Thinking in Wholes
"If there is a way out of our crisis, it will not be through the door we came in."
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Herbert Draper — The Lament for Icarus (1898) |
But what if they don’t? What if they can’t? What if the story we have been telling ourselves — technology über alles — is fiction? When we discover that, what will we do then? Will we have enough time?
In some sense, the debate over still untested techno-fixes is a distraction because we have not even begun to implement in any meaningful way the climate solutions that nature uses and that we already know work. What I will do over the next few installments is address some of those in greater detail, dissect the arguments for and against, and suggest a tactical way forward.
To repair a broken global ecosystem it is not necessary that we do the impossible or perform miracles. We can build upon proven remedies that humans had a hand in before we ran off the rails.
Proven Solutions
We can think of ourselves as if we were a fox caught in a foot snare. We struggle for hours. We are growing weak. We can feel the cold. Our limb is numb. If we do nothing more, we will die of hunger or exposure. In that dire situation, the choice becomes a stark one. We do not want to go there but we have to seriously consider it. If we chew off our own limb and limp away on the remaining three, with any luck, we may survive for some months or years more.
In the case of the leg trap of our making — call it consumer society, GDP growth economics, the industrial age, fossil fuels, whatever you like — our ecological relationship with planetary boundaries is now based on faulty, restricted modeling. We externalized too many critical elements and that led us straight into this trap.
At this point, financial and social pain are unlikely to be avoided. The trap is too firm. The teeth that bind us go too deep. And we’ve waited too long to do anything to change the path that led us here. So take a swig of whiskey, bite down on this mouthguard, and grin and bear it because this will involve an amputation. No alternative is viable if you want to live.
Any solution that does not attack the actual problem is not a real solution. At this point, it seems likely that any solution that does not involve sacrifice is not serious or very well thought out.
While many of the baby steps we have already taken have been somewhat helpful, climate change will not be reversed by solar and wind electrification, electric vehicles, or LED lighting. Some big steps do no better. Near-term human extinction will not be reversed by ending or reforming capitalism, shutting down all the oil and coal companies, or making rich countries pay poor countries reparations for slavery, colonialism, genocide, or loss and damage due to extreme weather and sea level rise (and how would you even make them, anyway?).
Truth: the problem is bigger than all that.
Dissing Capitalism
The problem with capitalism, for instance, is not that it has something inherently wrong with it, Extinction Rebellion and other well-meaning groups notwithstanding. Sunflowers and frogs are capitalists. They generate far more embryos than are needed to sustain a healthy population. One could call those excess seeds and tadpoles pollution, but they are neither. They capitalize the health of the larger system. They exist in the context of a web of reciprocal relationships with other species.
The problem of capitalism — or socialism, communism, or theocracy — is the same problem had by any model system. “The map is not the territory” — a phrase coined by the Polish-American philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski — says there will always be unaccounted-for externalities. Maps are typically two-dimensional. Terrain appears to our eyes in three dimensions but has also unseen dimensions — sound, electrical fields, microbial exchange, vibration, movement, phase change, and emergence. Terrain is alive. It has quantum entanglement. It is unlikely the human mind will ever encapsulate all of its forms and expressions. Expressions of a green energy transition, doughnut economics, or a circular economy are great motivators and may even expand the models but remain systemically incomplete and ultimately deficient. They are maps, not the territory. They are, to use Bill Rees’ expression, “business as usual by alternate means.”
Towards the end of his life, the great socio-ecologist E.O. Wilson campaigned for a comprehensive catalog of all Earth’s species. Strides were made and now, with the advent of new tools for remote sensing and A.I. cataloging (think of the Star Trek tricorder that could survey a whole planet for life forms while in outer orbit), a more accurate survey of biological diversity is exponentially progressing. It will never achieve Wilson’s goal. He wanted a map that traversed the entire biological territory. That terrain can never fit itself to a map.
Capitalism is one model of how we organize ourselves to live in the world by mutual self-interest — organizing cooperation among competitors. Being a model, capitalism externalizes many factors, most notably ecology, energy balance, compassion, or the inestimable value of natural processes, seen and unseen, known and unknown. In a recent panel discussion on The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens, Nora Bateson said:
And this is where we go horribly wrong, thinking that we can actually do the multiplicities of work that nature does, the beginnings and the ends for which we have no idea. We’re just learning about the microbiome. We’re just learning about the mycelia and the way that trees are communicating. Are you kidding? We’re at the beginning of this adventure into this understanding of how organisms that are interdependent are in communication and are in fact supporting one another.
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In what way is the tree … a description of the bacteria in the soil? In what way is the bacteria in the soil describing the birds and the bees? [Each organism] is made up of trillions of organisms. So this starts with even this idea of self, of where’s the edge of me? Where’s the edge of the apple? Where’s the edge of the soil?
An ineffable breadth of elegance
Bateson succinctly put her finger on what motivates me to campaign for natural climate solutions. They have inherent advantages of flexibility, safety, energy efficiency, reduced cost, and scalability over human-made climate interventions, but they have something much more. They have an ineffable breadth of elegance. I am not disparaging all technologies that may have a role to play or the heroism of humans following their bliss to invent a better future, but proof of efficacy and safety by a billion-year virtuous cycle of incremental improvement is a hard poker hand to beat. A nuclear power plant, as brilliantly designed and engineered as it might be, lacks many attributes that a 5000-year-old forest brings to the game.
Bateson says that one of the things we get wrong is trying to run our problems through an engineering mindset.
