310 comments on Six steps to “getting” the global ecological crisis
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But Matt,
WE get it.
The information is out there (or in here, as it were.)
So why don't intelligent, otherwise informed, well-meaning people do a modicom research and figure it out?
It contually puzzles/frutrates me.
Confederate,
One needs to be aware of the term "peak oil" before one can look it up. The same applies to other problems.
Tim Morrison
You can't choose what's not on the menu.
True Tim,
But everyone on this site has figured this out.
Somehow we made the leap.
However in my personal life I know not one soul aware/interested in any of this.
I find the complacency incredulous.
I greatly appreciate these articles/discussions.
I have mentioned PO to some very intelligent people, but they instantly have reservations about its importance. I think people need to either be very curious about the subject and spend time studying it, or else have a reasonable amount of foundational knowledge to "get it" - to make the leap that you mention. I also think people are afraid of being duped or caught up in unfounded concerns, conspiracy theories, doom-and-gloom cults or whatever. Others perhaps just can't be arsed looking into it deeply.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Exactly.
Even experts do not of necessity have "foundational" knowledge.
You have to be an obsessive compulsive type to sweat the details. Not everyone does.
I'm not OCD by a long shot, but I do sweat details where they matter to me. And one of those details is that carrying capacity is not a fixed quantity. It can go down, and it can also go up.
This has been established already. Consider the Amazon societies which created terra preta. This amendment turned easily-leached tropical soils which rapidly become sterile after a few cycles of annual cropping into nutrient-holding soils which remain fertile year after year. These greatly increased the carrying capacity of those lands.
Could we do the same, in that way and others? It seems likely. We have the benefit of broad historical knowledge, depth of scientific analysis and technological expertise to do many things. We can already build zero-energy homes which slash the non-food footprint of a family to a fraction of an acre. The question is less "can we?" than "will we?"
I don't think there is a clear line of separation between "can we" and "will we".
If we did not have the evolution-limited brains we do have, then "we can" do many great things: end hunger, end injustice, end wars, bring on utopia and the singularity, etc., etc.
But the fact is, as Donald Rumsfeld might say in one of his snowflakes:
You come into this world with the brain you do have rather than the brain you would prefer to have.
It is that brain and its many severe limitations that blur the line between "can we?" and "will we?".
The Rapture as it is known by 10,512 different names will not happen to save your butt.
We are going to have the die off, enough said.
Prepare for the living. That is what I do, if you are willing to be helped then I am willing to help you.
Seek, Knock, Ask, are all proactive actions.
Read my works, I have them published.
The Bible is a mirror site.
Laughs My Ass Off.
Charles.
God Grant you peace.
God Grant you Love of your fellow man.
God Grant you Faith and Trust.
Write in Candidate for President 2008.
Free Right Now party. No donations.
Term limits for congress, Min wage for them too
Charles Edward Owens Jr.
“In a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most successfully on the people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just like a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
~George Orwell, 1984
"In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism -- is one of the chief distinguishing marks of society.
If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity."
~George Orwell
In the book Bury Me Standing, about the Gypsies, it's observed that the Gypsies didn't seem to notice that WWII was anything remarkable, maybe they were treated a little worse than usually, but not so much worse that it made a great impression on their memory.
Nineteen Eighty Four is one of my favourite books. However, I seem to need to read it less and less nowadays. I can just observe society. Interesting that your prudent observation comes from a book within a book, so to speak. Nevertheless, Winston Smith managed to get a copy, so should we all.
Perhaps the author could draw another Orwellian analogy between energy depletion, economic adversity and environmental degradation - supporting the idea of collapse like "three sheaves of corn".
My theory is that "1984" happened in 1974 and after that, none of it horrified us anymore.
confederate,
is any of "us" among the people who run the show? Among those who enjoy privileges, have lots of money, appear on TV? Among those who admire such people and would like to have similar lives? Or even among those whose creature comforts do not exceed a McMansion, a large SUV and a job as a Regional Sales Director for a blow-dryer company? For these people, "informed" and "well-meaning" as they otherwise might be, "the information" means their whole living arrangements are pretty much worthless. Why should they even want to listen to it? It probably scares the sh** out of them somewhere on the lower floors of their mind, but we've all heard of Freudian repression.
People revise their world-views in a dramatic way when they have a religious conversion or the like, but where is the church that teaches the Gospel of Overshoot?
Berend Ohm,
..."church that teaches gospel of overshoot?" Ha! very good.
Well T. Boone Pickens is wealthy and influential, and Matt Simmons, Richard Rainwater, Roscoe Bartlett, Simon Rich... I've been known to host a Senator or two at my coastal home.
So I'm not so certain its cuz the wealthy and influential aren't talking.
