we’re lucky, that’s the way it’s going to go. I mean, fossil fuels are on the way out, though, when we’ll run out of economically exploitable supplies, even if we don’t abandon them in policy terms. So we’re going to have to adapt to a much lower energy future.

William Rees 1:02:53
For example, we could do that gradually and slowly. I can see a time when we well, we look back to the future. In 1925 there were 25 million draft animals in the United States. There may be a need for another 100 million draft animals in another 100 years, because there will be no fuel, and we’ll be doing agriculture with human and animal labor once more, if we’re lucky, I can see the possibility of relocalization taking hold big time.

William Rees 1:03:30
We should be teaching ourselves the basic skills needed to stay alive at the community level, how do you make clothes? You know, we’ve exported most of our capacity to manufacture the simple things that might be needed. So the bottom line is this collapse could be slow. Adaptation is possible, but it’ll be with a much smaller population living in much smaller communities that are much more dependent on local resources and productivity to maintain themselves, if they can self organized in order to do that.

William Rees 1:04:03
Collapse could be rapid. Right now, there’s a US naval fleet headed to the Mideast. Who knows whether you know, a week from now, we haven’t tipped over into a nuclear conflagration, which could end it all very rapidly. It too would be a symptom of our current mindset about the nature of our reality. It’s absurd, but that’s the way it is.

William Rees 1:04:29
So the answer to the question is, unfortunately, it depends. In any event, I think in 100 years, there will be about 2 billion people on earth. How we get there, could be a catastrophic reduction in population from climate issues, food shortages, war of one kind or another, or it could be a gradual everybody’s lamenting the decline in population growth in rich countries. I think it’s something we should be celebrating how what countries are doing it well, Japan is a perfect example. It should serve as a model for the rest of the world. Let’s get a grip on the population fault, so that after a generation or two, we’re down to a sustainable population on Earth, one that could survive on a much reduced energy supply, living in smaller, interacting, but nevertheless localized economies.

William Rees 1:05:25
So you can come up with any number of scenarios about what collapse looks like. I’m not optimistic, for the reasons Ruben mentioned, there seems to be no real understanding has not yet come to consciousness the true nature of our dilemma. It’s a self perpetuating dilemma, insofar as once you are in a it’s the old example of goldfish in a bowl and not aware of the water that contains them, and we’re simply not aware of the cultural paradigm that frames everything we do.

Speaker 1 1:06:01
That’s a great segway to Claude de Butner’s question, to the extent that there is a thought process that’s driving our problems, could we collectively be building wind and solar infrastructure now that is scaled not to the 8.2 billion people we have today, but for the less than a billion survivors afterwards. And I think, I think I know what you’re going to say, but could we? Probably will we, is the question.

William Rees 1:06:35
Well, again, that’s a what if question. It depends on whether we adequate energy supplies to keep producing the alternative form of so called modern renewables. But wind and solar energy are both utterly dependent at present on fossil fuel. There is no example where wind and solar energy create the energy to create wind and solar energy right on with our current level of technological development.

Speaker 1 1:07:05
So I think just to some extent, what he’s suggesting has already happened. When I drive around, there are very few suburban neighborhoods that don’t have at least one roof that’s covered in solar panels.

William Rees 1:07:17
Yeah, but those will be gone in 20 years, and if we’re not capable of replacing them, then gone for good. So let me answer Claude in a slightly different way. I think I know to whom I’m speaking here. The future will no doubt be dependent on renewable energy, but it may be mechanical wind turbines of the kind that operated in Poland before the last war.

William Rees 1:07:43
They may be water wheels powered by flowing water, as we used to use to grind grain. That’s renewable energy that causes no damage to the environment and isn’t dependent on fossil fuel for its continued production. So yeah, we could do it, but are we doing it? And it seems to me, right now, we’re investing in Canada, and I don’t know about the US, but certainly in Canada, billions of federal dollars, taxpayers monies, on the assumption that green, renewable energy, of the modern kind, fossil fuel dependent, is the mode of the future. I think this is not a sound policy, but that’s where we are at the present time, because, again, our techno industrial mindset keeps producing itself in alternative form. Business as usual is the problem. Business as usual, by alternative means, continues to be the problem.

Speaker 1 1:08:41
Steven Kramer asks, Does aI have potential to expand our ability to respond to complex systems beyond our current brain capacity?

William Rees 1:08:53
Reuben Go ahead.

Ruben Nelson 1:08:58
Given the way AI is developing and given which, remember, AI is entirely trained on modern literature, so AI thinks like modern people. And there are some wonderful examples. I’m sorry I don’t have one off the cuff, but some wonderful examples in the literature of the degree to which AI because you see, it’s no more reflexive than we are as a culture. Modernity is unreflexive.

