Existential & Socio-Ecological Crisis: A deeper transdisciplinary conceptualisation
We ARE fucked. But it’s important to understand exactly how
It’s time to face the inconvenient truth: we’re inseparable from the threads connecting us to Earth’s tapestry. My backyard echoes shifts across the globe. We stand at the edge of a precipice, where every step, every choice we make will determine our planet’s fate. Yet, we are leaving too many blank pages void of meaningful impact. It’s time for a real change (Ricky Lanusse 2023).
There is a long tradition of concern for the end of civilisation, the fine art representation in Figure 1 (above) being one of millions. Medium writers also regularly contribute to this theme, expressing concern for the ongoing decline of our “natural environment”; the quote above being just one of many examples. Much of this discussion is rightly positively motivated by implicit and explicit calls to reimagine our collective practices, and therefore promote more desirable existences, for ourselves and future generations.
All such accounts — and indeed, all and any such personal interpretations — of environmental crisis are hugely valuable contributions. This is because, despite the longstanding and well evidenced concern for the stability of human welfare on planet earth (Smith 2019), we face an overwhelming inertia in the status quo of the system (UNEP 2022). Therefore, the more passion and pressure that can be expressed and ideally converted into practical action, the better. And for the record, I believe Greta Thunberg is both saying and showing us what needs to be done (Guardian 2023).
Building on existing content [1], my article endeavours to add value by summarising my own understanding, formed as it has been through my work as a university, and now an independent transdisciplinary academic: one specifically concerned with understanding and promoting positive change and transformation.
In summary, I believe its valuable to consider that like all agendas we engage in, our individual and collective environmental concerns emerge as one response to foundational existential quest and crisis embedded in the universal experience of human consciousness. We all construct meaning through our social interactions, and many focus on concern for, and action to promote collective rather than individual “good”. There are many ways to enmesh ourselves in such a “good life” — or put another way, justify our perception that we are the hero in the film of our life — but responding positively to observations of negative and problematic environmental change has been a growing theme.
Beginning with this existential reflection is particularly pertinent as, I argue, our environmental concern is well founded: we are facing a socio-ecological crisis of such great magnitude it will likely severely restrict the potentials of human welfare on planet earth. Furthermore, I believe the reality of this crisis is usefully identified as emerging from three separate but interrelated “orders” of magnitude. These three orders are sketched in Figure 2 below:
- the first at the scale of our universe (blue dotted line),
- the second at the scale of our solar system (red dotted line),
- the third at the scale of our planet (centre of diagram).
I believe that this way of reading the reality of our human existence is valuable because it shows that much of our current understanding and practice is poorly conceived. Conversely, where we adopt this alternative view of our reality, we can move past much of the existing discussion on “sustainability” — not least the use of this word and concept itself. As such, we better distil a set of understandings and terminologies appropiate for meaningful, alternative thought and practical action.
I look forward to any and all responses that enhance and critique this perspective, which I commit to our collective furtherance.
Environmentalism: A product of, and concern for, “existential crisis”
Discussion of “Global Heating”, the associated breakdown of relative climate stability — the “Climate Emergency” or “Climate Crisis” — as well as other anthropogenic environmental disruptions, are often associated with the “existential”: or that pertaining to the very existence of humanity, other life and wider ecosystems. In many cases, environmental issues and perceived crisis are presented as an “existential threat”. This is true for both Medium contributions — for example see William House ‘s article for Earth Sphere —but also much more institutionalised and formal discussion (see for example, the United Nations (2021).
Given the density and breadth of this discussion, I want to build on its core theme, but by starting in a more unconventional, but prior position: that of absolute foundational human existential concerns. Specifically, Sigmund Freud considered human awareness of our own mortality to be one of the two primary drivers of human “Civilisations’ Discontent” (1909[1961]). Unlike the second driver — the specific structure and experience of civilisation itself; which is again, a subject covered my numerous Medium articles, including the below from the musician Faron Sage— he noted there is nothing to be done about the finite nature of our life, apart from respond to the knowledge of certain death as best we can as individuals. This reality creates a socio-ecological, existential crisis.
