The Hames Report

Convergence@Speed

A few years ago I started talking about the emergence of a plausible planetary technoculture resulting from the unpredictable conjunction of a few seminal streams of human invention, and the activities related to them. I was particularly fascinated by the effects of information-based technologies on what we currently do and how we do it – especially when divorced from more serious questions related to why we do it.

But now we also need to add the speed of change as an additional defining factor. Outside of its more everyday use as metaphor there is little current appreciation of the speed of change - still less concerning the conditions the speed of change could generate through technological innovation.

There are a number of significant convergences occurring that will transform human cognition and performance. The convergence of biotechnology, nantechnology and robotics, for example, is already radically transforming healthcare, war, security and manufacturing. Similarly the merging of in-memory computing, the Cloud and device mobility is shifting our capability to access knowledge, anywhere, in real-time – impacting how we interact with each other, undertake business transactions, and move to more participative forms of democracy.

Of course there are other more estoeric intersecting epistemologies that are potentially far more interesting than focusing on computer science and informatics (the convergence of quantum science, indigenous wisdom and spirituality, for example, that could well give rise to a new human cosmology) but these are outside the scope of this article.

How these conjunctions evolve, and how they will overturn everything we take for granted, make for a fascinating study for one overwhelming reason: the perceived rate of technological change is exponential. In other words we will arrive in the future much faster than anticipated. This is not a new phenomenon. One only has to review the time it took to decode the human genome or comprehend the illusion of time created by the exponential growth of a toxic weed in a pond, for example[1]. But it is still so often misconstrued and leads to patterns of human behaviour that lack foresight and wise judgement.

For the most part we cannot readily conceive of change at this magnitude because our intuition about the future tends to be commonly expressed as linear extrapolations of the past or the present. Consequently we tend to ignore, misinterpret (or drastically underplay) the impact of exponential change on our lives. This has huge implications for investors, ethicists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and government policy makers, as well as technologists themselves.

Let’s spend a few moments considering what exponential change implies vis-a-vis how we currently think about progress and habitually make decisions based upon assumptions derived from more conventional understandings.

The arithmetic of logarithmic (or exponential) functions is easy enough. Essentially it is a simple formula: when relative growth of any kind (e.g. population growth, compounded interest, resource extraction, inflation or consumption) is a constant measured as a percentage over time, the doubling rate of what we are measuring (in other words the time it takes for a quantity to double in size or value) will be 72 divided by the unit of growth. So for example, if the economy grows at an average 7 per cent per annum it will double over the span of ten years. If the growth rate is an average of 10 per cent per annum then the doubling factor will be just 7 years. And so on…

In this context consider what China has achieved since 1980. The Chinese economy has been growing at an annual rate of 10 per cent for the past 30 years. That means the economy has doubled a total of 4 times over that period. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty during that time. Many new cities have been built. A modern infrastructure of highways and railways has transformed the landscape, opening up the hinterland and making it far easier to travel to the major cities. In 2010, China had 18 million households with an annual income above USD 16,000. By 2020, this number will be 167 million households. That's almost 400 million people! What is more, Chinese brands are now competing with (and out-performing) the world’s best.

Astonishing economic acceleration of this nature is unprecedented on such a scale. But there are always unintended consequences. For example, if you were motoring on the highway between Zhangjiakou and Beijing in late 2010 it would have taken you many days to reach your final destination. Massive traffic jams regularly clog this highway – occasionally stretching to more than 60 miles. On this occasion thousands of commuters were stuck on the road for days, living off water and food sold to them by vendors wandering through the semi-parked cars. Apart from ongoing construction on this highway and the carriage of illicit coal and other materials from Mongolia, it is the explosive growth in car ownership (Beijing alone is adding cars at an astonishing rate of 1,900 every day) that's the most likely cause of this urban nightmare. It has created a paradoxical situation where the number of drivers on Chinese roads now negates any benefit from travelling in cars.

Back to our exponential function. We can apply the same mathematical logic to population growth. In 1986 there were 5 billion people on the planet. The growth rate was just 1.7 per cent per annum, meaning that by 2027 we would have reached 10 billion people. By 1999 the population had reached 6 billion but the growth rate had slowed to 1.3 per cent per annum, meaning that it will take until 2052 to reach 12 billion. That still means we are growing at a rate of 80 million people a year on a planet unable to provide adequately for 7 billion. Problematically most growth is occurring in undeveloped countries that can least afford large populations and where education hardly exists – nations like Burundi, Niger and Uganda.

But the population problem also exists in economically developed countries. In Australia, the city of Melbourne has experienced 1.88 per cent population growth over the past decade. One might regard that as modest growth, but that is not the case. Indeed if growth continues at that rate Melbourne will overtake Sydney in 2028, when each city will have about 5.6 million people. No other city in Australia has ever experienced growth of this size. It has taken city planners completely by surprise (because they presumably did not do the maths) and strained the city's infrastructure and services - adding to road congestion, overcrowding on public transport, increased waiting times in hospital emergency wards, the demand for energy and water, and a host of other undesirable outcomes. All of this in a relatively affluent country where annual immigration numbers are controlled by the Commonwealth government; the total fertility rate, of 1.78 per woman, is below that normally considered to be the replacement rate for a population; and where the potential impacts of exponential population growth on the city should have been apparent and handled differently in terms of systemic urban design.

Obviously we can also apply the same mathematical logic to the extraction of fossil fuels (like oil, gas and coal) the loss of biodiversity, the rate of global warming – and, of course, the increase in computer processing power.

All of which brings us back to the matter in hand: namely the speed at which technologies are converging and the subsequent role they will play in the future. For the astonishing truth is that it is not simply the rate of change in discrete fields or disciplines to which we should remain alert, but also the rate of change in that convergence. It is this speed of change that led US inventor Raymond Kurzweill to predict that the “singularity” (the year in which artificial intelligence exceeds that of humans) will occur at some stage within the next two decades.

The examples to which I have referred should show us that exponential change demands a far more sophisticated approach to systemic design, taking into account many potential features and points of view, while also pondering deeply the social, moral and ethical dimensions of the futures we are creating. All of which is easier said than done, especially when the subject is rampant, seemingly unstoppable, technological invention.

Kurzweill maintains that by 2030 we will be interacting with technologies that are billions of times more powerful than those available today. While this is correct in terms of logarithmic change I can’t help wondering if this is what we really want.

There are three paramount dilemmas we encounter when considering such possibilities as those anticipated by Kurzweill. The first has to do with distinctions between fate (the inescapable future) and desire (the preferred future). The second concerns the inability of human minds to imagine beyond what is known through experience and to translate these imaginings into a design capability. The third raises the issue of morality. In the end all three dilemmas relate to our intentions – the territory where the most difficult choices must be made.

1. The enigma of fate and desire

Depending upon the culture in which one is literate, the potential for shaping events is taken either to be severely limited (i.e. it is the role of a higher intelligence) or theoretically infinite (i.e. mankind is creator and capable of anything). Most of us occupy a space somewhere in between these two extremes.

For me, as a Buddhist and a practising futurist, the main problem I have with the kind of positivist determinism confidently proclaimed by many scientists and technologists is the irrefutable inevitability accorded most technological expressions of the future. Currently there seems to be a huge disconnect between what convergent technologies can potentially bring to humanity, and what we want those things to be. Nor are there many opportunities to discuss or debate such issues.

The notion of a reinvented species of humanoid with super intelligence in which humans can finally discard their earthbound carcases holds no joy for me. Nor do I believe there is anything inevitable about this evolution.

2. Imagining beyond the event horizon

Envisaging how our lives could be so utterly different from how they currently manifest is problematic for most of us. Other than artists and other visionaries we tend to construct our “probable” futures from linear extrapolations of present circumstances and past memories. This is the “here and now” of our daily experience and it undoubtedly limits our ability to step into a place of infinite possibilities – an “expanded” now compressing all past, present and possible options. One of the reasons Steve Jobs was not interested in asking customers what they wanted from Apple was because they had little idea of what was actually feasible. They did not know what they wanted until they could feel and see it in their hands and play with it. In other words they could not see beyond a particular event horizon.

Apart from those rare individuals who perceive the world from an altogether higher plane of awareness, there are several accepted ways of amplifying human creativity and imagination. Using hallucinatory drugs, for example, or accessing new tools such as virtual reality, allow us to perceive possibilities that would have been previously barred from us. Few people have access to simulation facilities and the immersive experiences these provide, however, as most are still privately-owned or used purely for entertainment purposes.

Perhaps we need to think more seriously about investing in the capability for the expansion of human imagination as a pre-requisit for more sophisticated social designs. Obviously an increased capacity for imaginative cognition may ultimately be provided by the technology itself. But by then it will be too late to influence the design of the technology and many ethical concerns will possibly have been overlooked.

3. The Moral Dimension

The moral issues, including many ethical questions that require resolution and will have a considerable bearing upon the various choices that may need to be made, have incredible consequences and are too important not to be considerd as part of the original impulse for design of any socio-technological ecosystem.

Meanwhile the inexorable tide of technological innovation that sweeps everyting before it gives us little time for any considered thought on these matters. For example, some clusters of transformative technologies could improve the human condition by prolonging life, enabling the human-machine interface, and eliminating disease. One might consider these critical to humanity’s future did they not exacerbate the population problem. It is ironic that most of what we regard as being good for humanity (medicine, peace, sanitation and law and order for example) actually worsen the population problem, while an alternative strategy for resolving the problem, (by promoting conflict and disease and encouraging murder for example) is morally obscene.

 

 

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[1] If a toxic weed doubles every day and covers the entire surface of the pond in 30 days, then it wil only cover half of the pond’s surface on day 29. This, of course, is part of the reason we see so little action to combat climate change. Looking at it today doesn't seem to be so bad. Unfortunately we do not see past the 29th day to tomorrow!

Ten Big Mistakes People Make in Thinking About the Future

Being a working futurist means that I think a lot about how people think about the future. It also means spending a lot of time with people who are also thinking about their own futures. Typically, this involves a dialogue between three distinct groups:

First, there's usually a small handful of very foresighted people, who are aware of their own blind spots and biases, and who are eager and open about the prospect of soaring into a wild blue sky to gather a lot of exciting new information.

