David Harsanyi wrote in the Denver Post that the Obama Administration is running out of people to demonize(http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16321444). This right-wing columnist insists that Democratic “demonization” of the Chamber of Commerce is reinforcing moderate perceptions that the Democratic Party has gone bonkers. Ironically (too painfully so), it is what has become the Republican mainstream that literally (rather than figuratively) demonizes Obama himself, accusing him of being foreign born, Muslim, and, yes, the the anti-Christ. As a mouthpiece for right-wing extremism, Harsanyi has turned reality completely on its head, accusing the opposition of the defects that so dramatically characterize his own ideological camp.
The Denver Post criticizes Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CO CD 7) for, among other things, supporting cap-and-trade (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16281757). I think that Ed is doing a great job in general, is supporting what reason and goodwill dictate that a responsible elected representative support, and has revolutionized constituent services and outreach (his “government at the grocery store” town halls have become famous). But what strikes me as incredible is the Post’s irresponsible position on cap-and-trade on the basis that it raises energy costs.
The rest of the developed world, responding to abundant and compelling evidence, recognizes the need for an affirmative global warming abatement policy (the prime contenders being cap-and-trade or a carbon tax), but has been stymied in its attempt to create a globally concerted policy to address the problem by the short-sightedness of a country that would rather keep energy prices low today than start to reduce the infinitely higher future costs that we can no longer completely avoid. We scuttled the Kyoto Protocol, and now the Denver Post wants to make sure that we make continue to stick our heads in the sand rather than even begin to address this most consequential of challenges. It’s one thing to have to fight popular misconceptions, it’s another to have them amplified by Denver’s last remaining major metropolitan newspaper. I’ve never in my life felt less respect for any newspaper anywhere in America than I feel for this one now.
Susan Greene reports on the strong-arm tactics of the Denver Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, suing a lesbian Sunday School teacher the Archdiocese had fired for brining her case to the Colorado Civil Rights Division (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16314690). Such strong-arm tactics by institutions that should be in the vanguard of nobler attitudes are all too common. I’ve experienced them at the hands of the current Jefferson County Schools administration, first for trying to bring to the district’s attention the serious problems with a principle who was the superintendent’s “dear old friend,” and more recently for trying to establish a robust school-community partnership in Jefferson County. In all such cases, it is the community’s responsibility to stand up and reject this privileging of power over purpose. I strongly encourage people to be more aware, and get more involved.
The Economist reports on the use of steganography, and a program called “Collage,” which distributes and hides messages among files posted to public websites, and allows intended recipients to reassemble them (http://www.economist.com/node/17243251). It is another example of the decentralized, and unstoppable, flow of information in the modern world, with all of the vast implications that that has. Totalitarian governments will find it increasingly difficult to control what information people have access to, and their ability to organize in opposition to the government. And more responsible governments will find it increasingly difficult to control the organization and implementation of violent extremism.
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For those who don’t get the title pun, we sometimes imagine that science (i.e., the social institution based on the modern scientific method) is in a class by itself, definitively removed from the sloppy human efforts to understand our world and universe that preceded its invention. But, unsurprisingly, it is a very human enterprise. Our efforts to conceptualize the wonders and complexities around us have always been sloppy and imperfect. The development of scientific methodology represents a major advance in disciplining that process, but not transcendence of inevitable human messiness. Thus, while we have somewhat cleaned up our processes of conceptualization in the modern era, there is still no such thing as immaculate conception.
Cute, huh? But, wait. There’s more. The fact that science is messy doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. Our vision of the world that has emanated from this slight refinement of our messy observational and interpretive processes is very real and significant. We do indeed have a deeper, sharper, and more reliable understanding of causal relationships, both in general and particular. And, when it comes to discerning verifiable facts and systemic dynamics, a scientific perspective is superior to any alternative. We know, for instance, that the sun rises and sets because the Earth rotates, rather than, for instance, because it is drawn by a chariot across the sky. We understand lightening as the electrical, meteorological phenomenon that it is, rather than as a bolt hurled by a god. And we understand human biological conception as involving the fertilization of a female egg by a male sperm, always. No exceptions. There’s no such thing as immaculate conception.