By this I mean: we know our ecological life ends, and, as far as science understands, this terminates the existence and experience of our consciousness. At some point in the future we will be no more, and we must manage the concerns that arise from this situation. I relate this to the social (socio-) because we are individuals living among others of the same species, and our individual subjectivities are in constant interaction with those of others.
Given this reality, human existential reflection, including its incarnation in spirituality and religion — a great introductory account of which is provided by James Cussen in Living Philosophy, below— has contributed a vast volume of thought for consideration.
Drawing on these existing narratives, I believe a more transdisciplinary approach can be of significant additional value. My starting point is that many common human responses to our mortality are pragmatic: people, individually and collectively seek to sustain their (active and “enjoyable”) lives as long as possible (see for example, Michele Cambardella’s articles). A wider general pattern that fits within the existential drive to create meaning is to invest in life activities that have a positive normative weight: people generally try to do, what they have reason to believe, is “good”. Evidently, what constitutes a “good life” is also the subject of much discussion.
Taking these two themes together, this is perhaps why so many humans invest in a mission to improve the world by supporting others to maximise healthy life years, either as policy makers or medical professionals etc (see Dr.Ramesh Chaurasiya). Despite these efforts, while average life expectancies have risen, life remains finite (WEF 2023). There is no basis on which to believe that any one conscious existence is “sustainable”: therefore, it makes no sense to aspire to such and here we have the opportunity to radically update our understanding of the human “predicament” [2].
Within the finality of individual human life, the vast majority of people reproduce (UN 2022), therefore providing a material foundation for the perception that something of them will survive their death. It is in this investment in the future of our genes, both individually and collectively that we understandably encounter interest in the life opportunities of future generations; evidence for this being that some humans who are sceptical about the future choose not to have children (Lockwood et al 2023). This I believe, is the foundational driver of human concern about the environment: it is therefore, a worry, fundamentally arising from existential reflection about human existence and its future, and this gives way to an objective socio-ecological crisis of three separate but interrelated orders of magnitude.
Socio-Ecological Crisis of the First Order: Universal Existential Impasse
Back in the 1980s, Carl Sagan noted that:
“[Even] If you [just] wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”.
Here, the prominent public scientist was explaining that everything we have on Earth, including ourselves, with our agendas of creating meaning to fill the existential drives of our human condition, originates with the emergence of the universe. Humans alive today occupy space and time within a vast, but ultimately perfectly and non-negotiable, closed system. The universe most likely started with a singularity in which time and space were the same. From there the space of our galaxy expanded, the process of which created the solar system in which human life emerged (Siegel 2023). Scientists do not have a consensus position on if the universe will, at some point, begin to contract until space will be reabsorbed by time (Andrei et al. 2022), or if the growing acceleration will tear the cosmos apart (Scoles 2023).
Given our best understanding of the universe then, on the longest imaginable timescale, the possibility for human existence is limited by the expected termination of the universe. While other universes might exist, we have no scientifically relevant level of confidence that this will involve “humans” as we know ourselves to be. As a result, all life and its agency in the universe faces an entirely non-negotiable, existential, socio-ecological crisis of existence of the first order. This first order crisis is represented by the outer blue dotted line in Figure 2, above.
At this scale then, nothing, not even time, is “sustainable”. The immediate implication of this is that using the term, be this in front of “development”, “business” or “work-life balance” is inaccurate: a hopeful and convenient allusion, actually incompatible with the most likely realities of our existence. Presenting such conceptualisation is akin to high school Chemistry class, where certain details are offered for convenience; they are not actually best or complete knowledge, and you have to wait to university to be told the full story. Such language and intellectual superficiality, I contend, has little value in serious conversations about the weighty subject of human futures and practical concerns of existential crisis. For this reason, I concur with B: can we please stop labelling things as “sustainable”, because, metaphysically speaking and according to the most likely scientifically informed understanding of reality, there is no such thing.