Ruben Nelson 1:09:34
You don’t get any rewards for being reflexive, because you end up at the table raising the questions so that if you’re at a board meeting of an important corporation, and one of the women begin to cry, and other people are uncomfortable, and you’re a male and say, Why are we uncomfortable? If a woman cries in our presence, it means both of you will be removed. And the corporation will do that without even thinking about it. In other words, it’s a done deal there.

Ruben Nelson 1:10:06
There’s just, I mean, it’s as much as the sun will rise in the morning. So that AI is utterly unreflexive. And so you get powerful modern consciousness that’s unreflexive, and you work it out. At what point do we say? Oh, damn, short run, lots of whizzy things, but most of us whizzy stuff. I mean, most of it again, is for males who like technology, who are emotionally 18. That’s where we are.

William Rees 1:10:43
I couldn’t say it better myself, I am ignorant of AI. In fact, I must say, I’ve been consciously avoiding it because I see it, in many respects, as a kind of prosthetic for the brain, which is simply an expanded version of our inadequate brains, so it’s similar to what Ruben is saying. I guess AI can’t be any better than and maybe worse than, because of its greater capacities than we are as human beings in creating the circumstances which we find ourselves.

Speaker 1 1:11:18
Fowler asks, what your response is to the the idea of just letting things unfold as they will, he specifically refers to letting nature’s homeostatic responses do what they will, which, as you’re saying, probably includes massive changes for us. But as an attitude, what do you think of that?

William Rees 1:11:44
Well, okay, I mean, I’m an evolutionary ecologist, and basically that’s what my entire talk is premised on, that I believe in evolution, natural selection, and when an organism is no longer adapted to its environment, that environment will select that organism out. Now in this case, it’s the organism is a call a form of culture. So if things unfold as they will, I think we are doomed to be selected out because of our incapacity to deal with the environment we ourselves have created.

William Rees 1:12:24
That was my second definition of obsolescence. If we are no longer adapted to our ecological circumstances, our ecological circumstances will select us out variation on Ashby’s law of requisite variety. So I think we are on that course, and that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t think humans will go extinct, assuming no nuclear conflagration, but certainly this culture can wipe itself out, and is well on the way to doing so. I think Ruben’s absolutely right, and we’ve passed peak modernity and are on the way down already.

Speaker 1 1:13:02
Many of the questions that are showing up here strike me as people really wanting some loophole, and so I’m going to ask one more of those. But there there are so many different loopholes that that people want to to surface and ask about but here’s one that I have a little bit of experience with. Samrat asks, What about direct action, violent action against a murderous system that that is killing the poorest and weakest human beings, and sort of alongside that, Samrat didn’t ask this, but I have friends who call themselves accelerationists, that if, if collapse of any system is inevitable, isn’t it ethical to speed that collapse, even knowing that people will suffer? So it’s really two questions there, direct action and accelerationism.

William Rees 1:14:04
I defer to my philosopher friend at first.

Ruben Nelson 1:14:11
My, one of the things that is at the core of modernity is that it is a materialist understanding of reality in which human beings are marginal. Put it another way, modernity has never understood us as persons with agency with any sense to nurture that and see what we could bloom into. It’s not that there haven’t been people, that there haven’t been lots of folks, but, but, but that’s a function of our humanity and not a function of modernity.

Ruben Nelson 1:14:53
And one of the things that’s different in my, today is that the world I was born into 85 years ago, modernity’s clutches on us in terms of its consistency, wasn’t nearly as great as it is today. So it’s like putting increasing amounts of sugar into a solution to see when it will pump out, um, we’re at a stage where modernity now has its fingernails on almost every dimension of our lives, every every waking moment, every dimension, and therefore it’s a struggle to maintain humanity with agency. I think that’s worthwhile.

Ruben Nelson 1:15:43
I think it’s worthwhile struggling to be reflexive enough to understand these things, not in the hope try. If you had asked me 30 years ago, I would be among those looking for loopholes. I’ve spent most of my life thinking about the future, and it’s taken me a long time to work out the consistency of where we are, which is why, when Bill and I met it was it was a comfort for me to know that I wasn’t the only one on the planet who’s as nutty is as I am, there’s at least two of us.

Ruben Nelson 1:16:24
So my sense is that it is entirely worth the struggle that as human beings to commit to being as humane as we can be in the circumstances, whether those circumstances turn out to be large scale, that it’s a global Masada, where you can literally see for several years the the certainty of death coming at you as the Romans built their war machine.