Scientific misconduct, such as the recent example involving a Harvard psychology professor’s research on primate cognition (http://www.economist.com/node/16886218), proves that there is, in the first sense described above, no such thing as immaculate conception: We are still firmly within the realm of a messy human process, polluted by political and pecuniary motivations and pressures, made marginally less reliable by the irreducible residue of unreliability inherent to human behavior. But it doesn’t undermine what science has more generally proven over the course of centuries, the cumulative refinement in understanding of the systems which encompass us: Despite our lack of immaculate conception, there is still no such thing as immaculate conception.
There are those who, for unscientific dogmatic reasons of their own, want to refute widespread and generalized findings of science by reference to specific instances of the human messiness of science. Global warming deniers, for instance, certain that they can credibly claim that global warming is still a question in legitimate dispute, point to the emails exchanged among particular researchers referring to specific instances bringing into question specific pieces of data. But climate science is decades all, involving thousands of researchers spread out all over the world, and an accumulation of data that is truly extraordinary and overwhelmingly consistent in the systemic trends it reveals. No specific instances of individual malfeasance (even if that were the case, which it wasn’t in this instance) would disprove the cumulative weight of that collective scientific enterprise. There is no vast scientific conspiracy to pull the wool over right-wing radicals’ eyes.
Some don’t wait for specific instances of malfeasance to refute inconvenient findings of science. They rely instead on an organized ignorance of what science is, and what it isn’t. When I was a high school teacher, the christian fundamentalist parents of one of my students objected to my using genetic diffusion and innovation (i.e., evolution) in a comparison to cultural diffusion and innovation in world geography class (I had offered to let their son excuse himself from class if the topic ever came up again). In an email from the father, he referred me to a website that offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove that the theory of evolution was true. I tried to explain to him that it is the nature of scientific theories that they can never be “proven” true; they merely keep getting stronger due to accumulating supportive evidence, an absence of definitively refutational evidence, and a general scarcity of even mildly incompatible evidence. But, to someone with a dogmatic belief that they want to defend against science, all they need is a construction of reality which isolates the entire corpus of mildly inconsistent evidence, combining that with the inability of their opponents to prove what is not amenable to proof, and they have their own immaculate conception, cleansed of the systematic application of reason which stands against it.
It’s appropriate that this post about science, acknowledging its contamination by motivated human behaviors but recognizing that that contamination doesn’t discredit the overarching enterprise, follows my post about religion (“Is Religion A Force For Good?” ), in which I broke religion down to its constituent elements, identifying its beneficial and detrimental aspects, and drawing attention to the fact that the latter are not peculiar to religions, but rather are elements found in other forms of human cognition as well. No matter what lens we are using to understand the world in any given moment, it is more a matter of how we use that lens than what the lens is. And the best lens of all is composed of the best elements of each, synthesized into a coherent whole, and utilized with integrity and humility.
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It’s not news that political advertising is deceptive (http://www.denverpost.com/election2010/ci_16264271), that our treatment of electoral politics as a spectator sport trivializes it, and that our oversimplistic reduction of the challenges we face to platitudes and slogans creates a noisy obstacle to governing ourselves intelligently and effectively. The blogosphere does not help, amplifying the noise rather than cutting through it (One Colorado Pols blogger, in a moment of unintentional irony, wrote that my choice to focus on understanding and discussing issues, including spending lots of time talking with people in my district, rather than raising money and playing the political marketing game, made a mockery of the political process). Grass roots movements are choked with the crabgrass of superficiality.
The most fundamental issues we face are not taxes, services, or even campaign finance reform. They’re not health care or civil liberties or any of the other substantive issues that occupy our attention and directly affect our lives. The most fundamental issues are, as always, procedural, on how most effectively to solve substantive issues and resolve political disputes. The most fundamental issue is: How do we refine our political process to better liberate rather than distract our collective genius, to apply our thoughts and actions to the challenge of improving the quality of our lives rather than to the challenge of winning the cock fights of dueling false certainties?
I understand the temptation to focus exclusively on accomplishing small gains through traditional means, rather than acknowledging the need to tackle the fundamental, long-term political challenges we face. It’s as though we’re trapped in a pit, fighting over the scraps within it rather than working together to climb out. It may not be possible to turn our backs on the brawl constantly underway in this pit of politics in which we’re trapped, but we have to find ways to free ourselves enough of its immediate demands that we can attend at least marginally to the ultimate goal: Getting out of the pit. And that means refining the political process, hopefully enough to constitute a complete paradigm shift (see The Politics of Consciousness).
