Loss and Resolve

Recent events in the Arctic have confirmed that global warming is self-sustaining, which along with accelerated extinction rates and other news has led me to believe that my worst-case projections of future global trends are likely correct. For several months I attempted to create a global survival plan that mapped out this and other threats to humanity and what we might do to confront them, but the results of this year's U.S. election, especially at the national level, appears to have nullified even a remote possibility of enacting such a plan and saving our species from extinction in the very near term.

It is small consolation that I did what I thought I could to fight against this outcome even as my research exposed that it is an inevitable consequence of our nature. Loss of hope had not squashed my lack of acceptance as I made a case for delaying the outcome for as long as possible; but at least in this country there was just too large a fraction of the population that either didn't care, or wasn't even paying attention to basic facts that belied their beliefs (including the obvious clues about the evil they were about to unleash).

I zeroed in on what I could personally control by enacting a plan to cut back on my own contribution to the drive toward oblivion: paying off credit, developing ways to scale back on my ecological footprint, and exposing through writing how people in a healthy world might live, as compared to our own dying world. It remains a fact that although it may soon be more possible for people to exceed limits of planetary habitability, we don't have to act on it. More specifically: if they drill for more oil, we can still avoid buying it. If more jobs become available in what I think of as the planet-killing sector of the economy, we can refuse to take those jobs. As protections are removed from our food, drugs, and financial industry, then we are justified in not trusting them, and seeking more reliable and responsible means to survive. I understand that "we" are likely a very small part of the world economy, but at least we can have clear consciences by contributing less to its death.

In a way I feel very sorry for the decent people who voted for the acceleration of our global nightmare. Many just want better jobs, or recovery of jobs they and their friends have lost. If we lived in the world of a century ago, which presumably is when America was "great," the costs of stripping away restrictions to growth would have been bearable, and the horrific outcome we now face would have been perhaps decades in the future (giving them enough time to live out their lives, even as the loss of future lives was ensured). I personally know a few of them, and it's not lost on me that for most of my life I had a lot in common with them.

My father remains my personal hero, and he was one of the most conservative people I've ever known. I don't know if we would be at odds with each other if he were still alive; but I do know he would have respected the results of scientific research, and perhaps would have tried, as I did, to derive his own understanding of what's happening. A child of the Great Depression, and a combatant in the world war that challenged the great fascists of the last century who are emulated by the new leaders of today, he would have at least recognized that threat, and challenged me – as he often did – to be "not just a man, but a hell of a man," and stand up for what's right as I see it. The great war of this century may already be lost; but those of us with honor and the vision to recognize it must try to delay that outcome for as long as possible.

Disruption

Several months of active job-seeking has made me an involuntary expert on the kinds of employees that companies are currently looking for. As I do with nearly everything, I've tried to learn some larger lessons in the process that can better serve my values, as well as my survival.

Many job posts appear to be recruiting the business equivalent of a soldier who will be involved in a project that is like a battle with high stakes that is part of a war with a cunning and powerful enemy. Their terminology often suggests a competition in overdrive following a strategy with no margin for error, learning, or realistic luck. Several decades of experience have taught me that these impressions generally match reality; and my investigation of its dynamics and their larger implications has convinced me that the existential threats now faced by humanity are direct consequences of blind obedience to that reality.

As I discussed in my blog post "Evaluating Competition," a sustainable and healthy competition must have goals and rules that support values that everyone – participants and those impacted by the competition – knows about and agrees to. Our current economic competitions arguably do not meet this test, especially since a few participants with an excess of power have corrupted them in order to acquire more power with the goal of dominating everyone and everything. To just keep what we have, the rest of us must follow their lead, with predictably disastrous results since we are already critically degrading and depleting the ecological resources needed for the survival of our species and many others on the verge of extinction at our hand.