Socio-Ecological Crisis of the Second Order: Imperfect Finality
Within the finite time available to the universe, there is also finite matter and energy; again, it is a perfectly closed system. This is not equally true of our planet’s solar system, as matter and energy does cross the universe and traverse our current position. However, our space-time is nevertheless a virtual or imperfectly closed system. This again, has important implications for our environmental concerns.
Dealing first with matter, this is created by different arrangements of the basic building blocks of our universe: atoms of different elements, themselves comprised of subatomic particles.
Currently, there is a very likely distribution of basic building blocks across the known elements and we have a relatively stable abundance of each in our universe, solar system and on our planet as a whole.
It is true that the availability of a given element is not fixed or finite. Already by the 1930s, human science generated the opportunity to “transmutate” atoms of one chemical element into other elements. Where Alchemists of popular human myth and history pioneered attempts to create gold from other substances (Wentrup 2023), we can now bombard platinum-198 with a neutron, which degrades to become Gold! The downside of this story only being that platinum is now worth more than Gold, so the point of doing this is somewhat muted.
Atomic transmutation is however, possible in many other cases much more relevant to contemporary human environmental concerns. For example, it can be used in the creation of synthetic liquid fuel substitutes for oil and petrol. At the superficial level, these technologies are currently impractical due to the amount of energy required (which we address immediately below) and this is a primary reason for the prioritisation of electricity as a flexible energy source for transport, as compared to say hydrogen (Royal Society 2019). A further issue is the limited atomic mass available in our planet’s biosphere, so while we have flexibility, it is still within a fixed quantity of material. Again here, the reassuring phrases of sustainable production are found to be naïve and inaccurate. By contrast, discussions of the circular economy, such as that by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, have more metaphysical validity.
Moving from mass to energy, we face the same crisis of finality: the reality of our existence on planet earth is best understood as a imperfectly closed system, with a finite amount of energy available. As with Matter, the law of conservation of energy states that it can neither be created nor destroyed — only converted from one form of energy to another (EIA 2023).
The largest concentration of potential energy for our solar system is our Sun — the star at the centre of our solar system. Unfortunately for human “sustainability”, like all others stars, the closest to planet earth will one day burn out, creating a black hole that will then destroy the surrounding materiality of our solar system (Scudder 2015) . As such, again, there is an expected existential crisis for humanity, which will come much before the end of the wider universe.
Until our current solar system collapses, all available energy in the Earth’s imperfectly closed solar system has come, does come or will come from the sun via a range of pathways which given the importance of energy to all aspects of human life, are important to understand the basic details of [3].
- Some solar radiation is absorbed by Primary Producers (mostly, but not exclusively plants), performing Photosynthesis to create chemical energy held in sugars. Primary Producers are consumed by other species (predators) as a source of energy. Every form of life is supported in this way, and this includes humans, who obtain the energy needed for biological life by eating plants and other living species. As energy moves through the food chain some is transferred to the wider environment as heat.
- Following specific mass extinction events the Chemical Energy contained within organic structures of life has been combined with heat energy and the borrowed potential energy of gravitational force (pressure) to become a different form of Chemical Energy embedded in fossil fuels: coal and oil. These have been the traditional sources of energy for humans to convert into Kinetic and Electrical Energy.
- Some solar radiation is absorbed and converted into heat energy in the land and water. In the case of absorption by the oceans and other large bodies of water, Heat Energy, alongside other processes, creates Kinetic Energy in the form of currents (Chidichimo et al. 2023). The heating and cooling of land and water generates wind currents. Both these forms of Kinetic Energy can be harnessed by humans, as either Mechanical or Electrical Energy.
- There is Heat Energy at the centre of the Earth’s core, and which drives semi-liquid kinetic movements. Humans have become more accomplished at extracting this heat and converting it into mechanical and electrical energy.