I’ve written that, to confront this fundamental political issue, there are three “virtues” we must emphasize: Reason, goodwill, and humility (or perhaps “skepticism”, the reluctance to assume that anything is true until it is well demonstrated) (The Foundational Progressive Agenda ). I am not arguing that we can just ignore the implications of being trapped in the pit of politics-as-usual, and dedicate ourselves exclusively to promoting these three virtues. As Henry Kissinger once said in a different context, that would only succeed in ceding the world to the most ruthless. But neither should we be satisfied with winning brawls in the pit, never attending to the more fundamental challenge of getting out of it altogether.
The irony and frustration of the human condition is that we’re capable of doing so much better. If we were able to address ourselves, as a society, as a world, to the collective enterprise of creating an ever more robust, sustainable, and fair global civilization, we’d be able to create a far less brutal, and far more accommodating, context for our lives. While it’s true that stating this does not move us toward it, and that the challenge of getting people on board, agreeing to work together to address ourselves to these most fundamental of substantive challenges, is as daunting as any we face, it’s also true that progress can be made on this front. And it behooves us to do so.
We need a new social movement, one that is not about the scraps in the pit, but about getting out of the pit altogether. We need a movement that suspends discussion (in the context of that movement) of all of the particular substantive policies and issues we are brawling over, and addresses instead the challenge of getting us more focused on working together as teammates in a collective endeavor, facing shared challenges and opportunities.
This is not something that candidates and office holders can, or perhaps even should, attend to. This is not something that the political parties can, or perhaps even should, attend to. But it is something that we, as a people, have to attend to. We have squandered the wealth of our genius far too egregiously for far too long.
Human history is about cumulative and threshold advances in how well we tap and utilize our genius. One of the best examples of a threshold improvement is the development of the scientific method, which vastly increased the signal-to-noise ratio in the information we generated through our observations of and inferences about the world around us. Making such advances is neither beyond our grasp, nor accomplished independently of the individual and organized efforts of living human beings to accomplish them.
The similarities between politics and science are not trivial. Both involve competing views, passionately held. Both involve bitter rivalries, brutal battles, and eventual outcomes that favor some ideas over others. Both involve resolutions that affect our lives. The main difference is that, in science, we have tamed this process to a far greater extent than we have tamed it in politics. And the benefits of having done so are astronomical.
The advance represented by the scientific revolution is a procedural one, not a substantive one. It is the creation of a more robust and less arbitrary methodology, reducing the casual and drawn-out processes of trial and error to a focused process of systematic investigation. If we can implement such a wondrous step in how we understand the nature of the world and universe around and within us, then we can certainly at least contemplate the possibility of implementing a similarly wondrous step in how we coordinate and frame our shared existence.
In fact, Science is a special cut-out from the universe of politics. Fighting over what is and is not true is a fundamentally political enterprise (see The Politics of Consciousness). Issues that we now recognize to fall clearly under the umbrella of science were once clearly merely political, with equallly rancorous conflicts of power and organization over which vision of the world would prevail. Eventually, to a large if forever incomplete degree, the preeminence of the scientific method to determine what is true and what isn’t, to frame those brawls within an agreed-upon procedure that maximized the influence of reason upon the outcome, to determine what causes result in what effects, has become widely accepted. The challenge now is to continue to subject all political disputes on matters that can be to scientific methodology (we already do, but relegated to the margins of political discourse), and, more dauntingly, to cultivate an agreement that we will privilege those conclusions over others more haphazardly arrived at.
We need a social movement that advances the notion that investing ourselves in the science of self-governance is good for humanity, that creating a context in which it is not just those who shout the loudest, but those who have best applied reason to the most reliable evidence, that prevail. We need to keep fighting to be a more enlightened society. That is the most fundamental political battle of all.
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This is a very specific, almost arbitrary, example of the systemic nature of the reality in which we live, and an illustration of the coherence of systems across levels and disciplines. The relevance, for me (other than exercising the sense of wonder that I believe should be driving us), is to draw attention once again to the ways in which we can better understand the context within which we live, both “human” and “natural” (it’s all natural, really), and, by doing so, can be better equipped to interact with that context wisely and productively. It stands in opposition to the movement advocating self-governance by shallow platitude, and in support of the movement that insists we are conscious entities, forever summoned to cope with the challenges and opportunities of a complex and subtle world.
