Oct 28, 2022·edited Oct 28, 2022Liked by Cylvia Hayes
Every wild creature is sacred. Every freshwater fish is sacred. Every bird is sacred. But human beings feel creatures and birds and fishes are not sacred, forgetting they put themselves in danger of extinction by seeing economic growth as sacred and seeing other creatures as not sacred. Thanks for strongly making the point.
I share the angst and fading hope of your essay. The reality of our situation as a species is direr than anyone dares admit in public. However, I’ve learned a few things since that decade ago when I struggled for solutions, gave excessively long talks, and came away sadder but wiser. I’m convinced about how things will play out globally, and the next 100 years won’t be pretty. However, the biosphere will recover, and life will thrive as it has done for nearly 4 billion years. Perhaps a remnant of humanity will survive for a few thousand or a few million years. Perhaps not.
We are not a particularly selfish species. Every living being is intrinsically selfish. Were it not the case, life on Earth could not have endured. The question is: what is it that requires us to forego selfishness and compromise for the future? I found the answer in Harari’s Sapiens: We became the dominant species in a mere 75 thousand years because we learned to tell each other stories that enable arbitrarily large groups of strangers to cooperate. Races, nations, corporations, religions, economies, sports, rights and obligations, and different political beliefs are all stories that various groups of strangers use to cooperate and exclude other strangers or other species. The stories are all fabrications, sometimes loosely attached to tangible things like lions, tigers, and trees.
Our earlier stories enabled us to produce later ones of sciences and technologies, from which came tools, machines, and manufactured systems that allow individuals, small groups, or the human population to take actions with global consequences. The stories that gave us all our benefits produced our existential crisis.
The law of supply and demand and other market-promoting stories are neither scientific (based on bodies of evidence) nor accurate. They produced the falsehood that growth and health are necessarily linked. Individual people usually are healthy during adulthood without having to grow. The biosphere has decoupled overall growth and health and maintains health even when it catastrophically shrinks. Study how living systems separate and couple growth and health and our economic and political errors become blatantly obvious. I could spell it out, but far more fun to discover for yourself.
There are no free lunches, no final solutions about anything. Every choice, system, or story is a temporary set of tradeoffs that works for a while, then is gamed and degrades the environment upon which it depends and either evolves or perishes. The evolution of life in the biosphere supplies 4 billion years of evidence for these assertions.
Hi Edwin. Thanks so much for your comments. I agree Nature will survive even if humanity wipes ourselves out. However, it still pains me terribly that our species is willing to squander the sacred.
Cylvia: I warmly recommend the book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Her concepts apply to living, social, and manufactured systems. She was the lead author of the 1970 document Limits to Growth. Sadly, she died of a brain tumor before publishing this book in 2008. I’ve added to her simple ideas, particularly about the relationship between a system and its local and global environments. Thinking in systems provided me with a microscope, telescope, and Swiss army knife to develop sustainable interactions with the biosphere.
Every wild creature is sacred. Every freshwater fish is sacred. Every bird is sacred. But human beings feel creatures and birds and fishes are not sacred, forgetting they put themselves in danger of extinction by seeing economic growth as sacred and seeing other creatures as not sacred. Thanks for strongly making the point.
Sylvia:
I share the angst and fading hope of your essay. The reality of our situation as a species is direr than anyone dares admit in public. However, I’ve learned a few things since that decade ago when I struggled for solutions, gave excessively long talks, and came away sadder but wiser. I’m convinced about how things will play out globally, and the next 100 years won’t be pretty. However, the biosphere will recover, and life will thrive as it has done for nearly 4 billion years. Perhaps a remnant of humanity will survive for a few thousand or a few million years. Perhaps not.
We are not a particularly selfish species. Every living being is intrinsically selfish. Were it not the case, life on Earth could not have endured. The question is: what is it that requires us to forego selfishness and compromise for the future? I found the answer in Harari’s Sapiens: We became the dominant species in a mere 75 thousand years because we learned to tell each other stories that enable arbitrarily large groups of strangers to cooperate. Races, nations, corporations, religions, economies, sports, rights and obligations, and different political beliefs are all stories that various groups of strangers use to cooperate and exclude other strangers or other species. The stories are all fabrications, sometimes loosely attached to tangible things like lions, tigers, and trees.
Our earlier stories enabled us to produce later ones of sciences and technologies, from which came tools, machines, and manufactured systems that allow individuals, small groups, or the human population to take actions with global consequences. The stories that gave us all our benefits produced our existential crisis.
The law of supply and demand and other market-promoting stories are neither scientific (based on bodies of evidence) nor accurate. They produced the falsehood that growth and health are necessarily linked. Individual people usually are healthy during adulthood without having to grow. The biosphere has decoupled overall growth and health and maintains health even when it catastrophically shrinks. Study how living systems separate and couple growth and health and our economic and political errors become blatantly obvious. I could spell it out, but far more fun to discover for yourself.
There are no free lunches, no final solutions about anything. Every choice, system, or story is a temporary set of tradeoffs that works for a while, then is gamed and degrades the environment upon which it depends and either evolves or perishes. The evolution of life in the biosphere supplies 4 billion years of evidence for these assertions.
Happy to discuss this further.
Ed Lee
Hi Edwin. Thanks so much for your comments. I agree Nature will survive even if humanity wipes ourselves out. However, it still pains me terribly that our species is willing to squander the sacred.
Cylvia: I warmly recommend the book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Her concepts apply to living, social, and manufactured systems. She was the lead author of the 1970 document Limits to Growth. Sadly, she died of a brain tumor before publishing this book in 2008. I’ve added to her simple ideas, particularly about the relationship between a system and its local and global environments. Thinking in systems provided me with a microscope, telescope, and Swiss army knife to develop sustainable interactions with the biosphere.
Hi Edwin. Yes, I have studied a lot of Donella Meadows work. Good and still timely to be sure.