Second, there's a larger group of people who don't usually think at 50,000 feet - but are willing to go there if they're with people they trust. Their wings aren't sturdy, and they are prone to some very common mistakes in thinking, but they're often the most gratifying group to work with. What they want is permission to let go, encouragement to go big, and a watchful eye to keep them out of the rocks and ditches.

And then there's a third small group that's very resistant to the idea that anything could or should change. I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about that last group, because I'm fascinated by the question of what drives change resisters. What they want from me is safety - the reassurance that if they overcome their natural reticence and try to embrace some constructive thinking about change, they won't end up all alone somewhere terrifyingly unfamiliar.

Of that second group, I've found that there's a fairly short list of common mistakes that they make over and over again - little assumptions that create big obstacles in their ability to see all the potential alternatives clearly. These are the same mistakes most people out on the street and in the media make, too; on any given day, one can open a newspaper to the op-ed page and find three or four of these mistakes, right there in black and white. When pundits and prognosticators are wrong, these assumptions are usually somewhere near the root of why they're wrong.

To the end of helping progressives think more productively about the future we're trying to create, here are ten of the most common mental hiccups that keep people from seeing the bigger picture and planning for it with a full measure of courage and intelligence.

1. The future won't be like the past. And the most likely future isn't. In any group, there's usually a tacit set of assumptions about where the world is headed, and what their future holds. Life has gone on for a certain way for a while - and the longer that trend continues, the more invested they get in the assumption that things will just keep on going that same direction. I always ask people early on to describe their Most Likely Future - the one they and their friends assume will happen if nothing else changes. And I've never met anybody who had to hesitate a minute to fill me in on what that future looks like.

But the gotcha is: research by academic futurists has found that this expected future really isn't the most likely outcome at all. In fact, it only actually comes to pass somewhat less than half the time. Which means that somewhat more than half the time, you're going to be facing something else entirely. And if you're too settled on that vision of what's most likely, odds are that you won't do nearly enough to prepare for those alterative futures in which you are even more likely to actually end up living.

It's good to know what your expected future is. Objectively understanding what that story is and how you arrived at it is half the work. The other half lies in being willing to let go of that cherished vision long enough to figure out and prepare for some of the other things that could (and probably will) happen instead.

2. Trends end. This is related to No: 1 in that the most typical reason the expected future doesn't come is that one or more of the trends supporting it fails. As noted above: the longer a trend has been going on, the more we tend to assume that it will never end. But all trends do end - and, in fact, the longer it's been going on, the more overdue you are for it to change. One of the things I do is map the trends that are creating the current conditions, and figure out which trends are overripe (there are tell-tale signs) and thus most at risk of disrupting the existing circumstances. Imagining how these trends could fail or reverse - what would happen if the opposite thing happened instead? - is a useful way of revealing viable and realistic alternative futures.

3. Avoid group-think. Another reason the Most Likely Future tends to obscure everything else is group-think. Every group has basic assumptions about how the world works - what's realistic, what's plausible, what's nonsense, what can't be discussed. The longer the existing set of operating rules has been in place, the more pressure people feel not to question that - and the crazier you look if you do suggest that other futures are possible.

In fact, it's arguable that when a group that's reached a point where no other futures are even discussable, it's a clear red flag that they are vulnerable to being flattened by some new situation that comes out of the blue - or any of the many other places they're no longer looking out for change. Which brings us to:

4. If it's taboo, it's probably important. The thing you are not discussing (the elephant in the room) has a very high probability of being the very thing that will put an end to the present era, and launch you into the next phase of your future. Worse: the longer you ignore or deny it, the more at its mercy you will ultimately be when the change does come down.

A big part of being a futurist is to gently get people to start thinking and talking about those taboo subjects, the ones that are too scary or painful to think about. The very act of bringing those hard issues out onto the table and beginning to grapple with them, all by itself, has tremendous power to make people more courageous and resilient. The elephant only has power as long as we refuse to talk about it. When we finally confront it, its power becomes ours.

5. Any useful idea about the future should sound ridiculous at first. This rule originated with Dr. Jim Dator, the founder of the graduate program in futures studies at the University of Hawaii. His point was: If you're not coming up with ideas that sound a little crazy on their surface, it's a sure sign that you're stuck in too many conventional assumptions - and are therefore not thinking big enough about just how different the future could be. If things don't look a little weird, you're not reaching far enough.

An example: Six years ago, I wrote about the right-wing's up-and-coming assault on contraception. It sounded completely off-the-wall at the time, and I took a lot of grief for it. But look where we are now.

6. Ask: What stays the same? The world is big, and governed by huge interlocking chaotic systems whose behavior can be impossible to anticipate. But, at the same time, there are also constants - the things that don't change from era to era, or that change so slowly that you can pretty much count on them staying the same even when everything else is going to hell.

Chief among these is human nature. Economies grow and shrink, nations rise and fall, the globe is getting hotter and world is getting smaller, but through it all, we are still Homo sapiens - which means we will always be hungry, greedy, horny, infuriatingly stubborn, astonishingly kind, quick to take up arms against each other, and equally quick to bind each others' wounds. It's just how we are.

Any serious survey of a future landscape includes questions like: What stays the same? What will we carry forward with us? What will follow us, whether we want it to or not? What can we count on? What will we still need to guard against?

7. The other side is not always wrong. Right now, America is assertively separating itself into two vivid, strongly held visions of the future. In these situations, groupthink necessarily runs especially high; we are committed not only to progressive values, but also to a specific set of solutions, policies and outcomes that we believe will best make those values manifest in a world shaped by our vision.

The other side, of course, is equally passionate about their values, vision, solutions, policies, and outcomes. In his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality, Chris Mooney points out that one of the defining traits of liberals is that we're far more open to evaluating conservative ideas on their merits, and adopting good ideas wherever we find them. Conservatives, on the other hand, will usually consider the source first. If an idea came from a liberal, it's immediately rejected as unacceptable, regardless of its merits.

This is gross generalization, though. It's plenty easy to find progressives rejecting potentially useful ideas out of hand because they came from sources we don't agree with. But when we're deep in the throes of transforming a country, an economy and a society - long on problems and short on good ideas for fixing them - that kind of narrowness of mind is a luxury we can't afford.

8. Be aware of different change theories. Everybody has their pet theories about how change happens. Almost all of these theories can be sorted into one of about 10 basic buckets, which are described here. Most of us have two or three of these buckets that we think explain just a whole lot about the world, and another one or two that make us very uneasy. And it's usually true that the people we disagree with most are working off of some fundamentally different assumptions about how change happens. Understanding which theories you're drawn to and which you tend to reject can go a long way toward helping you notice your own blind spots, and also form strategies to deal with places that your pet theories collide with those of other groups.

9. Don't think in five or 10 years. Think in 100 or 500 years. A lot of Wall Streeters didn't see the 2008 meltdown coming because economic forecasters typically work with historical data that's anywhere from two to five years old. In 2008, that means that their models didn't include so much as the possibility of a financial disaster on the scale of 1989, let alone 1929. They were thinking on a scale of five years, not 50. And certainly not 100.

While we know abstractly that bad things happened to the generations before us, we seldom believe that anything that bad could actually happen to us. America is safe and stable, and has been for a long time. We're comfortable thinking that there's no way we could face famine or drought, epidemic or genocide, or other catastrophes on that kind of culture-changing scale.

This is a common blind spot. Anything that's happened to humans before is quite likely to happen at some point again. And there's always the possibility that it could happen to us. Simply recognizing our true vulnerabilities, however unlikely those catastrophes may seem, and giving them their due in our future planning enables us to become stronger and more robust, even if the full catastrophe never arrives.

10. Don't assume it will be hard. Don't assume it will be easy. Better yet: don't assume anything, ever. Most of the above cautions are aimed at a final big one: Be acutely aware of every assumption you're making, and don't leave any of them unexamined.

Clear thinking about the future is all about carefully choosing which assumptions you're going to work off of. Often, futurists' main role is to point out and re-examine assumptions that everybody else just accepts as gospel. Someone will say, "Oh, we can't do that; it's too hard." And my job - made easier, because I'm an outsider - is to ask them why that's just assumed. As they explain the obstacles, we can unpack each piece of that assumption together - about how this person won't go along, or how that agency's rules work, or why the time frame just won't allow for it.

This exercise is worth doing because, frequently enough, the assessment that something's just not possible (or, conversely, will be trivially easy - one should question those, too) falls apart when you take a second, deeper look at things. Maybe that assessment was true when you last visited this question six months ago. But maybe things have changed since then - and now, your options are different. Or maybe it turns out that that old assessment is still true, after all. In that case, revisiting it increases your confidence that you can still trust it, though it doesn't exempt you from continually poking at your assumptions, every time you revisit them, to make sure they're still true.

Whether the assumption changes or not, the exercise is worth doing because basing your assumptions about the future on outdated information that already belongs to the past isn't useful. The future is ambiguous enough when you start working from the baseline of the present. You only increase that ambiguity when you put yourself several steps back of that line - especially when you don't have to.

In a time when the stakes are so high, and the margin of error so thin, it's more important than ever that we make the right decisions about the future the first time. Being mindful of these 10 mistakes can go a long way toward increasing the quality of our strategy and planning, and improve the choices we make about our future.

This piece was written by Sara Robinson and is reprinted here with the author's permission. Sara is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates. © 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154773/

When the Storms Came

Hi Jez. This is papa again. This is the last time you will hear my voice. As your life can only be activated after my passing we will never actually know each other. Yet these days, with so much time on my hands, I think of you constantly, wondering whether you will take after your mother or myself and imagining how your life is likely to unfold in conditions that are so utterly different from when I was born in 2011.

For the past few years I have been recording my own life’s journey to your mindbank just in case you want to know more about me as you grow up, especially the mistakes I made and the valuable lessons I learned along the way. As today is my final birthday it is an appropriate moment to add a concluding message to the imprint you will have access to at the moment of your birth.

As I mentioned to you in earlier chronicles I studied biocultural anthropology at Wisdom University and have been a biocultural ethnographer most of my professional life. Each month I work my allocated ten hours (about the current average for elders like myself) for the FinanceLab hubbed here in Moscow – a “resilient” city with a populace approaching 25 million, many of them environmental evacuees. I hope you are able to visit Moscow at some stage to see the city I experience every day and which has become my unlikely sanctuary.