The October 11 issue of Time Magazine has an article in it about Blockbuster’s “failure at failing” (i.e., its failure to manage its demise in shareholders’ best interests), which made me think of what an excellent example audio-visual entertainment is of the parallels between economics and evolutionary ecology, with the distinction (among others) of far more cross-over synthesis involved in the flow of innovations (like “breeding” of genetically dissimilar species to produce dramatically different ones). It is a story of dominant successors displacing eclipsed predecessors, combining with other dominant successors from other distinct lines of evolutionary descendance
Like a whole new species emerging from the combination of photographs (flipped in rapid succession) and, eventually, phonographs, first silent movies and then talkies spread like Eucalyptus trees in California. Movies shown at movie theaters became a dominant form of entertainment. Breaking this down a little, silent movies were the Neanderthals to the Homo Sapiens Sapiens of talkies, a dominant sub-species either displacing or interbreeding with the “inferior” one, driving it into extinction.
Then, by improving and adapting the technology of broadcasting signals encoded with sound (radio) to this form of entertainment, incorporating moving images as well, a new ecological niche was formed, one that would prove to be immensely robust: Television, in one’s own home (again, television being the dominant successor to radio, with the synthesis of audio-visual entertainment with broadcast technology being its genesis). The various species (audio recordings, radio, movies, and television) have found different ecological niches ever since, sometimes competing at one another’s expense, sometimes contributing to one another’s reproductive success. Silent movies were the only species from these various braided lines of development to go (virtually) completely extinct.
Within the television industry, various micro-ecologies evolved, with three major networks in the United States swallowing up and revitalizing local stations, forming a very robust symbiosis. Different content formats were tried and evolved: Talk shows, variety shows, news broadcasts (all off-spring of radio predecessors in form). Sit-coms, courtroom dramas, cop shows, and other archetypical forms, emerged and evolved, and occasionally blended into new forms (Ally McBeal and Boston Legal each blending comedy and courtroom drama, for instance).
Meanwhile, movies evolved as well, with special effects, and various genres, and various motifs developing and cross-breeding and displacing predecessors in a variety of ways. And some cross-breeding occurred between movies and television (and novels), with mini-series briefly enjoying a heyday (though short-lived due to the expense of production, a species-killer, at least in television, at least thus-far).
Enter video cassettes, a technology cross-pollinator of movies and TV. Now movies produced for cinemas could be watched at home on television sets. This seemed to threaten the survival of the movie industry for awhile, reducing box office revenues dramatically, until the movie industry adapted, and found that home rentals and sales could be every bit as lucrative.
Then the separate evolutionary thread that produced the computer revolution cross-fertilized with these, as with virtually all other evolutionary threads, producing compact disks, and, eventually, streaming video (as well as downloadable songs and i-pods, and downloadable movies).
Blockbuster was an innovative business piggybacking on the invention of video cassettes, which made more sense to rent than to buy. It was a niche waiting to be filled. But like ostentatious displays such as huge antlers on elk or bright plumage on peacocks, signalling to potential mates a surplus of male prowess, few qualities contribute more to reproductive success of products sold in the modern market than increased convenience. So, with the invention of the compact disk (and more manageable postage rates associated with smaller size), Netflix swept in to occupy that niche, ultimately spelling doom for the far larger and richer Blockbuster.
Netflix itself had to adapt to streaming or downloaded video via computer, or it would have been displaced by dominant successors just as it had displaced Blockbuster (which failed to adapt in time, though it might now). In fact, Netflix faces stiff competition from others eager to fill the streaming and downloadable video niche, including Amazon and Apple. And a separate niche exists for supermarket and store based CD rental vending machines, in which Redbox enjoys an early dominance.
I’ve traced above just one set of strands of a far vaster and more complicated net, with, for instance, the evolution of audio recording devices (phonographs to reel-to-reel tape to cassettes to digital, with the various forms of vinyl recordings evolving alongside of magnetic tapes); different filming and projecting technologies and types (as well as production styles); television sets (from small black-and-white to slightly larger, then color, then much larger, then projection, then plasma screen); different television signal delivery technologies (local over-air broadcast, cable, satellite, digital, which catalyzed a proliferation of channels and networks); and, of course, evolving computer hardware and software intertwined with all the others.
