By Albert Bates, from his book “Retropopulationism” — reproduced with his kind permission.
Chapter 32—Regenerosity
Nature is inexhaustibly creative. It’s the ultimate laboratory. Or maybe the right metaphor is the ultimate kitchen. Nature is constantly trying out new recipes and throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
—Joel Achenbach
A million years from now, when the descendants of microbes that hitchhiked on a Chinese manned mission to Mars return to Earth and try to reconstruct what happened, maybe the distant descendant of a whale will tell them it was Facebook.
Said the whale to the Chinese lab leak:
They were a magnificent race and you might never have existed without them. The social adaptations that led to advanced sciences and space travel evolved from a context of small, land-dwelling, hunter-gatherer groups—epigenetically adapted herd animals running upright and solving problems as a group through vocalizations and gestures. Perhaps their frames of reference—and their neocortices—expanded by regular contact with especially communicative plants and fungi.
“Although never to the degree that our own species’ brain-to-bodymass and processing power has,” the whale hastily added.
Failing a biological endowment or the soundwave propagation advantages of aquatic environments, they developed elaborate prosthetic media to communicate over greater distances with more dispersed networks using binary digital electromagnetic coding. They evolved from mechanical devices called telephones to personal computers and AR headsets, to brain implants and genetically modified “superhumans.”
Sadly, all that took them farther away from direct contact with the real world before their improved computational ability gave them the foresight to project the consequences of their technologies and the industrial strength used to produce them. Hypnotized by the virtual worlds they were creating, they drifted farther and farther from meaningful contact with their fellow beings, both among their own species and with all their relations, my own ancestors included.
The whale paused and looked off to the clouds. “We might have told them so much,” she said wistfully.
Adaptation to their new virtual world distanced them from the biogeophysical realities they derisively called “Default World.” They were ill-equipped to make rapid and effective collective behavioral responses to sudden, catastrophic climate change, food and water security, cascading zoonoses, and nuclear proliferation.
Towards the end—past the point where manned missions to Mars were launched but thankfully before my family was extinguished—atomization of the human family from large, multigenerational units into nuclear pairs and then solitary units with sexual avatar companions—almost unnoticeably gravitating from single breadwinners to multi-earner, overworked families struggling to keep up with vampire loan demands and social pressures towards conspicuous consumption—brought forward a primal longing for belonging that fed a toxic tribalism.
It might have been averted if they had only paused to reflect on what they were doing, but the head-worn screens triggered rapid eye movements reminiscent of the early hunter-gatherer reflex. It grasped them firmly to a genetic breast. Both the structure of their digitized social networks and the patterns of information flowing through them were directed by engineering decisions that maximized profitability for the handful of founders who became spectacularly wealthy at the expense of everything else.
These drivers were largely opaque to the driven, effectively unregulated, and sequestered from ecological feedback. The functional consequences only became clear in retrospect, by which time it was too late, and the human species went extinct, leaving behind a huge mess that even after countless millennia is still suffered by those of us remaining.
Of course, expanding the scale of a collectively behaving system—they knew it only as “social media“—by eight orders of magnitude in less than a decade was certain to come to a bad end. That scale of change is disallowed in the natural biological world for good reason. It is ecologically unstable. In the human social context, it created needless conflict and eroded familial cooperation. It altered entire populations’ abilities to make accurate decisions, reach clear consensus even on simple facts, or cooperate to govern themselves. Highly placed individuals—generally for reasons arbitrary to the competence required of their position—were given outsized influence. The popularity of leaders came not from socially beneficial attributes of character but as a result of ability to manipulate communications and emotional responses, taking advantage of “influence” algorithms—not possible historically or evolutionarily—to disinform for their own misguided purposes.
Macroscopic features of communication breakthroughs should have encouraged stronger and enduring interconnectedness, transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations, dissemination of scientific ideas, citizen engagement in science and politics, and overcoming isolation. Instead, they brought echo chambers, polarization, difficulty coordinating responses to pandemics or natural emergencies, eroded trust in government, nefarious actors causing local economic political instability to serve their own ends, “information gerrymandering,” and manipulated elections. Hysteria driven by unreliable information became so normalized that broader social governance became ineffectual at best, counterproductive at worst.
There were those who correctly read these trends and attempted interventions, but they were outnumbered and overwhelmed by contrary, short-term profit-oriented persons who kept building algorithms designed to recommend information and products in line with anti-survival outcomes. These created runaway feedback such that a subset of users enraged by emotionalized and moralized misinformation triggered the apocalypse that ended the race even before climate change had its chance to.
“Such a pity,” the Martian archaeologist said.
“Maybe,” said the whale. “And maybe not.“
Challenging Finality
This Parable of the Martian and the Whale serves my purpose of laying out one part of the threat matrix confronting humanity, but as a tale told to children it is unsatisfying in its finality.
Let’s instead take a moment to imagine a different future, wherein the writing on the wall is observed and understood by enough of us, soon enough, that we collectively act to change the outcome. What might that look like?
I’ve already sketched some of it in these pages—futuristic diets; reserving a third of oceans and land surface for rewilding; afforestation that rebuilds biodiversity. But there is a psychological element that is equally important, if not more so. We have to recover collective humility. We may not need to return to living in Black Hawk’s Sauk village but we need to recover that village’s reverence for nature and willingness to live within strict limits.
At what size might human population achieve an ecological balance with Earth systems? The current, broadly accepted, scientific range for that number is from one and a half to three and a half billion people.