I have personally struggled to act according to my values, whose definition has also been a struggle in the wake of proving to myself that there is a horrific lack of dependable guidance in my culture. In my writing, I have been building a case for those values and a body of guidance that can be used to serve them. In the rest of my life, I've experimented with what guidance I have, learning from both my successes and my failures along the way. Hovering over the whole process has been the need to keep what I have until I can find and enable a better way to live, which has meant flirting with the path to disaster and thus becoming more familiar with its many potential incarnations.

The simplest guidance comes from what might once have been common sense. People should work together to meet everyone's basic needs over the longest possible time, and use only what's left to increase personal happiness. Knowledge should be accumulated and used to predict the influence of their environment on them, and predict the consequences of their actions on each other and their environment. To enable all of this, everyone must understand and share common values, the pre-eminent being the lives of all people and respect for the creatures on which they depend. If what people do can affects others, they should make them aware of it; and if it potentially affects the survival of others, the others must agree to it. Clearly, our present way of life, embodied in economic competition, does not meet any of this guidance.

Other guidance involves details, and the latest installment applies to the use of knowledge. It comes out of research I started a decade ago while trying to predict the time it would take to complete various projects. While it remains little more than a partially-tested hypothesis, its predictions are consistent enough with my experience to present it as a means of evaluating more than what I originally intended (which is also a way to test it). One important prediction is that it is unlikely that any project or task attempted for the first time will take less than twice the minimum possible amount of time, and it will most likely take at least four times that long. If an organization claims to be able to achieve the minimum time, they are equivalently claiming that they have access to the less than 50 people in the whole world capable of doing so, which is extremely unlikely. As a corollary, if an organization does take the minimum time, then the quality of the result is likely much less than advertised. These first-time projects are the ones that make businesses competitive because of their uniqueness (based on the economics of low supply and high demand), while projects that have transitioned into full-scale production with several thousand times the minimum time invested in the process will have maximum quality and lower cost, but lose their uniqueness quickly, especially if the minimum time shrinks so much that other organizations – competitors – can duplicate it.

One of the business buzz words I've seen pop up recently is "disruption," which I read as the intentional and continuous conversion of an organization's activities into a set of unique projects so that competition can be accelerated. If coupled with super-optimistic time projections, this virtually guarantees the end of high quality, as well as lack of employment for the vast majority of the population (since only a very few people can come close to achieving the desired results) unless there are roughly as many businesses as there are people. Thus, the term matches all of its meanings: fracturing society through income inequality; requiring dishonesty to confuse the meaning of quality; sabotaging the health of business participants and their families by locking in a perpetual level of stress; and further destroying the Earth's habitability by multiplying resource-intensive and waste-producing activity.

To me as a world citizen, our greatest imperative as a species is to get back to basics, which starts with meeting everyone's basic needs, which includes leaving resources for other species so they can maintain our planet's habitability. The remainder, if there is any (and I doubt there is), can be used for the purpose most of our current economy is geared toward: increasing personal happiness beyond the basic level. Doing so requires examining our lives as objectively as possible in terms of basic values, which includes first identifying and agreeing to those values. Living any longer in our present state of apparent limbo (or increasing anarchy of meaning) is not optional if most of us wish to survive much longer; we may in the interim be able to justify to ourselves continued service to the system we know, but it ultimately won't be worth the cost.

To me as an individual, my present course is becoming rapidly indefensible, much as I felt as I was wrapping up my book Death Stoppers Anthology. An acceptable alternative is not yet in sight, but I'm learning quickly and am confident that I'm on the verge of discovering it.

Finding Focus

I've held several careers in my life, but none has made me feel as fulfilled as creative writing and music, which pays barely enough for a few meals a year. No one else decides what I create, and I can explore any subject that interests me in the process. You know you've found your calling when you can work for many hours and not even feel tired. In contrast, after eight to ten hours a day at any of my "normal" careers, plus typically more than an hour commuting, it's been difficult to do more than mentally vegetate in front of a T.V. or computer while eating a quick dinner.