Any aspect of the “anthrosphere” (human social institutions, technologies, products and constructions, and cultural motifs) can similarly be zeroed in on as one aspect of the evolutionary process discussed in “The Politics of Consciousness ,” and “Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future.” We can trace building construction, or aviation, or land transportation, or clothing, or medicine, or money, or markets, or warfare, or farming, or mining, or law, or political forms, or religion, or any other aspect of the human-produced sphere of our existence, in exactly the same way as audio-visual entertainment, and then trace the linkages and cross-fertilization’s among them. By understanding the anthrosphere in these terms, and contextualizing those human systems within the similar biological evolutionary ecological systems (the “biosphere”) that they mimic and echo, all within the framework of other natural systems (e.g., the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere), we have a single, coherent paradigm within which to understand the entire global system, applying complex dynamical systems analysis adapted to the particular forms of analysis evolved to address various subsystems, focusing on different aspects in different ways, zooming in more tightly or panning out more broadly, but not arbitrarily divorcing any one branch from the others with which it is ultimately interconnected.
(see also Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, The Fractal Geometry of Law (and Government), and The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix for more on this general theme).
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No sooner do I write and post an essay on the literally evolutionary nature of modern information technologies (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=577), then I come across an article in The Economist zeroing in on one aspect of exactly what I’m talking about (http://www.economist.com/node/17091709?story_id=17091709).
In my novel (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=126), a wizard ruminates that “the genius of the many is a captive giant, whose freedom is the ends and the means of all other things.” Wikinomics is about another large step in the liberation of that captive giant, by reducing the transaction costs involved in massive decentralized network communications. Ronald Coase famously said that in the absence of transaction costs, we would bargain our way to maximum utility. Some have interpreted Coase’s Theorem to be more about the formidable obstacle posed by transaction costs than the efficacy of bargaining our way to paradise. But, in either case, the internet has dramatically reduced the size of that obstacle.
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I almost titled this post “Knowledge AND Power,” as a play on my previous post a week or so ago titled “Knowledge is Power,” but decided to be less cute and more descriptively precise. Denverpost.com published today an article on a Boulder company’s contribution to smart grid technology (http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16199737). “Power Tagging,” the name of both the technology and the company, involves embedding “a digital signal deep in the flow of electrons that can be read through the noise.” The larger implication is the gradual evolution of more efficient energy delivery systems, by, for instance, incorporating real-time cybernetic feedback loops that allow energy delivery to adjust to conditions, much as a thermostat turns on and off the heat or air conditioning in a home. But the implications of a smart grid, and particularly of this new technology, are that the more information flows with the energy itself, the more efficiently the demands on the system (e.g., producing exactly the right amount of energy to balance the grid in real-time, a physical requirement of energy production and distribution) can be met.
More generally, information and energy are the intertwined life-blood of human and natural systems. The biosphere on Earth is fueled, ultimately, by the sun (starting with photosynthesis, at the start of the food chain), and evolves through the reproduction, occasional mutation, and competition for reproductive success of packets of information (genes). Human systems are embedded in, and echo, this pattern (as I discuss in my post “The Politics of Consciousness”: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=187). In our earliest form, on the African savanna, our fuel came from that solar-powered food-chain and, eventually, the combustion of some of its products (i.e., fire). Our early development involved ways in which to utilize that energy source (feeding domesticated animals, and using fire in the preparation of food and tools, for instance). Much of human history thereafter can be understood in terms of the evolution of energy sources and the technologies for utilizing them (from levers and pulleys to nuclear reactors and solar panels).
Parallel to, and informing, this evolution of energy sources and technologies, is our own cultural evolution involving the innovation, diffusion, and synthesis of ideas. But just as our own evolutionary process is an echo of Nature’s, we in turn have created a technological echo of our own, by creating information technologies which vastly accelerate the reproduction, mutation, competition, and evolution of human cognitive information. And now, we are increasingly taking steps which will allow that information to operate independently of us, just as a thermostat does, with technological systems reacting to information that no human being need ever be aware of.
The potentials for increased efficiency and efficacy in how we address the challenges and opportunities which face us are enormous. Despite the hyperbole that has sometimes surrounded the Computer Revolution, few recognize just how dramatic a threshold we have entered in just the past few decades. From a historical perspective, it may come to eclipse the Industrial Revolution in importance, just as the Industrial Revolution in many ways eclipsed the Renaissance and Enlightenment which were preludes to it.
