A Thirst for Vision

 

Has the world stopped behaving rationally or was that just a figment of my imagination?

The world, as in humanity, human civilization, the community of nations can, at times, appear out of control, flirting with self-destruction. Sometimes we behave as the person who compulsively pulls out their hair and eats it. We seem to ignore the signs of self-harm.  Why? What's going on?

Could it be that self-harm is the only thing we've been taught how to do? Is that all we know? Is that why we disconnect the habits, the acts, from the consequences? Is that what compels us to embrace belief over fact?

In his book, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed, anthropologist Jared Diamond discusses how previous civilizations indulged self-harm, sometimes knowing it would ultimately lead to the demise of their societies. What may not be rational in the long run might be entirely rational in the short term. Make hay while the sun shines and let the future look after itself. That sounds pretty selfish, even dastardly, but - bottom line - isn't greed good?

Despite clear evidence that we're exhausting our planet's finite resources, depleting its reserves, "eating our seed corn," our leaders still pursue perpetual exponential growth. That is self-harm on a global scale, a nightmarish form of trichorhizophagia. It's schizophrenic.

If we know this cannot possibly end well, why do we stay on this path, this road to ruin? Is it because that's all we know? Is it because we lack vision to imagine a non-destructive alternative?

It took me years of digesting the consequences of our lunacy to realize there's only one way out of this that gives us a chance of survival. It begins with recognizing our planet is finite. It has a finite amount of non-renewable resources and it can supply a finite amount of renewable resources. Our planet can only tolerate a finite amount of our pollution before its ability to sustain our species with clean air, clean water and healthy soils degrades, perhaps even collapses. So why are we pressing our luck? 

Our problems are real, as hard as concrete. So why are we clinging to "faith based" responses? I have a very wealthy friend. When I suggested we have to change course and soon, he scoffed. His take was that "they'll think of something."  He became a little indignant when I said that was faith-based thinking, the sort of nonsense we're taught in pews. He wants to believe, he needs to believe because it's the only option to facing facts. 

My friend is a great believer in constant GDP growth, a solid but modest 3 per cent annually suits him just fine. I showed him a compound interest calculator on my phone. I had him enter the principal amount of $1 with interest at 3 per cent calculated annually. $1 represented the economy in Year One. Then I had him input a 50 year term. The economy that began at $1 had grown to $4.4. It was more than four times bigger. Four times more production, four times more consumption, four times more waste. Go for 100 years - more than 19 times bigger than Year One. Add another century, 200 years - 369 times bigger than Year One. Year 300 - more than 7,000 times bigger than the entire economy in Year One. That's simple math and it's madness.

The good news is we can't grow the economy at the targeted 3 per cent per year. We get recessions, pandemics, wars, any number of disruptive events. But, even if we could, we couldn't. Where do we imagine we would find the requisite volumes of resources, renewable and non-renewable, needed for such growth. How would we cope with the waste and pollution and the knock-on effects (think global heating, food insecurity, severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration, sea level rise and such)? How are we coping with it so far? What, we're not? No, of course we're not. And that's like going skydiving without a parachute.  What is that but self-harm of a global dimension? 

This brings us to Tolstoy's question, "what then must we do?" I really don't have a clue. I know what we must not do, what we must stop doing, but the prescription for the remedy must be left to those with much greater insights, far ranging vision. Before we rally these people to our cause we better understand that what they might propose won't be painless. It might not even be popular. If we're lucky, though, it could mean our survival.

---

Tom Engelhardt of Tom's Dispatch picks up this general theme writing that, "it wouldn't have to be this way."  He looks at the U.S. and China and how their growing animosity could obstruct the world's two largest emitters from separately or collectively dealing with the climate emergency.