Ruben Nelson 1:16:53
Took them three years, but the folks in Masada absolutely knew once the once they were surrounded and the Romans made that commitment, there was only one way out of this, and that was death. There was going to be no other ending, and that may be true for us. I’m committed to as much of our humanity as we can, because one of the beauties of complex living systems is we don’t know enough about them to give up hope. We don’t know enough about them to have trivial hope, because it’s going to get smashed, but a deep and non trivial hope that can withstand despair and still get up.

Ruben Nelson 1:17:37
Human beings have had that capacity demonstrated through history, not in large numbers, but enough to keep communities going. And my sense is that I don’t know where that’ll turn out, but I as I understand this earth, human beings, with our sense of love and grace and forgiveness and beauty are as much part of this universe as lead and copper and water and oxygen.

Ruben Nelson 1:18:09
Modernity doesn’t believe that and doesn’t teach it, which is part of the reason we’re in trouble, but it’s, it’s the place I’ve come to, and so that would be my response, but I want to paper over, want to, I understand the impulse to find those loopholes, but I want to cement them all over and say, You got to come to terms of the fact that despair is already built into our future, and don’t try to run from it. Learn to develop the depths of your life that are deep enough to face despair and not be crushed.

Speaker 1 1:18:49
It sounds like you are not an advocate for assassinating fossil fuel executives or…

Ruben Nelson 1:18:57
Executives have become what most environmentalists have become. They have listened to messages from their culture and certain messages they’ve cleved to and become what those messages told them. And most environmentalists are no more reflective than senior oil executives. And living in Calgary, I know just enough of them to to not not think they’re wonderful, but I know that they’re not wicked people who get up in the morning thinking, how can we do in the earth? They’re simply people who have responded to the messages of their culture and done extraordinarily well at it unreflexively, and therefore they’re as puzzled as most of us as to what the hell is really going on.

William Rees 1:19:49
In fact, they just do not understand what the problem is with fossil energy, for example, since it is the root of our culture, it is that. Which we stand on, by the way you’ve just heard why I said, Let my philosopher friend go first, because he was not afraid to raise issues of love and compassion and the kinds of things that are simply not part of our normal discourse around these kinds of issues.

William Rees 1:20:16
It’s because modernity is almost abolished the sense of human beingness from the discussion plate, and so we don’t get to dine on those kinds of feelings about humankind. Now to go to the question, look, a number of people have done violent things in order to move society along. The Shock is a one way of converting some people. I suppose Roger Hallam, who was one of the founders of the Extinction reveling in the US or in the United Kingdom, has just gone to jail for a relatively minor protest.

William Rees 1:20:54
The Unabomber in the US is another example of people who take matters in this direction. I have some sympathy with it, to be quite frank with you, but society lashes back. And if you look at history, it seems to me, and again, my historian, I’m just a naive observer here, but it does seem that the big changes in social structure and organization have come from mass movements in the street by 1000s or millions of people.

William Rees 1:21:22
It’s really a question of there being a sufficient interest in these issues for mass protest, even revolution. Revolution can change things at least temporarily, before we fall back into if we don’t have an alternative way of being, we will fall back into the way we were before the revolution and a lot of people we harmed the meantime. So…

Speaker 1 1:21:48
We are, we are almost out of time, okay, any last thoughts, especially along the lines of beauty, compassion and and humanity being its best self.

William Rees 1:22:00
Those are key elements of the human person, and we have to let them bloom and flourish. We’ve suppressed them. They’re not something one likes to talk about in polite company around these things, because they have to be subjected or subdued by the profit motivation and growth and all of the things we need to do to move ahead. So it means destroying farmland, you know, putting up windmills and just carrying on as if nothing mattered except the machine that we’re all entrained within. And so let’s bring back those sense of compassion for each other and for the landscape, for the ecosystems that sustain us, because they are the essential basis for our very existence that we’ve forgotten utterly and completely.

Speaker 1 1:22:55
Well. Thank you. That’s a beautiful note to end on. My apologies to the many, many questioners whose questions we just didn’t get to, and I’m going to turn it over to Maynard Moore to take us out. Thank you, deep, deep gratitude to both of you for what you’ve done for us tonight. Lots to think about.

Note to modern humans: Whenever you read/hear “us,” “we,” “people,” “humans,” add “modern” before or after. Modern HU-MANS ≠ Humanity. We moderns are not normal animals. This must remain front and center in our memeosphere (prattleverse). Then the idea/imperative “renormalize” will necessarily follow as the day the long dark night of dogmatic slumbers.