Just as our own echo of natural evolution is a vastly accelerated process, so too the technological echo we have created promises a new quantum acceleration once again. Human history is an acceleration of natural history due to the increased rate of information-packet reproduction (as fast as we can communicate), mutation (as fast as we can modify), and selection (as fast as we can choose what to believe or what technology to utilize). The secondary evolutionary echo that may occur as a result of information technologies operating autonomously could be another quantum acceleration still, communicating, processing, modifying, and selecting information not only at the accelerated speed that modern computers can, but with the accelerating acceleration (i.e., increasing nth order rates of change) produced by the accumulating innovations themselves. We’ve already begun to experience the first whisper of this new acceleration, with the rapid communications and data processing capacities of modern computers, ushering in new wonders of comprehension and capacity at an accelerating rate. But that is still restrained by our own cognitive speed, still the bottleneck through which our computer-augmented data processing must pass. It is when the evolutionary process of self-replicating, mutating, adapting packets of information by-pass us completely that the new echo begins in earnest.
In a book about speculative future possibilities that I read decades ago (and can remember neither the title nor the author), one idea the author floated was the prospect of robotic combination space-faring/mining machines that could self-replicate with the materials that they mined from extraterrestrial bodies, bringing back virtually unlimited material resources to Earth. (Obviously, we would also need to invent self-replicated garbage collectors removing the equally prolific production of waste, else be even more deluged by garbage than we already are!) Now, imagine combining such machines with any variety of self-replicating and self-disposing/recycling machines to perform any variety of tasks. Finally, imagine their ability to process information about changing conditions or potential design improvements diagnosed from experience, and self-modify when reproducing in order to adapt to this information.
Such an accelerated process may well also accelerate our ability to safely and cleanly tap and utilize the universe’s abundant supply of energy sufficiently to meet any demands placed upon it. Both drivers of evolution, of progress, -information and energy- would be placed on autonomous growth curves, with problem-solving algorithms incorporated into them. It is even conceivable that self-replicated computerized machines could create not only their own off-spring, but their own novel inventions as well, new self-replicating computerized machines to accomplish new tasks newly identified.
Of course, the immediate future offers prospects more modest than these far-fetched possibilities, but dramatic prospects nonetheless, and prospects that will become increasingly dramatic with the passage of time. What it requires of us is a willingness to progress, an understanding that we have not yet arrived at our final condition, that our lot in life can indeed be dramatically improved, and that it is incumbent upon us to facilitate our advance toward an ever-more robust, sustainable, and fair social order to the best of our abilities.
But, as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and great potential for disastrous unintended consequences. This is true on several dimensions; technological, environmental, and social institutional. As some have noted, we may be on the brink of creating what is essential mechanical life-forms, and unleashing forces we will no longer be able to control. The most common and imminent concern involves nanotechnology: The creation of microscopic machines that can be used, for instance, to target diseases in the body, and can be programmed to reproduce and adapt to changing conditions by reprogramming themselves as they do so. Michael Crichton, in one of his typically scientifically-almost-plausible-but-extreme renditions of this concept, wrote the novel Prey, which depicted swarms of such nanites becoming very effective predators.
Clearly, more dramatically exploiting Nature, both on Earth and beyond, means more dramatically risking the destabilization of the complex systems which comprise us. We must always remain vigilent, and increasingly so, that our increasingly robust harvesting of Nature’s bounty is not done at the expense of the stability and sustainability of the systems which produce that bounty.
And the fear that informs conservatives, that the more we act with a concentrated will, the more we risk losing ourselves to the center of power thus created, takes on new dimensions as well in a future such as the one I have outlined. Vigilantly avoiding the possible pitfalls of falling prey to our own technological and institutional inventions is one more demand upon us, and one we must keep forever at the forefront of our contemplations. But the liberating possibilities of both a more effective and expansive social institutional context, and a more effective and expansive technological context, both facilitating the provision of needs and wants and opportunities beyond all but our wildest dreams (just as the present is beyond all but the wildest dreams of those of generations and centuries and millenia past), freeing us to grow and celebrate life in ways more profound and subtle than merely meeting the demands of survival which were forever our first and most formidable shackles, is a dream not to be denied.
Despite the risks involved, I find the path we are on more exciting than frightening, one which, when combined with our inevitable increasing mimicry of nature in the production of more organic and organic-like technologies and social institutions, holds the promise for a very bright future indeed.
Press release from Governor Ritter’s office: http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=GovRitter%2FGOVRLayout&cid=1251580722546&pagename=GOVRWrapper.
Congratulations to Lockheed Martin of Denver and United Launch Alliance of Littleton (both bordering on my state house district, on opposite sides) for being awarded two of four NASA contracts awarded nationally, highlighting one of Colorado’s most vibrant and inovative economic sectors. We need to preserve the policies that have made Colorado so attractive for economically vital enterprises such as these two, which include attention to infrastructure, to quality of life, and to vibrant cultural and educational facilities.