To be employed by FinanceLab is a great honour. This enterprise has managed all non-peer-2-peer transactions and financial flows for our zone since the global banking meltdown mid-century. Such trades amount to almost CNY 80 trillion each week which makes us the leading monetary facilitator in the region. Naturally all data is teleported instantly these days. Even so my job is pretty cool. My only regret is that I would love to be able to meet more people and listen to their stories, like in the old days, than be interacting with them via my webscreen all the time.

Because of the extreme heat and lawlessness it’s simply too dangerous to travel much these days – unless one is very wealthy of course, which I am not. So apart from an occasional trip to Beijing to visit your aunt and her family (and a vacation on Mars Station two years ago which I found overhyped, especially in terms of its so-called “luxurious” amenities) I tend to stay put. My friends still teasingly refer to me as a homey.

My devoted companion is DAO. As a fifth generation personalised android, DAO is able to access the totality of documented human knowledge, answer any question I pose and tend to all my requests. But she’s not really into hugging or intimacy, which I miss. You will meet DAO quite soon of course as she has agreed to care for you when I am gone. I still pine for your mama who loved me and looked after me so selflessly. Its sad that you will never have the opportunity to hear her voice the way you are listening to mine now, but the imprinting mindbank technology simply wasn't available back then.

These days I grow my own food using permaculture techniques I learned from your grandma after grandpa died. Because of the resources rationing I always recycle my waste. Choosing to be off-the-grid for water and energy I can at least ensure my diet doesn’t contain unwanted additives, which is a luxury few people can afford. I value my health. Besides, tending to my small indoor wall bioshelter is deeply satisfying.

Even after all these years, I still occasionally crave some grilled chicken or a pork green curry – what person born Asian would not? But after the great contagion of 2038 which killed over two billion people in a matter of weeks, including your mama, most meat production was banned. Even the Americas are totally vegetarian these days - or so it is claimed. Frankly I don't put much faith in local markets as you can never quite be sure what ingredients are used in those so-called "organic" products. Just last night an entire community was quarantined for consuming illegally acquired organic pork meat capsules from the market just around the corner. Nor do I fancy the artificial equivalents, though they often look and taste authentic enough.The local supermarket has become far more trustworthy of late, expecially as product labelling is strictly standardised these days. I suppose they had to do something to survive. But I'm just not into genetically modified food, so it is pointless my shopping there.

Being born of a Thai mother and an Australian father I grew up in what seemed to me at the time to be the most sublime if chaotic cosmopolitan city in the world. Like most old coastal cities, Bangkok has been submerged for the past quarter of a century. Unless you take one of the many underwater tours on offer from the coastal city of Ayyuthaya you will never see the glorious temples I visited in my youth. Most of the tropics are just too hot to inhabit now. As the default capital of South East Asia, Singapore still exists of course in what is undoubtedly an extraordinary feat of acqua-engineering. But I can’t imagine enjoying life in such a tightly regulated enclave where all residential dwellings are required to be submerged by at least 10 metres. I need to feel free and to breathe fresh air, even if that is an illusion and my movements are somewhat constrained.

I often wonder what might have happened had the scientists’ warnings about climate change been heeded. When the storms came it was far too late. It all happened so quickly. Wealthy people simply moved to the resilient cities. The poor suffered. So many people died from lack of water, disease and starvation. Recent rumours suggest almost 4.7 billion people perished within a decade - although ordinary citizens like me are still denied access to the official figures that are hidden somewhere within the vaults of the Planetary Social Records Unit.

After many relationships I now live alone – the unintended consequence of my generation being instructed not to parent children or to make too many friends on iWeb for fear of identity theft. Not that I mind. I feel no attachment or loyalty to this place. Almost everything your grandparents valued about life on this planet has vanished - including the strong sense of community that pervaded our culture, the local dialects, the scent of frangipani in the evenings, and the sheer diversity of life. But now all of those have gone, driven out by unbridled urbanisation as well as the callous nature of corporations and the tribal conflicts that erupted once the storms came.

And so today, as I record this message for you Jez, I celebrate my 89^th birthday. It is Saturday 12^th June. The year is 2100. Although I still take my daily does of Aprovel my geneticist tells me to expect death in about four months from now, probably from a stroke. I am ready. I have seen so much and lived through some astonishing changes. I have few regrets. My clone is already shadowing me in FinanceLab. My passing will hardly be noticed.

But I still have one small glimmer of hope: that as you listen to my voice recounting my story you will pause and wonder who your papa really was. I would like to think that you know and appreciate what I tried to do to make your life easier. Hopefully you will regard me fondly from the messages I have recorded over the past few years and that have been captured for you in this imprint.

Take care and be good!

Love from Papa.

The fictional author of this fictional letter is the same age as my youngest son Nico who was born on 12th June 2011. In composing this extreme picture of life at the turn of the 21st Century I hope I am wrong about most things. I would like to believe that Nico will enjoy everthing about living on this Earth that has made my own life's journey so precious and miraculous. My suspicion is that most of what is implied in this scenario may actually come to pass in one way or another and that such circumstances will make it much harder for him to make such a statement at the end of his life.

 

Dichotomies

Recently I was drawn into an intriguing and entirely amicable exchange of ideas relating to the fiscal position of the US relative to the state of the global economy.

Three points were being made by an online trader who chooses to characterise himself as a right-wing libertarian on his blog. I will refer to him simply as Alan. Although I would never think to classify myself in that manner I found myself agreeing, at least in part, with Alan's initial claims about the decline of “Brand America”.

Alan’s first claim described the US economy as one burdened by unsustainable debt, a worsening in living standards and an inability to compete internationally. The second declared the US dollar, being the global reserve currency, a two-edged sword within that specific context: in other words it uniquely permits the US government to print money which, especially after the financial crisis of 2008, has extended its liabilities to the point of insolvency. The third indicated the critical role innovation must play (especially as a universally-recognized value in US culture) in restoring the American economy to its former vitality.

Differences only became evident when Alan began to insist there is only one way to go about the latter task. That way, according to him, is to give people the freedom to create enterprise, relying on individual entrepreneurs to generate wealth for society and allowing markets to self-regulate, with little or no interference from the state. He then started to deride countries like China where a communitarian ethos, nuanced by a relatively short period of communism, has since resulted in a society where, he contends, creativity does not exist and most people live under a yoke of oppression.

I am on the record as having been highly critical of many of China's approaches to its problems - especially environmental and human rights issues. But I always attempt to put such criticism in perspective - to appreciate the conditions under which Chinese leaders have brought millions of people out of poverty, while making adequate provisions for the needs of the new middle classes, recovering from the worst excesses of Mao's cultural revolution, and dealing with the soul-destroying impacts of massive environmental degradation, all at the same time. This is unprecedented. No other nation in history has been faced with such dilemmas on such a scale. I happen to think they are not doing a bad job of it. Furthermore they have not been distracted by deliberately and systematically initiating conflict and societal disruption around the world – unlike some who claim to be purer than pure. 

Alan's views endorse the popular, though thoroughly discredited, monetarist notions of Milton Friedman - especially in the form of the economic "shock therapy" he advised should be used in pre-revolutionary Chile and Cuba to effect regime change. Basically Friedman believed that an individual’s right to generate wealth should supersede community interest – a view similarly expressed by Friedrich Hayek.

And so it was that I was reproached by Alan for being a socialist. This contention apparently arose from his hypothesis that if my thinking did not explicitly accord with his own interpretation of “an individual’s liberty and rights” then I must inevitably advocate collectivism - which would then brand me as a socialist or, even worse, a communist.

The fact that I neither advocate collectivism as a panacea, nor belittle individual rights, is neither here nor there, though the sloppy use of language in assuming socialism to be synonymous with collectivism irks me somewhat. My real irritation arises from the fact that so many people are still taught to think in this generalised manner – divorced from any ethical taxonomy of ideas and readily accepting theoretical abstractions they often do not understand, and are even less inclined to contest, in which to frame their beliefs.

But perhaps all of that is about to change. As communities around the world rise up against unfairness and injustice, awakening from their lethargy to confront the more obvious inequities in our current systems of production, governance and consumption, many subtle distinctions for expressing and organising ideas are starting to populate the language. Labels we may have happily used to represent an idea in the past are mostly inadequate for describing the variety of opinions, feelings and desires emancipated into our world today. Far greater precision and granularity is needed. Resorting to orthodox classifications such as collectivism and individualism in order to portray the differences between highly sophisticated, multilayered agendas and ideologies, especially when that is done merely to discount or deny a pivotal idea, is either laziness or sheer mischief. In either case it is inexcusable. And if emotionally charged statistics are triggers to this sloppy way of thinking, let us remember that the Soviet experiment with communism taught us far more, and ultimately damaged far fewer lives, than the US's imperialistic, neverending (yet ultimately futile) war on terror.

But back to my main point. A new panarchical language is evolving - its vocabulary a developmental technology enabling the human family, connected to each other and embedded within nature, to remain individually and collectively inventive, but also ensuring altruistic qualities such as empathy and wisdom are fundamental design criteria for shaping progress on this planet. This is a language that includes and transcends obsolete generalisations and abstractions in order that original ideas and motivations can evolve and take flight - but within a rewnewed shared purpose.

Let us take the concept of the market as an example. Markets are vital to our future. But markets are only one economic contractual mode, another being barter for example. There is certainly no reason for markets as currently constructed to apply to everything we produce, transact and consume. Nor are markets free - a delusion supported by nice theoretical statements and perpetuated by yet another sloppy use of language. It is just that the costs are hidden from view. Indeed in their current highly politicised form (driven by a toxic mix of competitive business interests and the maintenance of power – usually in the form of rich countries wanting to ensure adequate supplies of essential resources like oil, for example) many markets have become surrogates used to distort reality and fortify old industries and regimes. Unregulated, markets simply cannot be trusted to provide adequately for humanity as a whole.

I readily concede that is not the view shared by most conservatives. If we look at recent history, especially the way Milton Friedman and his Chicago disciples wreaked havoc in Chile and Cuba (and, by implication, in Thatcher’s UK and Reagan’s US) by applying "free market" principles as a weapon of choice to reduce potentially viable economies to a near state of feudalism and class warfare, we might be forgiven for thinking that money is all that matters and should be used purely to keep the rich wealthy by humiliating and destroying the poor and degrading the environment.

But if we are at all concerned for the wellbeing of future generations and the need to sustain the abundance of life on Earth, it is obvious that economies and markets must be designed differently – with a revitalized purpose that serves the majority, social architectures reflecting current and future priorities, and an autopoietic capability to maintain relevance and viability.