- Humans can direct various forms of energy, all originally from the sun, to lift mass away from the earths core. Given the laws of gravity, we can create potential energy, which can be recaptured when this mass is again allowed to move towards the earth core.
Given the above, it is not appropiate to conceptualise the Sun as a power station — as many do — which provides all the energy available to our planet. This gives the incorrect idea that the Sun can be continually fed with fuel that it converts into energy.
Instead, it is much more rigorous and accurate to adopt the metaphor of a battery. This is because, like a battery, the sun has a finite amount of potential energy and one day all the fuel will have been discharged: as a consequence the sun will colapse into a blackhole, which will destroy our solar system and remove the potential for any life in this part of the universe.
Taken together, the essentially finite availability of mass and energy within our solar system creates a second order socio-ecological crisis of an existential nature (represented by the Red dotted Line in Figure 2, above).
In response it might be immediately argued that we have the option of escaping this crisis by moving to other solar systems in our galaxy. Unfortunately, even where that was possible, we remain trapped within the first order crisis created by the perfect finality of the universe. The only meaningful resolution and language to represent this opportunity is to invest in “extending” our individual lives, and the overall potential for human existence, on our planet or perhaps beyond.
Again, the above reality is at odds with the current widespread expression that there exists the absolute possibility of the “sustainable”. Again, using this language is superficial, and it creates a false hope of a possibility that we have no rigorous reason to believe exists. This is negotiated by spiritual and religious beliefs, but these operate on the basis of other modes of continuity, not the sustainability of known human experience. Therefore, material considerations are left at the smallest of our three scales of socio-ecological crisis: those created through human interactions with planet earth.
Socio-Ecological Crisis of the Third Order: Anthropogenic Risk
The emergence and intensification of capitalist practices as the driving force in the vast majority of human organisation, is itself, like all human activity, a response to our collective existential quest to create meaning (Shankar & Cavanaugh 2012). In addition to reproducing themselves, certain and growing communities of humans have become invested in reproducing capital, which has then become the overriding outcome of the wider socioecological system. This has been a highly effective way to increase our collective capacities to extend life for many, and the self-focused accumulation has been intellectually and practically supported by some redistribution of opportunities and welfare (UNDP 2022).
This shared and therefore socialised effort to do one version of what is “good”, has become most prominently reflected in a concern for individual financial wealth and collective “economic growth”: the latter of which is taken to represent the overall capacity of the human community, although, which it only does to a highly imperfect degree (Stiglitz 2020). At the international scale, we have created interrelated agendas such as “international development” and more recently, many have joined the narrative of a need for “sustainable development” (Smith 2019).
The perceived need for so-called “sustainable development” arises from intellectual reflection on the interaction between human physical and social technology and population growth. One widespread perception is that the outcome of this interaction has actively created socio-ecological pressures and crises at the planetary scale. This situation is interpreted in many ways, but I believe there is one narrative that offers the best means to understand the nature of this third order existential, environmental crisis: the step of which provides a valuable foundation for taking action.
Many have written about the intellectual divide that humans have developed and reproduced, through which we have separated ourselves from what is outside of us, and most specifically “the natural world” (Sullivan 2016). While this underlying intellectual separation has a long history, it is far from being confined to the human past. The most problematic of which is embedded in our collective understanding of the “human economy”, something almost every single individual is concerned with.
You can see this misconception for yourself by picking up any high school or introductory undergraduate economics textbook used in North America and Europe, or engage in self-learning through platforms. Here, as with the example in Figure 8, below (published by FutureLearn) you will be encouraged to “conceptualise” the economy as a closed, isolated system.
The inappropriate and problematic inaccuracy of this presentation has been critiqued since the 1970s. Here, many critical commentators have pointed out “The Fundamental Flaw in Economics” (see for example, a most eloquent account by Anna Mercury, below).