Tautology is a word we don’t use very often. It doesn’t come up in relationship to ecological processes as often, I think, as it should. I think it’s an important word because of exactly what Bill [Rees] just said and what we’ve been talking about, basically this whole hour and a half, of why can’t we get out of the hoop? We keep trying to get out of the hoop and we can’t get out of the hoop. And part of this has to do with the constructs of what’s real is real because we said it was real, and what’s researched is researched because the research proves the research. And the monetary system is where the buck stops because the buck stops at the monetary system, and we’re caught in these loops. Now the thing is, there’s something very ecological about these loops. Part of the problem of the ecological thinking conundrum is that we are in an ecology of thinking that is adverse to ecological thinking. I know that sounds tricksy, but I’m actually quite serious. We are living in a context that’s allergic to context. And so there’s something I think very important about just recognizing that.
Those moments when you are perceiving how you perceive, just take a look at how we’re talking. Pay attention. What is happening here? That is an opening. That’s where something new can get in, that moment of being a little bit confused, of not knowing exactly what someone said or a cultural confusion or some moment when there’s been a moiré effect of some pattern crossing your pattern that just, woo, that’s super important. Those are the moments when the new information can come in, and that’s exactly what a tautology does not allow. A tautology is adverse to new information coming in. So there’s a way in which we have to, with our animal claws, rip a little hole in the tautology so that we can start to actually have some new information moving and new rhythms of movement. I think this happens because it’s ecological. It happens in poetry, it happens in podcasts, it happens in the way mothers treat their babies. It happens in how you make dinner. It happens in how you are with your partner. It happens in courtship. It happens in spiritual practices. It has to happen everywhere because that’s how ecologies are. They work from lots of different directions. It’s a trans-contextual process.
Digging Wholes
Bateson sounds very ad hoc and indecisive, not advocating for the commonly assumed radical change that will be required for human survival amid life-threatening climate emergencies. And yet, changing our ways of thinking and being is a prerequisite — learning to listen, staying calm and rational, transforming panicked conflict into consensus. Action taken without that kind of general buy-in may be worse than no action at all. At best it will produce the same kind of blowback that doomed rational public health efforts to prevent the Covid pandemic or thwarted multilateral efforts to arrest atomic proliferation after World War II.
Bill Rees responded in the same panel discussion:
The narratives we live from are contrary to ecological reality, ecological common sense, as I think Rex [Weyler] has put it. It does not make sense for one species to command most of the energy flow through the ecosystems of which it is a part. That’s a very destabilizing situation. And the wise species would do everything possible to reestablish some kind of balanced energy and material throughput. If we don’t do that, again, I keep harping on this, people hate me for it, but we will go down. There’s just no question that the natural system is one that will take us out if we don’t take ourselves out with a degree of grace and good judgment.
Nora Bateson replies:
Life is beautiful, and it’s also terrible. And I think that there’s something inside this about this question of what’s the point. And if you ask that question, what’s the point? you’re asking the wrong question. What’s the point of the forest? The forest is just foresting. And so the reason for tending to life is because life. And so I think this is really extraordinarily counter-indicated to all of the ways in which we think about that question. What’s the point? What’s it for? How are we going to do it? What’s the strategy? All of that thinking is wound up in something that’s taking us to an endpoint, and does not allow for what I perceive as a vast realm of possibility that’s right under our noses, that is completely emergent. But if you are looking to do it to get a result, you are going to miss that. So my feeling is there are lots and lots of possibilities that are sitting right with us, and they are in the ecology of our relationships, our communication, the ecology of our ideas, the ecology of possibilities. There is an ecology of possibilities.
My purpose in this week’s essay, and the inclusion of these extended quotes, has been to lay some groundwork upon which to discuss natural climate solutions. Not all of these will comport with the tautology of engineer-mind. A life-cycle analysis may be able to express their efficiency in terms of energy requirements or carbon drawdown but may miss more than half of the effects they have in the context of whole systems.
Unravelling Tautology
A direct air capture and carbon gas separation and storage machine, no matter how elegant its design, does not feed any living thing. It is not a nesting place for sparrows. It does not pull sugars up from root to leaf and make them available to pollinating insects. A wind generator may cool your home and rescue your family from a heat wave, but it will not rescue the groundhog or the kestrel from the same. A forest could.
Standard tautologies tell us that forests are nice but as climate mitigation tools are vulnerable and cannot scale. They tell us that whale populations would be good things to restore but are insignificant to the greater scale of challenges we face. These tautologies decry the crude poeticism of indigenous wisdom while overlooking the millennial messages of hard-won science they reveal.
After more than 40 years devoted to studying these issues I have come to conclude that the natural climate solutions I most favor do not suffer from the negatives they are often labeled with. They actually have a host of positives that never get talked about, and the greatest of these are what Bateson, Weyler and Rees spoke of — the ineffable.
We kid ourselves that we know more than a forest does, or that we can think like a mountain. Those are poetic conceits. There is real wisdom in forests and mountains, and we need to listen and learn.
Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages, and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are 70 sites in Ukraine and 500 around the region. As you read this, 24 Ukrainian ecovillages have given shelter to more than 2500 people (up to 500 children) and now host up to 1400 persons (around 200 children). We call our project “The Green Road.”
For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad or you can listen to this NPR Podcast and read this recent article in Mother Jones. Thank you for your help.
The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.95 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.
Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will arrest all our planetary-ecosystem-destroying activities?
As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.
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