I share with millions the unfortunate necessity of "making a living." Because our dominant culture has deemed worthless anything that can't be traded for anything else using the universal medium of money, I must find a way to show equivalence of what I do with what a significant number of other people do. This inevitably results in pressure to reduce uniqueness, while increasing consumption of those things that appeal to the most people – along with whatever else that can be converted into those things.

There is of course an alternative, at least in principle: I can find a way to meet my basic needs with minimal economic interaction. For most of human history this was the norm for the majority of people, who could rely on their skills at hunting and gathering members of other species. Today, this is much more difficult, even with modern knowledge. Those who do, or try to, are at risk of being overrun, or having their resources taken from them, by rapacious organizations that are driven – and empowered – by our global culture of imperative growth. They are also hindered by the effects of civilization's sabotage of multiple natural systems that we and other species depend upon for survival.

Because I also want what I do with my life to have a net positive effect on the world, I've been looking at approaches such as permaculture, which are aimed at building healthy partnerships with other species to both enable self-sufficiency and heal natural systems. Essentially, they amount to large-scale gardening (or small-scale farming), which requires access to land, water, seeds, and animals, as well as security. Also required is a considerable amount of knowledge about local conditions, from both natural and societal perspectives, involving research few of us have ever done about where we live. I currently have none of these things, nor do I find anything but the research particularly attractive.

Economic interaction is unavoidable, for practical and legal reasons. My most developed skills, communication and finding critical knowledge gaps and failures, have so far been most economically applicable to technology (through technical writing and test engineering). Any jobs in technology are, by definition, dependent on the continued existence and growth of that technology and, most importantly, the infrastructure that supports it. That infrastructure, by its nature, uses critical resources and generates toxic pollution, and is vulnerable to the extreme weather amplified by climate change. Even creative writing depends on means of generating, reproducing, and distributing books and music (electronic and otherwise), which along with the rest of technology's infrastructure will become increasingly degraded. This degradation will occur either because: civilization unravels, as I expect; people come to their senses and create healthy alternatives that likely have less massive dissemination potential; or technology becomes so powerful that we dismantle it for our own survival.

One of the key features of civilizations that have avoided extinction is the ability to adapt, to radically change the way people interact with the world so that they can survive. Another is division into small groups that are supportable by their environments and able to experiment without jeopardizing other groups if those experiments yield dangerous results. There are at least two lessons here for me, as I consider what to do with the rest of my life. The first lesson is that I must be flexible in considering my options. The second lesson is that the path to having a net positive effect on the world may be as simple as finding ways to help activate the two extinction-avoidance features for as many people as possible.

In the movie "Up In the Air," the main character advocates, and later rethinks a philosophy that matches what I see as a fundamental adaptation strategy for the future: keep your life simple enough to carry in a backpack. In practical terms, it was the reality for our hunter-gatherer forebears, and will likely be a necessity for the survivors of the ecological apocalypse that we have unleashed. I would rephrase it slightly: Keep your life simple enough that you can most completely and sustainably accept responsibility for the direct and indirect consequences of your actions. Perhaps if we all tried to do this, in our careers and the other parts of our lives, many of the problems we face would begin to be solved. It could be the essence of the first feature of extinction-avoidance. Maybe it is what I should dedicate my future to promoting, in whatever media is available.

Catching a Break

For the first time since before my father died nearly 20 years ago, I am contributing to something that I deeply care about, is fully in line with my personal values and skills, and could have a positive influence on the future of many people beyond my direct involvement.

As a systems integration engineer, I will be devising and performing initial tests of the National Science Foundation's National Ecological Observatory Network, working for a non-profit, NEON™, set up specifically to design, build, deploy, and manage it. The goal of the network is to monitor the ecosystems in the U.S. over a period of 30 years, enabling scientists to detect and characterize changes in a wide range of variables. Just as large-scale monitoring of weather has enabled a better understanding of climate and the ability to predict how it changes, such monitoring of ecosystems has the potential to do the same regarding the living environment; building the network is a critical step in this direction.