However, the crux of the intellectual crisis has been that such a widely shared conception overlooks the self evident fact that, unlike our best understanding of the universe and the solar system, the human economy is not a perfectly or even imperfectly closed system: it is, without question an entirely open arrangement fundamentally embedded in the “social-ecological” system of planet earth (see Figure 9, below). As such, it is densely interconnected with the wider planetary ecosystem through exchanges of inputs and outputs — some of which are recycled within the planet’s biosphere — but also to the wider solar system.
This nested understanding of our human place in space-time is an essential realisation. It helps us conceptualise and predict the outcomes of our actions; it helps us understand and respond to our third order socio-ecological crisis. Indeed, such realisation invites the question as to why and how institutionalised economics has remained so intellectually inflexible in the face of the best and better understanding. The only reason for this, I would postulate is that Economics is existentially undermined by this more ecologically focused and insightful perspective: it therefore has no option but to disassemble itself or ignore the intellectual challenge. For understandable sociological and political economy reasons, those who have created a career out of economics have chosen to pull down the shutters rather than make adjustments for more insightful contributions. It is for these reasons that I’m hugely supportive of Kate Raworth’s call for us all to actively vandalize economic textbooks, and is why I think platforms such as FutureLearn should rapidly review what they are teaching.
Once we more appropriately conceive of our interconnected space-time, being part of a socio-ecological system on earth, yet enmeshed within the wider finite universe, we can focus on the inputs and outputs of “matter” and “energy” between the Human Economy and what ecology, and ecological economics label as our planetary “Ecosystem(s)”: these being the collection of living (biotic) and not-living (abiotic) components that provide the context for human life (see Figure 10, below).
As with all living species, humans have evolved to exist within a biological “niche”, or a specific set of relationships occupied within a wider community of living species. The development of our niche has required adapting effectively to the “conditions” and “resources” available to us (British Ecological Society 2023).
“Conditions” are contextual characteristics of our surroundings: such as temperature range, atmospheric composition, PH. etc, and these are not used up by the existence of an organism; “resources” on the other hand, are those inputs that an organism consumes, like nutrients in food and water. As with all living things, humans produce biological waste, these realities are inescapable.
More usefully still we can identify the reliance of humans on the wider ecosystem through the well developed framework of Ecosystem Services, or “benefits”, that humans unavoidably rely on as individuals and a collective. The standard four categories of Ecosystem Services, which we can use to understand our socio-ecological crisis, are:
- Provisioning Services: through the direct supply of resources, which might be consumed for survival, or used as raw materials for the human economy after being extracted by the primary sector for further processing in the secondary manufacturing sectors. While tertiary economic sectors do not extract or process materials, service work relies on these former stages: teaching for example, needs a building and computers, as well as food to keep everyone going. The finance sector requires “financial capital”, but cannot exist without the real economy to give value to the money used to facilitate all these complex interactions (see Figure 11, below).
- Supporting Services: enable other processes that humans make direct use of, e.g. the role of primary producers in converting the sun’s energy into sugars, which in turn support direct provisioning of humans through food (and which is important to fully understand the role of energy in our environmental crisis);
- Regulating Services: through the maintenance of certain ecological conditions that enable supporting and provisioning services, e.g. the conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen to stabilise ratios of gases in the Earth’s atmosphere (useful to understand the issue of global heating); and
- Cultural Services: through the provision of nontangible benefits, e.g. the mental welfare gains found to be associated with spending time in a forest, the potential of which might be commercialised by tertiary economic activity (see Figure 12, below for more examples).
From this framework we can identify that the human economy relies on physical resources for the purposes of Provisioning. Here, discussion generally focuses on concern for resources that are traditionally labelled as being “non-renewable”. In popular understanding, for example, rare metals are non-renewable because they were created during the formation of the universe, our galaxy, solar system and planet. Likewise, coal is considered non-renewable because it takes mass extinction and millions of years of pressure and heat to be formed before it can be mined. As such, humans have simply used more and more of an essentially practically finite resource, and in fact, we have done this at a rate of growing intensity (see Figure 13, below).