This is precisely why I am arguing for a better balance between individual wealth (generated by individuals through entrepreneurship) and the wealth of the commons (generated by nature and communities). The way capitalism is currently utilised is destructive because it rampages over the needs of the majority. But disaster capitalism is like a zombie in that it refuses to die. At least soviet communism had the good grace to admit defeat!

So a major problem still is in our thinking and in the language we use to explain that thinking. In the West we continue to construct reality in past heroic terms and are unwilling (or unable) to include and transcend orthodox economic mechanisms that have brought some of us so much wealth and comfort, even though they are no longer sufficient for our collective needs.

In Greek philosophy nomos (laws and customs) is used in the service of logos (knowledge and purpose). A more pertinent way of expessing this idea is to accept that economies should be implanted within (i.e. be of service to) social and natural ecologies. Since the early 20^th century when escalating production and consumption, aided and abetted by corporate public relations and advertising, became the engulfing credo throughout the developed world, we have succeeded in turning that moral genesis on its head – exclusively pursuing growth and affluence to the detriment of our peace of mind and sense of communal wellbeing and, in the process, damaging our vital connection to nature, upon which we rely for life’s essentials.

Unlike Alan, my overriding contention is that the future design of viable socio-economic systems must surpass any historical ideas - especially the Occidental mindset of free market economics – at least as this is currently construed, practised and regulated. If we are not able to do that it is probably because the thinking and the language we still use is so embedded in the ideological assumptions of past centuries – a reality based upon scarcity, competition and “every man for himself” – that it has become almost impossible to extract ourselves from this dominant worldview.

I am not that pessimistic however. I do not doubt new forms of empathic capitalism will emerge to displace disaster capitalism - where economies are embedded in ecologies and not vice versa. And I believe they will flourish because of that. That does not make me a socialist or a capitalist - or anything else for that matter! Nor does it in any way imply that individuals and entrepreneurship are of secondary importance to society’s collective aspirations. Indeed to fall into the trap of trading one off for the other is intellectually negligent.

The key to civilizational advancement is surely to find ways of accommodating both within socio-economic structures that are distributed, agnostic, and do not just favour a wealthy minority who sit back and trade on the misfortunes of others.

Feeding Frenzy: Clues to the Future of Food

Today's industrial agribusiness and animal husbandry practices, together with the extensive value chains and investment habits that maintain them, have created a paradigm that originated almost a century ago in the US and Europe. Facilitated by the convergence of petrol-based machinery, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, advanced refrigerated storage and conveyance methods, broadacre farming (and its oceanic equivalent of seabed trawling) this market system exploits the planet’s resources for the benefit of an affluent minority of the world’s citizens who mostly live in large cities in Europe, the US, Japan and parts of Asia such as Singapore.

It is also a system under extreme stress. The actual amount of food we produce is theoretically sufficient for possibly 12 billion people. But in spite of assertions to the contrary, the system as currently configured cannot feed a population of seven billion without causing a further decline in the planet’s productive capacity and putting the health of the community at risk - through e-coli outbreaks, for example, as well as swine and avian flu pandemics. Transfixed by the need to double food production over the next fifty years in order to sustain a population in excess of nine billion, (with less water, less land, depleted soils, fewer fertilisers and no fossil fuels) the industrial agricultural system has shifted way beyond its generative capability to function effectively. In spite of its apparent benefits it is becoming a lethal killer.

Originally each of the innovations mentioned above appeared to be ingenious responses to one of our most critical issues: how to safely grow and manufacture sufficient food for a burgeoning human population and deliver it to where it is most needed. The obvious answer was to increase production and to process large quantities of food in ways that preserved nutritional value, even whilst being transported over considerable distances.

Beginning with the Haber-Bosch process (a method of geo-engineering ammonia which can then be used in the oxidation of nitrates and nitrites for fertiliser) this is precisely what we did. And for a while it seemed to work. Crop yields increased remarkably as traditional landscapes comprising small fields, copses and forests were converted into vast plains better suited to the new agricultural machinery.

Unfortunately there were other costs that were either ignored or not seen at the time. We are only just beginning to come to terms with the overall effects of a process that precipitated the detonation of a population time bomb, the collapse of natural ecosystems, and soil and water degradation on a massive scale. 

Only belatedly have we come to grasp the negative impacts of discrete solutions on such intricate complexity. Misgivings had been around for decades but were mostly disregarded or disparaged. In 1962, for example, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring cast doubts on the indiscriminate release of large quantities of chemicals into the environment without full knowledge concerning the potential effects on human health and ecology. Carson’s logic effectively launched the environmental consciousness movement. The unintentional consequences of the industrial paradigm, however, were not seriously considered prior to 2004, the year in which the Stockholm Convention eventually outlawed several persistent organic pollutants and restricted the use of DDT.

And so we allow the industrial paradigm to persist even as it implodes. Grounded in widespread impulses and anecdotal beliefs, such as those arising from a belief that greater yields are generated by economies of scale rather than by economies of flow, for example, strategies calculated to maintain this system are ingrained in every part of the supply chain - from research, production and processing right through to packaging, distribution and consumption.

Inequities and process flaws are unavoidable of course. Farmers and fishermen toil to survive but are manipulated by large corporate intermediaries who profit from their struggle. Loss and waste is prevalent and getting far worse. Bio-diversity has been drastically diminished. Arable land is being degraded and developed for urban use, yet huge tracts are also given over to the production of biofuels. Grain harvests are failing leading to famine, malnutrition and starvation. Less healthy foods are directly marketed to children and to those on lower incomes.

In the meantime the rising cost of staples such as wheat, corn and rice nudges even greater numbers of people into poverty. This is a cruel paradox given that we actually produce sufficient food to feed and nourish the entire human family. The problem can be reduced to a few very simple elements:

• In the developed world:
  • we eat too much – most of which is processed
  • what we choose to eat causes obesity, aggravates illnesses like diabetes and leads to further environmental degradation
  • most of our food is produced at a distance from where it is eaten
  • much food is allowed to go to waste and is thrown away.

• In the developing world:
  • too few of us eat enough food that is wholesome and nutritious
  • what we do eat causes malnutrition and a range of other diseases
  • local farming practices cannot keep up with demand
  • the impacts of climate change are already making matters worse.

Given such unacceptable outcomes one might have expected the need for a substantial and urgent redesign of the food system to have been self-evident. But that is not the case. Protectionist policies combined with corporate interests still wield sufficient clout, both economically and politically, to stymie any attempt to invoke wide-ranging change. Indeed over the past decade alternative proposals, ranging from organic and biodynamic produce, food hubs and growers markets to large-scale hydroponics and permaculture, have been contemptuously and systematically scorned by agribusiness and its powerful industry lobbyists. At the same time, propositions in the same mould as the Haber-Bosch process (such as genetically modified plants and geoengineered manipulation of the climate) have been pushed by some scientists and large multinational corporations, causing outrage amongst most thinking people.

Meanwhile key assumptions underlying the viability and security of the food system go largely unchallenged and significant alternatives stall or occur only at the periphery, quarantined from the broader market system, which then continues on its suicidal path.

Which brings us to our current situation. Today it is evident that modern industrial agriculture is in crisis - unsustainable in its current form. There are three main reasons for this:

1. The industrial agricultural system is both chemical and petroleum intensive which exacerbates the risks from climate change
2. Industrial agriculture is a monoculture and the lack of diversity in crops contributes to the destruction of Earth’s natural cycles and ecosystems
3. We are facing a convergence of water, land, energy, technology and knowledge shortages - combined with an increased demand for food created by population and economic growth.

Recent estimates from several leading authorities on the subject indicate a need to double food production by 2065. In view of volatility in other parts of the ecosystem, particularly instability in the two critical variables of temperature and precipitation, that target cannot be achieved. Take temperature for example. An increase of just 2 degrees celsius has the potential to wreak all kinds of havoc on the food system. Rising temperatures and unpredictable levels of precipitation are already impacting food production in some arid parts of the world. As the problem worsens considerable damage is being done to agricultural yields and food security.

Most propaganda from agribusiness predictably claims that the industrial model remains the best way to feed the world. Advocates for the current paradigm are well entrenched. A recent report on food security from an independent group of eminent scientists from 13 countries, funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food, stops short of mentioning the need for transformation of the current system. Instead it puts forward a detailed set of recommendations to policy makers in which a number of outmoded assumptions are taken for granted.

Politically correct reports such as these avoid the real issue: namely that we must transform the paradigm of industrial production and its inherently toxic practices. Anything else is a recipe for species extinction. But is resorting to a bankrupt paradigm really the best or only way to arrive at a viable solution? Are there alternatives?

Yes of course there are. Better education would possibly encourage us to eat less. Efficiencies in flow lower costs and reduce waste. Permaculture deployed at scale can conjure arable land out of wasteland. Biomimicry methods could increase the growth rate and resilience of plants. Enlightened approaches to diet can eradicate obesity and help reduce heart disease and diabetes. Greater crop diversity could eventually restore the capacity of soils to produce more. Smart irrigation methods could drastically reduce the amount of water required to produce crops. Better use of local resources could see the majority of a community’s food grown within that community. And so on….

My conclusion, shared by many, is that any enduring, universally acceptable resolution of the various dilemmas, flaws and failures inherent within the current food system, will only come from a reimagining of the system’s high level intent, design criteria and foundation principles.

Paradigmatic renewal sounds very grand and philosophical but it is important to appreciate why a high level design is the starting point. It is a fact that systems only ever deliver what their architectures have been designed to deliver. Change the intent and the key design principles, in addition to any explicit factors causing the system’s state to behave as it does, and we change the outcome. So devising an entirely different conception could shift the entire food system into a resilient and viable future, transforming the relationship we have with each other and with nature in the process. If we do not start with high level design we run the risk of repeating many of our current mistakes and sticking with fallacies that no longer make sense.

This is an audacious and exciting proposition in which there will be no losers. A strategically relevant high level design would not merely metamorphose every critical assumption underpinning a range of deficient structures, mechanisms and relationships, enabling innovation at the same time as relieving current stress points, but would generate an entirely new paradigm for health and wellbeing. A paradigm more in keeping with our true circumstances. One linked to the broader problem of environmental sustainability. One in which waste is reconceptualised. An equitable and just system capable of ensuring abundant supplies of affordable, wholesome food for every inhabitant on the planet and offering an adequate and secure living for all and sundry - from primary producers to retailers.