Of course, having knowledge does not automatically ensure that it will be used, or that it will be used to anyone's benefit. In my personal writing, I will continue to address this issue, along with the question of how to maximize the amount and quality of life in the Universe, beginning with increasing the longevity of our species and eliminating its role in the Sixth Great Extinction.

Along those lines, I look forward to studying the upcoming book Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin (who I worked with in the Mars Society), which examines the dark, radical side of environmentalism that sees humans as inherently evil, and (apparently from the promos) debunks some basic tenets of environmentalism. I've caught glimpses of the radical side, and am certainly familiar with the judgment of evil – but focused on what we do rather than what we inherently are, and as a consequence of valuing other species in addition to our own. Also, simplified understanding of outdated theories seems to be common to many radicals (as well as people in the general public who follow them), such as opponents of the original version of evolution who have no problem applying the crude analogue of "social Darwinism" to economics and public policy. I am particularly interested in what Zubrin finds wrong – if anything – with contemporary understanding of ecology, economics, and their overlap in ecological economics, along with other disciplines (such as climatology) which all point toward the need to reduce or otherwise radically change our impact on the rest of the biosphere to avoid catastrophe.

Hopefully, as more and better data is gathered, we will all be willing to adjust our views to conform with the reality it describes. I'm honored to be contributing to that.

Building a Better World

A couple of days ago I hit my personal threshold for stress about the state of the world. I've been tracking our progress toward population collapse for a long time, invested a lot of effort in determining what we can do to stop it (at a high level, anyway), and have recently been commenting on news stories of interest – which are multiplying almost exponentially. The last straw was the military action in Libya, which no matter what its immediate justification, was a dangerously reckless move by a president who I expected to know better (and judging from his own words, once did). I decided to localize my attention, in no small part because my own survival is in jeopardy.

Most of the jobs I'm applying for are contracts with companies that are part of the problems I've been pontificating about. This has the advantages of buying time, meeting my financial obligations, and presenting opportunities for changing minds; but it still feels like I'm thrusting a proverbial knife into what might still qualify as my soul. To develop alternatives, I've continued to study human ecology, and started doing an ecological study of my own region, which includes the three cities covered by my local Transition group. Educational opportunities are still on the table, if I can find ways to improve my chances at admission and paying tuition while helping my wife with paying our other bills.

Yesterday, I decided to change my approach (at least mentally) from trying to keep bad stuff from happening to building a better world. I began by going back to first principles, which is reflected in today's Idea Explorer post, “Delta World.” In addition to providing a new, useful way to frame world events, as a value system it has the potential to help make decisions about how to interact with the local environment. I chose the concentration on differences with that in mind. Looking at what's around us and asking how it can be changed to maximize good (as I defined it) leads the way to action, which in my experience is the best cure for despair.

Personally, I don't have to go much further than my own house, which is full of items that have already reduced all three of good's component variables just in their construction, and if disposed the wrong way could decrease them even more. The yard owned by my homeowner's association is a classic suburban deathscape, occupied by thirsty grass, non-native trees and shrubs, and sprinkled with rock hauled in for nothing other than questionable aesthetics. Most of the residential area is like that. Industrial and retail space isn't very far away, sharing the primary goal of serving just one species -- ours. With my new perspective, I can imagine how the parts of my mostly artificial world directly or indirectly affect the longevity of individual people here and at the next links in the supply chains they may be part of, in many ways manifested as happiness (which, you'll recall, is linearly correlated with life expectancy). In the interest of making at least this part of the world better (again, as I define it), I can think about how the existing structures and activities might be improved, and how others might be brought into service to address deficiencies.