The replenishment rates of other resources that are traditionally labelled as being “renewable”, such as fish stocks and forests, are also a prominent concern. In the case of these, humans perceive them to be more resilient to extraction as they are replenished by Supporting and Regulating Ecosystem Services, in a timeframe observable and practically useful to our needs. However, extraction rates have outweighed replenishment and overall stocks have declined, just as with human use of coal (see Figure 14 & 15, below). Of further concern is that once a population of living organisms — like fish and trees — falls below certain thresholds in a given context, the overall resilience to further decline, drops, and this gives rise to the potential of irreparable “population collapse” (Cerini 2023).
In response to these resource concerns and the associated crisis of availability that are flagged, vested interests and the politically and economically conservative (by definition those preferring or unable to accept new ways of knowing and doing, as discussed by Matthew Maniaci) present human technology as a means to negotiate these trends.
This conservative position has some rigorous merit. This is because environmental discourses have claim that individual resources are “non-renewable” in the absolute sense is inaccurate. What this label has really implied is only that such resources are ‘not replenishable within economic parameters or current human knowledge’. Indeed, we know that in many cases technology can substitute for naturogenic, ecosystem services, such as the provisioning of certain chemical compounds. One high profile example is that the Haber–Bosch process facilitated the production of ammonia used in artificial fertilizers; this ended reliance on organic inputs, such as guano (bat faeces), and supported significant human population expansion (Erisman, 2008). Moreover, the possibility of elemental transmutation allows humans not only to rearrange atoms in different compounds but to transform the very building blocks available for those chemical reactions.
Therefore, in some cases, the availability of technology means that one human generation’s use of natural resources might not necessarily impose an absolute limit on the opportunities of future humans to access them. Indeed, in some cases, resource use and even total depletion only limits the ready availability, but these can be substituted through the search for new sources, e.g. through a switch from “non-renewable” fossil fuel, chemical energy sources, to extraction of energy from other pathways of transformation e.g. solar, wind and wave power (Solow 1992, in: Anand and Sen, 2000, p. 2033). Again, given the realities of resource replenishment and human use, the widely used and defended categories of “renewable” and “non-renewable” resources — for example see Kaykl.uz — have not been sufficiently accurate, and again, resisting the use of these terms could be helpful.
Despite these substantive and linguistic concession to the conservative status quo however, all substitution possibilities are ultimately finite. The first reason is that as discussed above, the amount of atomic mass — matter — available within the planetary system is imperfectly but practically finite. The second reason is that even if humans captured significantly increased amounts of the sun’s energy in one form or another, the amount of this energy is also ultimately limited by the life of the sun.
Additionally to these finite limitations on human potential, we currently have no knowledge of technologies that might replace other supporting and regulating ecosystem services where these become critically degraded by other human activities. For example, we have zero knowledge about how to substitute for the Earth’s Ozone Layer that deflects harmful wavelengths of radiation away from our planet: and it was for this reason that hard regulation was required to simply rule out activities that were causing the deterioration of our O Zone protection, as identified in the 1980s (Andersen et al., 2002).
The foundational conclusion here then, is that while human technology can create flexibility, many ecosystem services, such as global and local biodiversity densities, can only be rigorously considered as non-substitutable, critical natural capital. We might hope that there are substitutes but we currently have no reason to believe that their removal does not impose significant and absolute limitations on the opportunities of future populations (Daly, 1996). Science and evidence informed policy and action must be guided by rigorous knowledge and appropiate risk management.
This then brings us to the best framework for interpreting our third order socio-ecological crisis as anthropogenic risk. In the most extreme cases, science expects that efforts to increase human opportunities of creating meaningful lives will transgress critical thresholds: beyond which the accumulated impact of human activity creates non-linear changes — a mechanism by which one falling rock might trigger an avalanche — thus radially altering the ecological conditions under which human development has so far unfolded (IPCC 2023).
