Our world today has big problems. We can’t be afraid to ask big questions.
This blog will be built around a book I am writing. Human Nature and Human Beings in Nature: Culture, Consciousness, & the Fragile Earth is its preliminary title. Its central theme is that:
A huge gap exists and is growing between what we know and how we live.
That has happened before, but never on this scale—nor, I think, with such clear, sharp mismatches between knowing and doing. To see what I mean, consider the following.
Would a civilization that proudly views itself as based on reason use up its resources in ways and at a rate that it knew risks ending in its own collapse, and (by inducing climate change and in many other ways) contribute significantly to the decline, possibly catastrophic, of the life support system of the planet itself? If it did, it wouldn’t be so rational after all, would it? There would be a serious disjunction between what it knew and what it was doing. Would a nation that enshrines ideals of fairness and universal human rights knowingly commit millions of other human individuals on its own land and around the world to abject poverty by using its economic and military might to exploit grossly more than its share of the world’s resources to support its own lavish lifestyle? If so, there is a gap between its expressed values and its actions. What if it also knew that citizens of some countries who have far less per capita income live longer, score higher on quality of life indices, and by all measures are happier? Well…. You can see what I mean.
True, there are many, many benefits of the modern Western world that no one wants to give up or lose. It has opened up whole new worlds of human possibility, and evolved values that humans everywhere relate to and aspire to. But if our culture can’t sustain itself now without creating ever more inequity and conflict which threatens those very values, then we risk losing that which we have won. If we can’t learn to live without plundering the natural world that sustains us, then, ultimately, we risk societal collapse. If we hadn’t achieved so much, carelessly squandering it wouldn’t matter so much.
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If we look at ourselves in the mirror of honest reflection, we see a civilization that has become rich and powerful by means that no longer work well in the world it has made for itself. The very things that made us wealthy and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of earlier times cannot sustain us in that achievement. They use up too many non-renewable resources; they pollute beyond the capacity of the Earth to process; they create unconscionable and intolerable extremes of wealth and poverty that breed uncontainable conflict. The social and economic dynamics that propelled us to the heights we now enjoy don’t have brakes. They produce and absolutely depend on growth; but nothing can grow forever. The engines of growth that drove us to the top of the hill will continue to churn away as they drive us over the tipping point and down the other side. They will, that is, unless we can figure out how to wind them down and transition to new ways of living on the Earth.
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An unusual and paradoxical aspect of our current situation is that we know better. That’s what makes the gap between what we know and how we live. I don’t think that ever happened before. Other civilizations used up their resources or otherwise disrupted their local environment to the point of collapse, but unlike us they lacked the means to understand what they were doing or predict its consequences. They didn’t have the measures of environmental carrying capacities and resilience, the sophisticated theories of ecological interactions and balances, the traditions and means involved in making, storing, and interrelating many empirical observations, the depth of historical knowledge, and all the other capacities for understanding their situation that we do have for understanding ours. Arguably, they didn’t know better. We certainly do. They also didn’t place the same value that we do on the inherent worth of every individual human life and other democratic ideals.
Moreover, the relevant knowledge that we have is not esoteric or hidden, not just the exclusive domain of ivory- towered specialists. The sobering thought here is that knowledge is power; and with power/knowledge comes responsibility—but that’s a whole other discussion. For now, let me just give you a quick example to illustrate what I mean about knowledge being accessible.
Just this morning I followed a link on my email and learned that today (August 13, 2016) is a significant anniversary. This same day last year we reached Earth Overshoot Day. That’s the day when, “as a planet, we collectively reached the limit of how much of the Earth’s resources we [could] use in the year without jeopardizing the planet’s ability to replenish those resources for the future.” That was last year; this year we hit Earth Overshoot Day, exceeded our sustainable limit for 2016, five days ago on August 8—the earliest day yet recorded. I also learned that if the world’s population lived like we in the United States live, it would take 4.8 earth-like planets to sustain us.
If we don’t just trip over it while doing something else as I did, or occasionally see it on TV, you and I can google-up such information, often complete with graphs and tables, essays and blogs, historical notes and scholarly perspectives. You can find something on just about any topic bearing on our continued survival and well-being, or on the reasonableness and justice of our collective actions.
So, you see: Universal education and literacy, and the internet, do democratize information. Access to knowledge today isn’t limited to just the few or the privileged. Anyone, with the click of a mouse, a few strokes on the keyboard, or a few taps on their cell phone or tablet screen, can easily find all the information he or she needs to understand the implications for our own collective well-being, and that of the Earth as a whole, of what we do day-by-day. You might occasionally even find something on TV.
(Of course, it’s not quite so simple in practice, and I’ll share some thoughts later on why it all seems to get so complicated; why there are so many conflicting opinions and strident arguments. But the basic facts still hold: We’re in trouble as a civilization; we have abundant evidence that this is so; we know why it is so and what we could do to alleviate critical problems; and this evidence and knowledge is widely available to all citizens. Even where debate roils up about particular issues, possibilities are open for almost any one to readily become more informed and join the debate.)
So the question is: If we know so much, why aren’t we doing better? Why is there this huge expanding gap between what we know and how we live? You might think that it’s a silly question, a naïve question, or has obvious answers, or no answers, or too many answers. But it is none of those things. It is a good question; and understanding the issues it raises is critical to our well-being and even survival going forward. That’s the core problem that this blog is about.
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