At one and a half you have enough people to allow big cities with symphony orchestras, sports stadiums, creative arts and high technology but also enough wilderness that anyone who wanted could choose a very different kind of life—such as isolated in a remote hut or living in a small town. Of course, technology is always evolving and in our new virtual world, many of the cultural benefits of large cities have become available to rural peoples.
To look at this as an economist might, or an ecologist, we’d want to ask whether we can design a system modification that instead of optimizing for individual profit at the expense of the commons—including, for instance, the pleasure of having a third or fourth child or a pet dog and cat—we could optimize to regenerate the natural world and reverse climate change. If you imagine a Facebook algorithm that drives potential customers to purchase a Mediterranean cruise, might it not be equally possible to gratify users by guiding them to assist in restoring Mediterranean wetlands and corals? Or perhaps, by paying to bunk on a sail cargo vessel, to re-establish the sail-trade routes of the Romans and Phoenicians? Of course, depending on social media to do the right thing will not be enough. We’ll also need a governance system that encourages good behavior from those who increasingly command our attention in the digital age.
Evolution of these kinds of systems is already underway, although not without some countercurrents. Regulation lags technology and society. One danger is that the transition to a greater valuation for the commons moves too slowly. Another is that it happens too fast. For instance, if the fossil fuel industry had to suddenly internalize the environmental harm of its business model, it would just cease to function. While some might rejoice at that idea, it would mean the entire modern industrial civilization would simply grind to a halt in a matter of days. Civilization would collapse from a lack of energy.
On the other hand, if you slowly priced in the neglected externalities of fossil fuels, the environmental harm, social harm, medical harm and more, a present-day smartphone’s price would gradually rise to $10,000. Commuting to work might cost more than most people are paid by their jobs. The result would not be collapse, however. Innovations in smartphone life-cycle design could keep the price low. Mass transit would adjust itself away from dirty energy and become available to more commuters, such as those now served only by six-lane highways.
Our present civilization has many perverse incentives. They reward us for doing things that may or may not be bad for us personally but have decidedly adverse effects on others and the natural world. The challenge is to bind incentives—social, economic, governmental—to the well-being of the commons. We need a culture in which individuals and companies improve their positions only when what they do is comprehensively better for the planet. We need algorithms that place social and ecological health before private profit.
Some might say our fall began with the yoked plow and the woven basket. Others would say it began with our use of words to express the world around us. Only then did we break things into separate parts, and for the sake of having a simple description, deprived them of their interbeing. With exponential population growth and exponential technology growth, we may get exponentially increasing complexity but we don’t necessarily regain wholes. In that sense, attempting to find solutions in words, written in a book like this, is futile. We need to put down the book and open ourselves to re-experiencing the world in its completeness.
We were given a beautiful world. It really has all we’ll ever need. We just have to respect its limits. That’s all.
___________
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.
– Carl Sagan
References
Achenbach, J., The hard lessons we learned — and didn’t — from two years in pandemic school, The Washington Post Magazine, (February 24, 2022).
Damania, Z., Saving Civilization: Healthcare, Tech, Democracy (w/Daniel Schmachtenberger), The ZDoggMD podcast (Feb 11, 2022).
Diana, F., The Growth and Collapse of Industrial Civilization, frankdiana.medium.com (2021).
Ehrlich, P., Was the Population Bomb Defused? The Great Simplification Podcast with Nate Hagens, episode 9 (2022).
Very amusing.. but in a sad way. I have some reservations about the whole approach taken here, both in the parable and in your comments afterward: my worry is that in both “collective” humanity was held collectively responsible for bad planetary outcomes. But this is false. Throughout 99.9% of our species’ existence, we were keystone ecological engineers. It is only in the past few thousand years that inegalitarian and ecologically destructive cultural systems developed, and eventually coalesced to become the monstrous military-industrial complex of “modern” civilization.
It is still very difficult to accept that civilization, so far, has generated most of the ecological disasters and species extinctions for 10,000 years. It is also difficult for most people, who imagine they are from “advanced” societies, to let go of their prejudices against the smaller scale societies with “simple” technologies and economies. The cultural ecologies, of hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, and nomadic pastoralists, appear to represent earlier “stages” in the evolution of culture. They were not. They were based on practices arising from an extremely sophisticated ecological knowledge that might have been understand by a minority of people enthuse economies, but were so effective that they became embedded in all approaches to the environment.
These cultures all contributed to the maintenance of mosaics of secondary growth in every ecosystem. This reduced the severity of wildfires and supported high levels of species diversity.
If alien visitors had arrived to assess this situation 100,000 years ago, or even as recently as 5,000 years ago, they would have been reassured that Homo sapiens was developing into a beneficial organism for the future of the planet.
So what went wrong? I suggest that part of the explanation lies in our dependence on learned and shared information and practices. Our excessive reliance on this “cultural” system of adaptation made us vulnerable to two major dangers: 1) the hubris of those who “won” in the development of socio-economic class systems, and 2) the creation of larger settlements - cities - that required that the surrounding countryside - and eventually the whole planet - be stripped of fauna and flora and minerals and even fresh water - just to support the consumption patterns of urban populations, and especially the wealthy self-deluded elites.
just talked to per espen stoknes on linkedin he stated that the human population will peak on 9 billion in the year 2050 and than decline in the year 2100 to 6 or 7 billion NO COLLAPSE THIS CENTURY and if you look and the earth4all study you can find all papers !!!!