From within this approach, back in 2009 the Stockholm Resilience Institute developed the Planetary Boundaries framework to identify and track the nine ways in which human activity was generating the most risk of compromising current development trajectories. The framework was particularly valuable as it drew on longstanding environmental concerns (e.g. global heating), but identified areas that had previously had little significant, popular attention (e.g. biochemical flows). The boundaries are shown below in Figure 16 & 17.
Over the years academics and researchers have used this framework to track the level of risk facing human socio-economic organisation. The diagram below shows the development of the framework and the extent to which risk is estimated to have grown between 2009 and 2023 (Figure 17, below).
As is well known, the simultaneous and deeply interrelated Biodiversity and Climate Emergencies are considered to be the most critical boundaries to planetary stability (Steffen et al., 2015). If the impact of human activity transgresses these objective and non-negotiable thresholds, it is predicted that significant structural changes in the planet’s ecosystem will threaten the currently ‘safe operating space’ which has allowed previous gains in human development. You can read more about this framework and the resulting analysis and policy and practice suggestions from other Medium writers, such as Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Conclusion
In summary, I have argued that the foundational reason humans are invested in calling attention to environmental threats is that it offers one response among many, to the fundamental existential quest that sits at the heart of human existence. However, I believe this theme of reflection is more than apt here, as, following the best knowledge we have access to, objective reality uncontestably creates a physical existential threat.
Beyond this, I have suggested that humans face a socio-ecology crisis at three scales: the meaning of our existence is threatened by the very likely perfectly-finite metaphysics of the universe, as well as the imperfect finality of the existence of our solar system. The realities here lead me to reject the value of the prefix “sustainable”, as a naïve tool of hope in managing our existential angst, and further than it undermines meaningful discussion.
In this light, I conclude we must reject the incorrect concept of the human economy as a closed system, and accepts it’s socio-ecological nature. Within this perspective, I further conclude that there is great value in understanding our near term socio-ecological crisis through the lens of the nine planetary boundaries. This also encourages us to use the concepts of risk, possibility, probability, as well as uncertainty, which are the mainstay of scientific methodologies: where almost nothing is ever expressed as black or white, “sustainable” or otherwise.
Overall, it is this reality that informs my current view of what we are justified in aspiring towards, and the most appropiate language and concepts to create, communicate, and therefore recreate, knowledge. Moreover, it informs how we should focus our efforts in creating change and transformation of human society in order to avoid the third order socioecological crisis in which we are certainly, currently enmeshed.
To return to where we started:
It’s time to face the inconvenient truth: we’re inseparable from the threads connecting us to Earth’s tapestry. My backyard echoes shifts across the globe. We stand at the edge of a precipice, where every step, every choice we make will determine our planet’s fate. Yet, we are leaving too many blank pages void of meaningful impact. It’s time for a real change (Ricky Lanusse 2023).
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Notes
[1] I have not compiled a specific list of all those articles that have helped in spire the above. Many of them have been added to CATLAN’s general reading list which can be accessed here.
[2] I use the term “predicament” here, in contrast to the label of “problem”. The former refers subjects and situations that are metaphysically unstructured, in which case all we can do is develop well founded interventions and responses. The latter is used to indicate a structured ontology, for which a solution can be theoretically identified. An example of a structured problem that can be solved might be a crossword puzzle or a complicated version building a bridge in a windy area. Predicaments, by their very nature, cannot be perfectly addressed, and the climate crisis as a complex whole, is a exemplar. I do still find the term “predicament” a little unsatisfactory as it is often associated with superficial matters, but I find ir more valuable than a label of “complex problems” or “wicked problems”, which still, in my view, mistakenly applies an ability to solve the situation perfectly. I hope to think and write about this more, so all thoughts and reflection are hugely welcome.
[3] I am indebted to Frederick Bott for his thought provoking articles on the nature of energy and the implications for opportunities to rethink our human economy, not least the process of money creation. Beyond this, Fredrick’s energy and willingness to discuss and debate has been a great source of inspiration. I hope to return to your ideas more on other occasions. For now, please accept my gratitude. I would certainly love to read any comments you might have.