So what might a fresh, strategically relevant, globally integrated and sustainable system of agriculture and acquaculture actually look like? How would it assure positive outcomes for all without the usual trade-offs and inequities to which we have become so uncritically accepting?

Futurists are fond of proclaiming the future is never the same as the present. That is mostly correct when we look at technology and how everyday practices are transformed by new applications – touching everything from travel to health care, education, finances, trade, marketing and manufacturing. This is because the speed of new knowledge creation and innovation have become astonishingly exponential. Deep-seated elements, however, like ingrained cultural mores and ethics, move slowly by comparison, although even these are accelerating with the development of real-time, interactive communcations technologies that can be used to interact with anyone, at any time, for any reason. Although such instant connectivity provides many social benefits (e.g. the time it takes for paramedics to get to a cardiac arrest patient for example) it is also one of the reasons some people feel their lives are spinning out of their control.

Of course there is always a slim chance that the future food system will continue to feature much of what exists today; the same players, the same production and consumption traits, value chains, policies, pressures and failures… But that is increasingly unlikely when (i) the necessity for massive change is accepted by influential agents within the food system and when (ii) this acceptance accords with a spontaneous community awakening to the damage being done by current practices. In fact when these two prime factors align the only other things in dispute concern (i) the speed at which we choose to shift to a new paradigm (including how different potential pathways available within that shift are expressed and communicated) and (ii) the economic imperatives of the transition. A third factor is the political will to lead, or the lack of it. But this is becoming less relevant in an age of democratic activism.

Personally I am confident that the future story of food will be one in which we recognise the importance of provisioning for the entire human family in ways that do not harm the capacity of the Earth to harvest sufficient, nutritious food for future generations. Of necessity this will require changes to some of our most basic patterns of production and consumption. Any number of positive alternative scenarios can be crafted, with critical pathways duly mapped, to illustrate and assist in either the improvement, transformation or transcendence of that which currently exists, as we are hoping the establishment of a Sustainable Food Lab in Australia will amply demonstrate.

But while future narratives are important, of far greater signficance initially are:

• The choice of design criteria that together proclaim a manifesto for a system that benefits the greatest numbers of people, regardless of circumstances or geographical location. It is essential that such criteria are made explicit in all stories related to the future of food for they embody the ethical foundation upon which a viable, secure and morally defensible food system will evolve and endure.
• The selection of systemic acupuncture points that, once agreed and enacted with wisdom and empathy, can trigger a radically new purposeful energy across the entire system.

Let me deal with both of these here in as concise manner as possible.

1. Design Criteria

As indicated previously, I believe the intent of a viable future food system, within the additional complexity of the intertwined environmental, economic and energy issues facing us over the coming dacdes, must be to make adequate provisions for the entire human family in ways that (a) ensure people everywhere have access to sufficient nourishing food, (b) increase the health and wellbeing of the human family, (c) does not harm the capacity of the Earth to provide for future generations, and (d) secures a fair living for everybody involved in the supply chain, especially primary producers. In-built resilience must be generative.

Given that different design principles reflect different priorities, a single story is sufficient to illustrate a number of sustainable design principles I find relevant to these ideals.

Most market economists trust that a resource without a private property regime is destined for misuse. Yet for centuries, on the Indonesian island of Bali, rice farmers have coordinated their use of scarce water through collaborative social networks. The system is centered around what anthropologists refer to as “water temples” which enfold the water sharing within a context of traditional religious beliefs. In effect the networks function through a form of bottom-up cooperation in which the temples provide a channel through which producers can coordinate their water use. Modern computer analysis has found that the resulting allocation is close to ideal in terms of the productivity of the local farms. It defeats pests naturally and uses the available water to maximum effect.

Bali’s water sharing is an example of commons management. In the late 1960s the government decided to push rice farmers into the modern age. New laws bypassed the water temples. Hydrologists were hired to install modern irrigation systems and government bureaucrats pushed Green Revolution techniques, complete with heavy pesticides, upon the farmers. The result was a disaster. Insects soon developed resistance to the chemical pesticides. Crop yields plummeted. In the end the government relented. Farming communities returned to the social productivity arrangements experts had deemed relics of a bygone and unlightened era.

Principle 1 – Stewardship for future generations

We acknowledge that economies are held within ecologies (not vice versa) and that it is our responsibility to hold the inheritable gifts of the Earth in trust and pass them on, undiminished, to future generations. Economically these gifts are irreplacable and invaluable capital. Protection of these common assets must trump individual and corporate gain. This principle must be enshrined into our economic operating system and enforced by the world’s courts.

Principle 2 – Putting human knowledge to better use

Valuable wisdom is contained within all heritable knowledge. A food system capable of feeding a population in the billions while preserving nature’s gifts for future generations must learn to adapt and utilise a variety of methods for food production based upon indigenous intelligence as well as Western science and modern ingenuity. Inventions like permaculture, for example, can be scaled up and used to return waste and degraded land to agriculture. Urban spaces can be developed into community gardens. Innovations that are out of patent protection can be used in situations where patented products are beyond the means of the community to access because of their cost. In all these situations a revitalised commons management can assure our most valued resources are impossible to privatise.

Principle 3 – Moving from scarcity to abundance

The global market is only one mode of economic production and value exchange. Others, including collaboration and reciprocity, continue to exist in many cultures. Our food system will become more resilient by encouraging these modes to function alongside each other. While the global market is still likely to be shaped by corporate competitive interests, other modes could lead to the expansion of local economies and barter systems, comprising food hubs and growers markets where fresh locally produced goods are exchanged and primary producers retain more of their products’ true value.

Principle 4 – Stimulating sustainable lifestyles

The global economy depends upon nature for raw materials, energy stocks and ecological services (such as clean water, air purification and soil fertility) that are indispensable to life. But materials flows in the global economy have become excessively large relative to their host, the natural environment. Further growth will merely make current problems, like global warming, far worse. Instead of growth we need to move to an economy of ecological sufficiency and wellbeing where food is produced, sold and consumed in closer proximity, healthy eating is encouraged, and waste is eliminated through process efficiencies.

Principle 5 – Insisting markets tell the truth

Many environmental costs often go unrecognised by markets, as when costs created by carbon emissions are not factored into the price of gasoline or electricity. These costs are invariably transferred to the poor which is a classic failure of markets. New policies must shift levies and taxes away from things valued by society (like employment, fresh food produced by renewable energy and the bolstering of community life) to undesirable things like pollution and urban traffic congestion.

Principle 6 – Accounting for nature’s contributions

Nature is a plentiful storehouse of the raw materials needed by our civilisation. The collective annual value of assets like plants, fibre, fuel, fish, water, soil and minerals can be valued in the trillions. But the global ecosystem also provides, other services (including purification, mitigation, seed dispersal, pest control, pollination, stabilisation, nutrient cycling, detoxification and biodiversity maintenance for example) that are an indispensible substrate of economies. These contributions must be factored into economic decision making by both administrative and economic means.

Some people may argue that these six design principles are either too idealistic or too far-removed from our current situation as to be unworkable. But that is the point surely? The future of food is about transformation of the current paradigm. Transformation entails boldly imagining what has been impossible until now, yet is most desirable, then finding ways to bring that new vision to life.

Take the 4^th principle, for example. Few people known to me personally would want to argue against the urgent need for a system based upon trust and cooperation where variety and diversity (of resources, products, channels and access points) is utilised for the common good. Variety can manifest anywhere and should be encouraged. Surprisingly a city like New York has around 650 or more permanent community gardens and there are now over 4,000 farmers markets across the country. So whereas sixty years ago the US national highway network heralded the collapse of local markets offering wholesome, affordable, locally grown, seasonal produce, these commercial commons are now being re-established with great enthusiasm.

Or take the 5^th principle, which also happens to double as an acupuncture point for whole-system change. When markets tell the truth it is pretty certain that long distance transport costs will rise. Manufacturers will react by shifting from global to local production. Clean and abundant energy from the sun and the wind will enable widespread organic farming, which will be competitive because the prices of fossil fuels and agricultural chemicals will have risen steeply as the sun sets on those industries. In that new world farmers will begin to cut out intermediaries and keep more of their products’ value. That cannot be a bad thing.

It matters little where our gaze falls, it is obvious that it would be silly to persist with the current system. Take farmers for example. There are around 1.8 billion of them worldwide, but more than a billion are likely to be thrown out of work if food supply channels continue to contract. What about international trade? Approximately 26 per cent of the world's food is traded internationally. At least half of that is controlled by a virtual monopoly of around two dozen companies - commodity traders such as Glencore-Viterra, seed industry firms like Dupont and Monsanto, food processors such as Nestle, and the massive supermarket chains of Carrefour, Walmart, Tesco and China’s Bailian Group. With power consolidated in such a small number of commercial entities, developing countries are being forced to f ollow agendas that best suit these multinational corporations rather than the needs of their own people or the local environment. Or perhaps we should hold labelling and standards up as an example of what is working reasonably? Well no actually. Strict bureaucratic specifications in developed countries like the US, EU and Australia, result in mountains of rejected product that would otherwise feed the victims of drought or those who are simply less fortunate because of where they live.

Clearly the current system is fatally flawed in almost every dimension demanding sustainability or equity. Furthermore its performance is becoming more untenable each year. In that situation a newly defined intent as well as strategically aligned, relevant, robust design criteria, are the path to a future system with a generative capacity to respond and adapt to changing conditions.

2. Acupuncture points

There is just one further set of ideas we need to articulate before launching into possible future narratives. Indispensible tools for transformation of any system they concern the array of constraints within the current system that can be targeted for change in ways flip the system into a more desirable condition - effectively, cheaply and relatively unobtrusively. I call these constraints acupuncture points for reasons that are probably obvious. They are the key causal factors regulating the actual performance of any system’s architecture.