A marine bacteria that very robustly pumps carbon out of the atmosphere and into a permanent oceanic carbon sink. From The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/16990766.
To sumarize, when marine life dies, some of the carbon in the remains dissolves into the ocean, 95% of which can’t be metabolized (called “refractory”). Since it can’t be metabolized, it can’t be turned back into carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, making it an actually and potentially enormous carbon sink that has been largely overlooked by marine biologists until recently. The quantity of carbon stored in these refractory molecules is about equal to the amount of carbon stored in the atmosphere.
It had previously been discovered that a certain kind of bacteria (abbreviated AAPB) produces these refractory molecules when it metabolizes certain common nutrients, but on a far more robust scale than previously realized. (The main source of food for these bacteria is phytoplankton, which plays a crucial role in the marine food chain and itself is affected in complex ways by global warming).
Until now, the only known way to stimulate carbon absorption into the sea was to seed the sea with iron in order to stimulate the growth of planktonic algae. However, the introduction of iron has some serious negative side effects. With the new discovery of this very robust carbon pump (the AAPB bacteria, which pumps carbon from the carbon cycle into an apparently premanent carbon-sink), new potential exists for organically pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and into the sea, which has a large capacity to absorb it with ecological damage. How this might be done, exactly, is not yet known.
This story is interesting in its own right, but what appeals to me most is that it highlights the complex systemic nature of the world in which we live, and the value of understanding it for working with those systems to find solutions that both serve our own particularly human interests, and simultaneously restore disrupted systems to a sustainable dynamic equilibrium.
Humanity faces a daunting challenge: Billions of people desperate to live even in what Americans would call an extremely modest level of comfort and security, and a global integrated system (comprised of biosphere, and the anthrosphere within it; the hydrosphere; the atmosphere; and the lithosphere) already strained by the relatively few who already do. For the wealthy and comfortable few to attempt to condemn the rest of global humanity to perpetual poverty in the name of environmental sensitivity is completely untenable for both humanitarian and pragmatic reasons (you want more violence and instabililty? Try that strategy).
Our paltry attempts to solve our environmental problems with what are truly systemically superficial strategies are not going to rise to this challenge. We are going to need to effectively redesign our economic and technological systems to become more integrated with the ecological and natural systems within which they are ensconsed, and upon which they depend.
Economically, it means “internalizing the externalities,” incorporating into the prices of our goods and services the environmental costs that are currently not incorporated. Technologically, it is going to mean integrating an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the systems which comprise our world into the technologies which interact with those systems. Together, economically and technologically, it will mean constructing closed systems, in which the waste produced is the in-put in another process, and in which imbalances are addressed by tweaking the human and natural systems through which we operate in ways which restore and maintain the balance that had been disrupted.
First, of course, we need to overcome that faction of humanity more to the indefinate continuation of immediate, on-going, destructive, unsustainable, self-indulgent greed and mutual indifference. Once again, though the challenges we face together are daunting enough, it is the armies of Organized Ignorance among us who ensure our inability to confront and surmount them.
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The Denver Post today printed an interesting op-ed today (“Green Homes Are Not So New”: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16036555), describing the history of sod houses on the prairie, with sunflowers growing on the roof, as well as past uses of passive solar technology in architecture, and implicitly comparing and contrasting that use of “green technologies” to today’s more sophisticated New Energy technologies.
Aside from presenting a fascinating little detail of Colorado history, the story also reminds me of the fact that much of what progress is involves rediscovering the essence of what we were and where we’re coming from, and applying it in more sophisticated ways to what we are becoming and where we’re going. Ultimately, we “emerged from” ecosystems (and remain, despite our delusions of exceptionalism, mere products of nature still ensconced within ecosystems), and are now striving to reintegrate ourselves in systemically sustainable ways back into those ecosystems, without sacrificing the prosperity that our rapacious exploitation of Nature’s bounty has enabled us to enjoy.
It is my belief that our social institutions and our technologies will increasingly come to resemble nature’s forms and functions ever more closely, eventually becoming fully reintegrated into the natural systems of which they are inevitably a part, preserving the benefits to us, while finding ways to eliminate the costs to the natural context which sustains us. In the process, we will better mimic the far-greater sophistication of natural systems, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our own human systems by doing so.