In the world I currently live in, meeting my own needs depends on transactions with other people, who trade currency for my services that I can use to access resources I can't as easily get on my own. No matter how much “good” I enable, I must convince someone that it's worth what they had to do to get the currency they're trading with me. If they don't share my definition of good, or see it reflected in what I've done, then I have to find someone else or effectively perish. Because the overlap between my values and those embodied in most economic activity is pretty slim, I probably won't make much money doing what I consider right, and to get the amount of money I need right now I may be forced to do a lot of what I consider wrong. In short, my life is a microcosm of the world, at least in a so-called affluent country.

In the interest of trying to have a positive attitude, I have to consider the likelihood that I'm just not being creative enough.

By the logic of an ideal marketplace, we are all responsible for building demand for what we do, whether it be providing a product or service. There's an exquisite overlap between the need for a change in our culture's values and the need to increase demand for what's “good.” I've played that game, early in my career with my father in our education business, and lately with my own creative writing, both with dismal results. The “green” movement has been a lot more successful than I may ever hope to be, by attempting to use people's current values to trick them into accepting new values; but the results are still less than adequate, probably because there has been too much compromise in the process (see “Green Economy?” in the Idea Explorer blog). Co-opting the green approach may be my best option for at least morally neutral income in the near-term, but I can't shake my sense that it's a loser overall (note that, by my calculations, we must be making major changes within this decade and many years afterwards to avoid a catastrophic reduction in our population).

As I pointed out in “Delta World,” I see the main problem being a fundamental disagreement over values. If that changes, our economics will be naturally in line with the new values, though I expect them to work in a very different way. Again: if we don't change over the next ten years, it will be too late. If I'm to contribute to solving this problem and meet my financial obligations, then simultaneously working for a green organization, doing other “good” things for free, and making a strong case for my less ambiguous value system may be the best strategy, at least until I think of something better.

Almost Too Late

Last night, I watched the on-line version of Nicole Foss's presentation on the collapse of the global economy, which was somewhat different from the presentation she gave at the Transition conference, and surprisingly even more depressing. Foss focused mostly on the financial situation because she believes it will be at the leading edge of the catastrophe that's coming, while the energy situation – specifically peak oil – will drive the majority of it. Her prescriptions were the same in both presentations; among them: avoiding debt, home ownership, and banks; accumulating cash, food, equipment, and survival skills; and, above all, becoming part of a community.

While at the conference I was thinking globally, this time I was overwhelmed with how much the details of how people's live will need to change, especially mine. Like many Americans, I'm unemployed and in debt. This isn't the first time. I've worked myself out of worse situations before, and if the economy had a chance of rebounding, I would no doubt be able to do so again. Unfortunately, there have been deep structural changes in the past few years that will make it much more difficult to recover this time, even if I get one of the many jobs I've applied for since the last time I was working. Those changes, like most of the threats facing us, are tied to the relentless pursuit of growth. When you can't get enough new stuff, you start consuming the stuff that you used to process that stuff, and that's what the world's business leaders are doing, except the “stuff” they're now consuming is effectively composed of people. Those people, right now, are disproportionately among what was the middle class, and I and most of the people I know are among them.

There's still a chance that I can work my way out of debt before things get too much worse, but it will probably mean taking the highest-paying job I can and hanging on for as long as possible, even if what I'm doing with that precious forty to sixty hours a week isn't helping to lay the groundwork for a better future given the realities I've spent the past seven years discovering. In “Titanic Choices,” I likened this to bribing the crew of the Titanic to let me out of my cabin so I would have a better chance of convincing those steering the ship to avoid the iceberg, warning the other passengers, and helping to build more lifeboats.

If Foss and those in Transition are right, we're too close to avoid the iceberg, and we'll be lucky to get a few lifeboats launched before the ship sinks. I've so far resisted this conclusion, which is reflected in the career choices I've considered so far (along with the assumption that I even have the freedom to choose my next career). Their case, right now, is holding more sway with me, especially as unrest here in the United States has started to spread like wildfire. Given that possibility, my career choice will need to be much more practical. Permaculture design, perhaps?