In terms of the global food system I have identified four acupuncture points, although I am sure there are probably others. These are the loci where we need to focus our attention if we are serious about nudging the current system into one that is ecologically responsible, socially desirable, ethically valid and economically realistic. Aligned with the six design criteria each acupuncture point is a catalyst in its own right. Some may be more appropriately applied to specific regions or countries. But collectively they facilitate a new and purposeful energy that will enable us to transcend most of the flaws we have been studying in the current system.

  i.     Establishing eco-efficient production

Current production processes founded upon economies of scale are extremely wasteful and toxic, threatening every ecosystem on the planet. Instead we need to adopt economies of flow to ensure: finite resources including water, fertiliser and pesticides are used sparingly and with far greater precision; we mimic nature in the design of distributed processes and products that have negligible ecological impact; and we use the notion of industrial ecology to ensure that our plants, farms, factories and supermarkets are restorative of human and natural capital.

  ii.     Investing in sustainability

Surges of innovation, where new technologies and means of communication come together to revolutionise production processes, accelerate the rate at which natural capital can be turned into sustainable value. Investments and forays by ventures capitalists into green chemistry, clean-tech, biomimcry and industrial ecology promise startling breakthroughs in using natural wealth more efficiently, prudently and fairly. At the same time governments need to be persuaded to enact policies that democratise the economy, thus changing the way capitalism functions. They can best do this by encouraging energy and eco-efficiencies, removing subsidies from fossil fuels, and exploiting peer-to-peer networks in the creation of a distributed, post-carbon industrial infrastructure.

  iii.     Using social media

In the 1920s Edward Bernays used the new power of broadcast propaganda based upon crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to help the tobacco industry overcome one of the biggest social taboos of the time. He used these methods to persuade women that smoking in public was not just acceptable but the cool thing to do. Over time corporations elevated "public relations" based upon Bernays's techniques into a new artform, blatantly manipulating public opinion for commercial gain. Now is the time to fight back, using new social media to inject different, more ethical and beneficial, messages into public forums. Today the power and persuasion of new social media and crowd-sourced feedback mechanisms can be harnessed to advocate the purchasing of fresh wholefoods, to support local producers, and to promote healthier eating habits. 

  iv.     Liberating women

This may seem counterintuitive to many of us living in Western countries but is vitally important to global food production. A 1994 UN report noted that most poor people are women and most women are poor. Yet almost all low-income women are economically active. Even in many wealthy countries gender bias dampens economic activity. Women also lack access to land and credit. In developing countries they own only 15 per cent of the land. In spite of that women are responsible for between 60-80 per cent of the world’s food production. By empowering women on the land we stand to increase productive economic activity and also the amount of embedded productive knowledge in the economy.

Having recommended a renewed purpose for the food system, suggested a few simple principles that should inform the high level design of that system, and identified a number of strategic acupuncture points where we can focus resources to flip current conditions into a more desirable state, we can now look more deeply into what is already working at a local level, throw in some imagination and creative thinking, and begin to craft some compelling stories describing what our preferred futures within that new paradigm would actually look and feel like.

These stories might illustrate the growing number of networked ecovillages, transition towns, and other sustainable communities that are already flourishing around the world. We might choose to focus on farmers cooperatives as a way of keeping today’s agribusiness consolidation (that concentrates market power in an ever smaller number of multinational corporations, who then influence the food choices available to consumers) in check. We could point to new ways of preserving the biocultural diversity of crops (meeting the expectations of the land) by using a combination of smart breeding, soil preservation and growing perennial rather than annual plants. For the more technically minded, especially those who are willing to go out on a limb, we might resurrect the contentious issue of genetically modified crops or the chemical engineering of new products, suggest scaling fish farming into tight urban spaces, establishing native seed banks and niche markets for heritage breeds. And for good measure we can throw in “paddock-to-plate” informatics, grow-your own movements, single-course restaurants and memory-enhancing fruit and vegetables for senior citizens. We might even re-conceptualise food as preventative healthcare. 

Whatever the nature of our scenarios we must remember three important tenets: inclusion, collaboration and diversity. Transforming something as complex as the food system might be regarded as a fool’s errand. Fortunately it does not come down to the decision of one individual or company for this is a choice point that affects the entire human population. It demands the active engagement of those whose lives are bound up with the system. Collaboration in purposeful change is essential. Diversity of opinion is welcome. Everyone needs to be included in the conversation if everyone is ultimately to benefit.

Given this complexity it is also highly probable that a wide range of scenarios will unfold, driven by different needs in different communities. Allowing “many flowers to bloom” is one way we can overcome the dominance of the present (corporate and agricultural) monoculture. Large supermarket chains may well continue to offer selected brands at a discounted price but that does not stop a plethora of niche alternatives from also emerging and flourishing.

It is also vital not to demonise certain sectors if that can be avoided. Multinational corporations (like Tyson, Cargill and Nestle) and large supermarket chains (like Walmart, Carrefour and Sainsbury) are easy targets compared with television coverage of a fifth generation farming family evicted from their land - especially given the emotive and manipulative nature of the relationship between primary producers and large corporations within the current system. Setting pride, anger and personal circumstances aside we must reach out to all stakeholders in the system. In that way we stand a good chance of preserving the best of what we have while encouraging a more sustainable and just future to emerge that benefits us all. Of course it is a distinct possibility that large corporations will be the last to change as they are driven by legal requirements, particularly in terms of putting their shareholders first, over which they have no control. But that should not prevent us from inviting them into the conversation.

I recently attended and contributed to the 2nd National Sustainable Food Summit in Sydney, Australia promoted by NetBalance and organised by 3 Pillars Network. This extended philosophical statement tries to bring together some of the key themes presented during the summit in addition to creating a framework to provoke further dialogue and alternative narratives concerning a preferred global food system. I have not attempted to summarise all of the topics discussed during the two days, but rather to define a philosophical space that can be used to identify strategic imperatives and actionable pathways into the future. My views are entirely personal and do not represent an official point of view or endorsement of any kind.

The Third Industrial Revolution

Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting, and the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated. The entire industrial infrastructure built off of fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous levels all over the world. Governments, businesses and consumers are awash in debt and living standards are declining everywhere. A record one billion human beings - nearly one seventh of the human race - face hunger and starvation. Worse, climate change from fossil fuel-based industrial activity looms on the horizon, imperiling our own species’ very ability to survive.

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in the summer of 2008, governments, the business community, and civil society have been embroiled in a fierce debate over how to restart the global economy. While austerity measures and fiscal, labor, and market reforms will all be necessary, they are not sufficient to re-grow the economy. Let me explain by way of an anecdote. Just months after arriving in office, the new Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, asked me to come to Berlin to help her administration address the question of how to create new jobs and grow the German economy in the twenty-first century. I began my remarks by asking the chancellor, “How do you grow the German economy, the EU economy, or, for that matter, the global economy, in the last stages of a great energy era and an industrial revolution built on it?”

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Second Industrial Revolution is dying and that industrial induced CO2 emissions are threatening the viability of life on Earth. What we need now is a bold new economic narrative that can take us into a sustainable post-carbon future. Finding that new vision requires an understanding of the technological forces that precipitate the profound transformations in society.

A New Economic Narrative

The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. New energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the new complex commercial activities made possible by the new energy flows. In the 19th century, cheap steam powered print technology and the introduction of public schools gave rise to a print-literate work force with the communication skills to manage the increased flow of commercial activity made possible by coal and steam power technology, ushering in the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, centralized electricity communication - the telephone, and later radio and television - became the communication medium to manage a more complex and dispersed oil, auto, and suburban era, and the mass consumer culture of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Today, Internet technology and renewable energies are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that will change the way power is distributed in the 21st century. In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own renewable energy in their homes, offices, and factories and share green electricity with each other in an “Energy Internet” just like we now generate and share information online.

The establishment of a Third Industrial Revolution [TIR] infrastructure will create thousands of new businesses and millions of jobs and lay the basis for a sustainable global economy in the 21st century. However, let me add a cautionary note. Like every other communication and energy infrastructure in history, the various pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution must be laid down simultaneously or the foundation will not hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others.

The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on-site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy internet that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of renewable energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus green electricity back to the grid and share it with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

The creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via a green electricity Internet, and connected to plug-in, zero-emission transport, opens the door to a Third Industrial Revolution. The entire system is interactive, integrated, and seamless. When these five pillars come together, they make up an indivisible technological platform—an emergent system whose properties and functions are qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the synergies between the pillars create a new economic paradigm that can transform the world.

The public/private financing of the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure build-out across the world will be at the very top of the agenda for the international banking and financial community in the first half of the 21st century.

The Shift To Lateral Power

The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great Industrial Revolutions and will lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging collaborative age. Its completion will signal the end of a two-hundred-year commercial saga characterized by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial markets, and mass labor workforces and the beginning of a new era marked by collaborative behavior, social networks and professional and technical workforces. In the coming half century, the conventional, centralized business operations of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the traditional, hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society.

Lateral power is a new force in the world. Steve Jobs and the other innovators of his generation took us from expensive centralized main-frame computers, owned and controlled by a handful of global companies, to cheap desktop computers and cell phones, allowing billions of people to connect up with one another in peer-to-peer networks in the social spaces of the internet. The democratization of communications has enabled nearly one third of the human population on earth to share music, knowledge, news and social life on an open playing field, marking one of the great evolutionary advances in the history of our species.

But as impressive as this accomplishment is, it is only half of the story. The new, green energy industries are improving performance and reducing costs at an ever accelerating rate. And just as the generation and distribution of information is becoming nearly free, renewable energies will also. The sun, wind, biomass, geothermal heat and hydropower are available to everyone and, like information, are never used up.

When Internet communications manage green energy, every human being on earth becomes his or her own source of power, both literally and figuratively. Billions of human beings sharing their renewable energy laterally on a continental green electricity internet creates the foundation for the democratization of the global economy and a more just society.

Distributed Capitalism

Energy regimes shape the nature of civilizations - how they are organized, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is exercised, and how social relations are conducted. To understand how the new Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure is likely to dramatically change the distribution of economic power in the twenty-first century, it is helpful to step back and examine how the fossil fuel–based First and Second Industrial Revolutions reordered power relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - are elite energies for the simple reason that they are found only in select places. They require a significant military investment to secure their access and continual geopolitical management to assure their availability. They also require top down command and control systems and massive concentrations of capital to move them from underground to the end users. The ability to centralize production and distribution - the essence of modern capitalism - is critical to the effective performance of the system as a whole. The centralized energy infrastructure, in turn, sets the conditions for the rest of the economy, encouraging similar business models across every sector.

Virtually all of the other critical industries that emerged from the oil culture - modern finance, telecommunications, automotive, power and utilities, and commercial construction - and that feed off of the fossil fuel spigot were similarly predisposed to bigness in order to achieve their own economies of scale. And, like the oil industry, they require huge sums of capital to operate and are organized in a centralized fashion.