But I apreciate your response and will think on it.
"The information is out there (or in here, as it were.)
So why don't intelligent, otherwise informed, well-meaning people do a modicom research and figure it out?"
Confederate, if I may...
I work with a lot of fairly well educated folks (many with advanced degrees in the sciences, PhD's, MD's) and I am struck by something one of my colleagues once said to me. This woman, a physician whom I had known for a number of years, who is articulate and intelligent and a good doctor, was surprisingly ignorant of these very profound, serious issues such as have been discussed here on the board. In her mind, she worked hard taking care of patients in the local medical-industrial complex (ie academic teaching hospital/university medical center) and at the end of the day, she didn't really want to think about "all those things" but rather just go home and watch TV or go on skiing trips or engage in other similar diversions. They just don't want to hear about it.
SubKommander Dred
Sub D
"They just don't want to hear about it"
Amen to that
(&, I should have written "modicom OF research")
There is a reasonable hypothesis from evolutionary psychology - that the group will believe the myth espoused by the leadership in the face of evidence, because group solidarity was of survival value to the tribe.
As an extension from this, the group will go into denial for as long as it can in the face of extreme threat. This is because maintaining group solidarity is usually of survival value for more everyday threats but extreme threats that are likely to wipe out the tribe are rare and behavioural patterns to cope with them have not evolved and are not instinctual - as distinct from fear of strangers, foreigners and plagues, for which group dynamics are easily mobilised.
Hence to declare a "War" on terrorists and run off to steal other people's oil is easier than saying - the world as we know it is about to change drastically.
Group solidarity is also of extreme survival value to the individual.
You basically have to be a sociopath to begin a discussion about rocking the boat.
Ah, evolutionary psychology. Always full of reasonable hypotheses - but also notoriously poor in evidence.
Strictly anecdotally, my cousin on my fathers side, who is a psychologist, was rather anti-evolutionary-psychology, until she met me at age 30, at which point she re-evaluated her position pretty rapidly - which I think was a bit embarrassing for her with her colleague-friends.
I hadn't had anything to do with anyone on my fathers side, including my father, since I was 2 yrs old see, and yet in my approach, my debate, the things I moaned about, she saw my father.
Strictly anecdotally of course. If you want method based evidence, there's plenty of twin studies etc to be found now, I gather the evidence base has changed somewhat in recent years.
--
Jaymax (cornucomer-doomopian)
The hypothesis you brought up, that "The group will believe the myth espoused by the leadership in the face of evidence, because group solidarity was of survival value to the tribe", is a typical just-so story with very little (if any) testability. EP can probably be useful if done properly, but this is closer to crank etymology.
In my understanding of the evolution of the human species, the "leadership" you talk about is a prominent feature only of large civilizations. Smaller tribal cultures, where humans have spent the majority of their evolutionary existence, did not have the same kind of "leaders" that we do today.
Mythology on the tribal level could not be handed down from up on high, because there was no one in a small group that could maintain the position of being up on high against the will of the entire group. The beliefs and understandings would be arrived at by the group as a whole, in order to maintain group cohesion and survivability.
Dissidents would have been a threat to that leadership, but those dissidents were also necessary to the survival of the group in other ways in terms of skills and knowedge, so dissidents must be dealt with in such a way that maintains the cohesion of the group. Which would mean that even dissidents played a part in shaping group mythology.
I think people go into denial when facing a threat because the threat is a challenge not just to one idea or belief, but a threat to a whole system of ideas and beliefs upon which a way of life is founded, and a threat to emotional experiences attached to those beliefs.
The first "leaders" you experience in your life are called your "parents".
You have no free will. You are born to whom you are born to.
They pass down their mythologies to you.
They train you in what information you should be receptive to and what you should filter out.
"Denial" is kind of a broad carpet for sweeping under it all sorts of fine details about how people's brains operate, what they are "receptive" to, what they are not.
The tyranny of parenting, if any tyranny actually existed, in tribal society was temporary.
If the mythologies passed down to you didn't work in your world, you could challenge them.
How many mythologies can we count in our world that do not work from our own experience that we have no ability to challenge? Under the umbrellas of infinite growth and salvationist religions, there are plenty of ideas regarding our world that are just plain wrong, that most of us were raised with, that we here have abandoned ... but we haven't challenged the system to change the mythology, we have left the system and are beginning to adopt new ideas and complex understandings.
I know I don't have free will, and neither do you. But I do have complex self-awareness and self-organization. As do we all.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637635365191428174
A good video for those who think they exist in this society on their own terms...
==AC
Thanks. I have seen all these ideas, piecemeal. This provided a nice historical perspective. It is difficult to grasp that so much has passed so quickly and violently.