Three of the four largest companies in the world today are oil companies - Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath these giant energy companies are some five hundred global companies representing every sector and industry - with a combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is the equivalent of one-third of the world’s $62 trillion GDP - that are inseparably connected to and dependent on fossil fuels for their very survival.

The emerging Third Industrial Revolution, by contrast, is organized around distributed renewable energies that are found everywhere and are, for the most part, free - sun, wind, hydro, geothermal heat, biomass, and ocean waves and tides. These dispersed energies will be collected at millions of local sites and then bundled and shared with others over a continental green electricity internet to achieve optimum energy levels and maintain a high-performing, sustainable economy. The distributed nature of renewable energies necessitates collaborative rather than hierarchical command and control mechanisms.

This new lateral energy regime establishes the organizational model for the countless economic activities that multiply from it. A more distributed and collaborative industrial revolution, in turn, invariably leads to a more distributed sharing of the wealth generated.

The extraordinary capital costs of owning and operating giant centralized telephone, radio, and television communications technology and fossil fuel and nuclear power plants in markets is giving way to the new “distributed capitalism,” in which the low entry costs in lateral networks make it possible for virtually everyone to become a potential entrepreneur and collaborator, creating and sharing information and energy in open commons. Witness twenty something young men creating Google, Facebook, and other global information networks, literally in their college dorm rooms and thousands of small businesses converting their buildings to green micro power plants and connecting with one another in regional electricity networks.

What I am describing is a fundamental change in the way capitalism functions that is now unfolding across the economy and reshaping how companies conduct business. The shrinking of transaction costs in the music business and publishing field with the emergence of file sharing of music, eBooks, and news blogs, is wreaking havoc on these traditional industries. We can expect similar disruptive impacts as the diminishing transaction costs of green energy allow manufacturers, service industries, and retailers to produce and share goods and services in vast economic networks with very little outlay of financial capital.

Democratizing Manufacturing

For example, consider manufacturing. Nothing is more suggestive of the industrial way of life than highly capitalized, giant, centralized factories equipped with heavy machines and attended by blue-collar workforces, churning out mass-produced products on assembly lines. But what if millions of people could manufacture batches or even single manufactured items in their own homes or businesses, cheaper, quicker, and with the same quality control as the most advanced state-of the-art factories on earth?

While the TIR economy allows millions of people to produce their own virtual information and energy, a new digital manufacturing revolution now opens up the possibility of following suit in the production of durable goods. In the new era, everyone can potentially be their own manufacturer as well as their own internet site and power company. The process is called 3-D printing; and although it sounds like science fiction, it is already coming online, and promises to change the entire way we think of industrial production. Think about pushing the print button on your computer and sending a digital file to an inkjet printer, except, with 3-D printing, the machine runs off a three-dimensional product. Using computer aided design, software directs the 3-D printer to build successive layers of the product using powder, molten plastic, or metals to create the material scaffolding. The 3-D printer can produce multiple copies just like a photocopy machine. All sorts of goods, from jewelry to mobile phones, auto and aircraft parts, medical implants, and batteries are being “printed out” in what is being termed “additive manufacturing,” distinguishing it from the “subtractive manufacturing,” which involves cutting down and pairing off materials and then attaching them together.

3-D entrepreneurs are particularly bullish about additive manufacturing, because the process requires as little as 10 percent of the raw material expended in traditional manufacturing and uses less energy than conventional factory production, thus greatly reducing the cost.

In the same way that the Internet radically reduced entry costs in generating and disseminating information, giving rise to new businesses like Google and Facebook, additive manufacturing has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of producing hard goods, making entry costs sufficiently lower to encourage hundreds of thousands of mini manufacturers—small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) - to challenge and potentially outcompete the giant manufacturing companies that were at the center of the First and Second Industrial Revolution economies.

Already, a spate of new start-up companies are entering the 3-D printing market with names like Within Technologies, Digital Forming, Shape Ways, Rapid Quality Manufacturing, Stratasys, Bespoke Innovations, 3D Systems, MakerBot Industries, Freedom of Creation, LGM, and Contour Crafting and are determined to reinvent the very idea of manufacturing in the Third Industrial era.

The energy saved at every step of the digital manufacturing process, from reduction in materials used, to less energy expended in making the product, when applied across the global economy, adds up to a qualitative increase in energy efficiency beyond anything imaginable in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. When the energy used to power the production process is renewable and also generated on site, the full impact of a lateral Third Industrial Revolution becomes strikingly apparent. Since approximately 84 percent of the productivity gains in the manufacturing and service industries are attributable to increases in thermodynamic efficiencies - only 14 percent of productivity gains are the result of capital invested per worker - we begin to grasp the significance of the enormous surge in productivity that will accompany the Third Industrial Revolution and what it will mean for society.

Near Zero Cost Marketing and Logistics

The democratization of manufacturing is being accompanied by the tumbling costs of marketing. Because of the centralized nature of the communication technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions - newspapers, magazines, radio, and television - marketing costs were high and favored giant firms who could afford to devote substantial funds to market their products and services. The internet has transformed marketing from a significant expense to a negligible cost, allowing start ups and small and medium size enterprises to market their goods and services on internet sites that stretch over virtual space, enabling them to compete and even out compete many of the giant business enterprises of the 21st century.

Consider Etsy, a brash, web start-up company that has taken off in the past seven years. Etsy was founded by a young New York University graduate, Rob Kalin, who made furniture in his apartment. Frustrated that he had no way to connect with potential buyers interested in hand-crafted furniture, Kalin teamed up with a few friends and put up a website designed to bring individual craftsmen of all kinds, from around the world, together with prospective buyers. The site has become a global virtual showroom, where millions of buyers and thousands of sellers from more than fifty countries are connecting, breathing new life into craft production—an art that had largely disappeared with the advent of modern industrial capitalism.

Connecting multitudes of sellers and buyers in virtual space is almost free. By replacing all of the middlemen - from wholesalers to retailers - with a distributed virtual network of sellers and buyers and eliminating the transaction costs that are marked up at every stage in the marketing process, Etsy has created a new global craft bazaar that scales laterally rather than hierarchically, and markets goods collaboratively rather than top-down.

Etsy brings another dimension to the market - the personalization of relationships between seller and buyer. The website hosts chat rooms, coordinates online craft shows, and conducts seminars, allowing sellers and buyers to interact, exchange ideas, customize products, and create social bonds that can last a lifetime. Giant, global companies mass-producing standardized products on assembly lines operated by anonymous workforces can’t compete with the kind of intimate one-to-one relationship between artisan and patron.

Although still in its infancy, Etsy is a quickly growing enterprise. In 2011, Etsy’s sales topped nearly $500 million. In a recent conversation, Kalin told me that his mission is to help foster “empathic consciousness” in the global economic arena and lay the foundation for a more inclusive society. His vision of connecting up “millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again” is the essence of the Third Industrial Revolution model. Etsy is only one of hundreds of global Internet companies that are bringing together producers and consumers in virtual marketing spaces and, in the process, democratizing marketing costs across the global economy.

As the new 3-D technology becomes more widespread, on site, just in time customized manufacturing of products will also reduce logistics costs with the possibility of huge energy savings. The cost of transporting products will plummet in the coming decades because an increasing array of goods will be produced locally in thousands of micro-manufacturing plants and transported regionally by trucks powered by green electricity and hydrogen generated on site.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution allows small and medium size enterprises to flourish. Still, global companies will not disappear. Rather, they will increasingly metamorphose from primary producers and distributers to aggregators. In the new economic era, their role will be to coordinate and manage the multiple networks that move commerce and trade across the value chain.

New Business Models and Jobs in the 21st Century

Germany is leading the way into the new economic era. The Federal Government has teamed up with six regions across Germany to test the introduction of an energy internet that will allow tens of thousands of German businesses and millions of home owners to collect renewable energies on site, store them in the form of hydrogen, and share green electricity across Germany in a smart energy internet. Entire communities are transforming their commercial and residential buildings into green micro-power plants. To date, more than 1 million buildings in Germany have been converted into partial green micro power plants. Companies like Siemens, Bosch and Daimler are creating sophisticated new IT software, hardware, appliances and vehicles, that will merge distributed Internet communication with distributed energy, to create smart buildings, infrastructure, and green mobility for the cities of the future.

The transition to the Third Industrial Revolution will require a wholesale reconfiguration of the entire economic infrastructure of each country, creating millions of jobs and countless new goods and services. Nations will need to invest in renewable energy technology on a massive scale; convert millions of buildings into green micro power plants; embed hydrogen and other storage technology throughout the national infrastructure; lay down a green energy internet; and transform the automobile from the internal combustion engine to electric plug-in and fuel cell cars.

The remaking of each nation’s infrastructure and the retooling of industries is going to require a massive retraining of workers on a scale matching the professional and vocational training at the onset of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. The new high tech workforce of the Third Industrial Revolution will need to be skilled in renewable energy technologies, green construction, IT and embedded computing, nanotechnology, sustainable chemistry, fuel-cell development, digital power grid management, hybrid electric and hydrogen-powered transport and hundreds of other technical fields.

Entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of cutting edge business models, including distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, open source and networked commerce, performance contracting, shared savings agreements, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply chain management. The skill levels and managerial styles of the Third Industrial Revolution workforce will be qualitatively different from those of the workforce of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution shifts the fulcrum of power from centralized global companies to distributed small and medium size enterprise networks. The rapid decline in transaction costs brought on by The Third Industrial Revolution are leading to the democratization of information, energy, manufacturing, marketing, and logistics, and the ushering in of a new era of distributed capitalism that is likely to change the very way we think of commercial life. The Third Industrial Revolution offers the hope that we can arrive at a sustainable post-carbon era by mid-century. We have the science, the technology, and the game plan to make it happen. Now it is a question of whether we will recognize the economic possibilities that lie ahead and muster the will to get there in time.

This article was written by Jeremy Rifkin and is reprinted here with his permission. Jeremy is the author of The New York Times best selling book, The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. He is an adviser to the European Union and to heads of state around the world. He is a senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C.

Occupy Your Mind

Regular readers will recall it is my occasional habit to reprint articles of particular consequence in The Hames Report. In that spirit I recently asked my US-based friend and colleague Dr David Martin if I could print a piece he had just published on his BlogSpot Inverted Alchemy. He did not hesitate.

But then I read this important piece again. And again. I realised that merely reprinting David’s article would not satisfy the insatiable desire I had to elaborate on some of his most critical points. Consequently I am publishing David’s article in italics below and then making some further comments of my own.

Returning from Salt Lake City to Charlottesville via Chicago provided a suboptimal venue to listen to the audio of Ken Wilber’s interview conducted by my friend Todd Goldfarb. It turns out that cheap courtesy headphones from a hotel gym have no sound dampening value to overpower the engines on a CRJ-700. The good news was that the audio quality was so dreadful that I had to concentrate. So, I sat next to the window, focused on the ground passing below and listened to Ken describe the passage of humanity’s transitions. And it was in the observation of the millions of acres of industrial farmland over which I was passing at 38,000 feet that I settled in on the puzzle: Is it possible to perceive human transformation as a first person actor or are evolutions of consciousness only discerned in retrospect?

Let me provide a bit of background. Todd and Ken were discussing the notion that we are on the edge of a new inflection of the human experience. This edge is, in part, defined by previous inflections (from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to modern to post-modern, etc.) and has several particular characteristics that are noteworthy. In his description of the ‘Integral’ transformation, Ken suggested that, in contrast to previous inflections, rather than rejecting past human narratives, a hallmark of this inflection is the explicit inclusion of wisdom and experience from all previous epochs. And, for a moment over Iowa, I found myself trying to reconcile this vision with the reality from which I had just come.

You see, I had just been at a board meeting where I had heard representatives from one of New York's leading investment banks talk about the merits of fixed income investments and had heard them discuss the fact that they were encouraging investments in revenue-based instruments (like water) rather than debt issued by cities and counties. After all, they argued, even unemployed poor people have to drink! The neatly groomed fields below me, the echo of merchants peddling water as a safe investment, and Ken all converged in an unholy trinity between Cedar Rapids and Oxford Junction. I can recall the moment. Ken was in the middle of one of his many “never before in human history” generalizations…

Who do we think we are? We have got a real problem. I have described with effusive affection my respect for Karl Popper on numerous occasions so I will not belabour his criticism of our Occidental hubris again. As I have commented in my recent posts on the Occupy movement, what I find most disturbing about our present consensus delusional state is the intersection of our belief that we access information and our resulting belief that we’re informed.

Has capitalism ‘worked’ when:

1. The largest communist country on earth actually owns a controlling interest in our debt and supplies a considerable amount of our consumables

2. There has never (since the Land Act of 1820 and the Morrill Act of 1862 to our modern military, technology, and service profit-subsidized government procurements of today) been a phase in US history where we actually had open, unsubsidized free markets; and,

3. Our income distribution and growth is at its all time greatest asymmetry?

Has our social conscience evolved when:

1. Ken Wilber describes our evolution past slavery, for example, at a time when there are more humans (per capita) in slavery today than at any recorded period of history

2. When we continue to promote 19th century narratives about wisdom traditions ranging from Egypt to Peru to Mongolia without consideration of the possibility that these civilizations actually may have out-engineered our self proclaimed modern marvels; and,

3. When ‘hope’ and ‘change’ has led to more remote control assassinations than the notorious Bush / Cheney regime?

It would be lovely to imagine a world in which we would hold ourselves to an abiding commitment that ‘evolution’ might actually involve some notion of improvement. Improvement of the means by which we interact with the Earth. Improvement in the manner in which we engage cultures diverse from our own. Improvement in how we assess the qualities of ourselves and our ecosystems. Improvements in how we engage in dialogue and discourse holding genuine respect for alternative points of view.

Alas the evidence shows us that we seem to be more drawn to evolution that involves the selective repression of ever larger numbers of voices – voices who have long memories and have alternative views to our own. Is humanity at a tipping point or are we walking past the masses from whom our ignorance has extracted humanity?

The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.

If one explores below the surface of this highly considered response to an experiential dilemma the implications in David Martin’s cautionary thesis appear to me to be profoundly disturbing. Not only do they call into question the degree to which we are actually sentient individuals (in comparison, say, with herd animals possessing relatively uncouth instincts and unvarying habits) they also point to Occidental “maturity” as a delusion in which many of us are still trapped.

This may be partly to do with the hubris arising from our recent technological prowess and subsequently assumed moral authority – though the latter (if it ever existed) is clearly in a state of rapid collapse today. It may even have something to do with the so-called six “killer apps” (i.e. competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic) identified by the economic historian Niall Ferguson as an explanation for the West’s prominent (now declining) position in the global world-system over the past 300 years or so.

More ominously, I suspect, is an ingrained belief that those of us with an Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage are somehow smarter, wiser and creatively superior than others. This is not just arrogance. It is intensely foolish. Yet if we needed evidence we have only to recall the number of occasions during the past half century where assumed Occidental superiority has led to our military powers trampling over the cradles of our civilisation in Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. As David Martin queries: Who do we think we are?

I am reminded of some research undertaken by professor Robert Sternberg at Yale University who undertook and extensive study of stupidity, which he identified as a lack of applied wisdom rather than the absence of intelligence. Sternberg argued that specific aspects of life as a smart person actually cultivate stupidity. In other words that it sometimes takes a really smart person to do something truly stupid.

Sternberg concluded there are four main tendencies that lead us into this quandary:
1. Egocentrism – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that because we are so smart, the world does and should revolve around us
2. Omniscience – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that part of the reason the world revolves around us is we know much more than we do, or even all we need to know
3. Omnipotence – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe such knowledge makes us invincible. We can do whatever we want and get away with it
4. Invulnerability – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe we can get away with it because our intelligence makes us invulnerable to attack and even to criticism.

We move into a very vulnerable space indeed when we are either too smart (believing we know everything we need to know and that we can get away with any act) or too dumb (to realise we lack the cognitive capacity to recognise and overcome our stupidity). I suspect one of these characteristics are present in the majority of people occupying leadership roles today.

Of course the worst possible scenario would be if the world were led by really stupid people. However the situation gets almost as ludicrous when smart people use their intelligence or influence to quarantine themselves from the very feedback that would appraise them of the reality of a situation. This is commonplace in the corridors of power.

Furthermore, if we have already arrived at a point where we believe other people, or nations, or cultures, or social groupings, are less capable of defining a collective future for humanity and that consequently it is incumbent upon us to re-establish a future in which our failing social, economic, political and commercial systems continue to endure, then our collective stupidity is profoundly entrenched.

Like David Martin I fail to understand how we can imagine our society (i.e. we are implicitly referring to the so-called developed world remember) has reached the zenith of its evolution as a civilised global community, and that we are consequently approaching an inflection point that will enable us to include and transcend all previous experiences and knowledge, when we still reach for the sword before the pen; still fiercely exclude those who hold differing beliefs to us; still feed an industrial war machine that can easily annihilate humanity; are still fearful enough of the unknown as to worship primitive deities; still innately disengaged from the natural environment that sustains all life; still arrogant enough to believe our ways of knowing outweigh alternative epistemologies; and still bound up with our own overwhelming sense of individual pride and self-importance.

The single, most important, feature for enabling intentional evolution is expressed within David’s final paragraph. He says: The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.

Because of our tendency to deliberately exclude others we are not at a global tipping point by any stretch of the imagination. For that we need a critical mass of the world’s citizens to be able to convey new possibilities within a fresh narrative for humanity arising from a higher consciousness and sense of self-awareness. That will be a new human story.

In contrast we are still content to perpetuate ideas, principles, models and values that were outmoded long ago. Can anyone really state that our collective state of being (our empathic consciousness) is more advanced than that which existed fifty years ago?

That is not to deny a palpable feeling of anticipation, articulated by many in words and deeds and expressed in the Occupy Wall Street and other similarly motivated movements, that numbers of concerned people in Western society may be coming out of their hubristic slumber and awakening to the realities of the human condition. They may be challenging the linearly-constrained models that are still in play across our society and that have given rise to astonishing affluence and opportunity on the one hand and ingrained poverty, hunger, injustice and inequity on the other. They may be standing up and shouting “enough is enough” and that we must craft new intentions regarding our relationship to each other and to planet Earth if we are to survive the extinction of our species. But all of this in no way adds up to a universal tipping point.

I grew up in the United Kingdom immediately following World War II. Through my public school education I was inducted into a Western empirical culture that strongly believed in its own superiority and invincibility. As I became more accomplished and comfortable in that social milieu it did not dawn upon me that I was illiterate when it came to alternative cultures. Only later did I begin to comprehend that I existed in a bubble of blissful ignorance.

Vast numbers of people are in a similar state today. In an age of unprecedented travel they do not journey far from home. Their views are parochial. They watch the kind of infotainment on television designed to keep them docile, content and compliant. Inducted into a way of life they do not challenge they have little conception of what poverty or hunger (for example) actually means. Nor do they really appreciate the freedom, democracy or liberty they supposedly have in abundance.

As an Australian living in Asia while working across the Global South I am constantly dismayed and frustrated by the continuing conceit I perceive in the US-Eurocentric view of how things are and how they should be. Occidental traditions are relatively young in comparison with the great Amerindian, Indigenous, Oceanic, Indic and Sinic cultural mindsets. The sooner we are able to embrace these alternative traditions and benefit from their wisdom the sooner we may reach a genuine tipping point for the authentic advancement of humanity. That will be the moment we are able to shift from involuntary to intentional evolution. I hazard a guess that a shift of this nature, entailing a new inflection of the human experience, will not be triggered from those trapped in Western mindsets. In fact you can bet on it!

Old King Coal: A letter to my grandchildren

Dear Eglantine, Addie, Bodhi, Rafael, Roman and little Mia (who is still preparing for her entrance into the world)...

I am sitting at home in my study in inner Bangkok looking out over Sukhumvit. Most of the central plains of Thailand are inundated with flood waters. It is raining heavily and the run-off from the north is fast encroaching on the city’s canals. The death toll currently stands at 289 and the economic cost is already running into billions of baht. At this stage 187 districts in 26 provinces are still under water, causing untold misery to more than 2.2 million people. Many citizens have been hording goods and supermarket shelves are now emptied of bottled water, rice, meat, fish and other staples. Watching the unfolding drama over the past few days it is so evident that officials are powerless to do much against the forces of nature. Parts of this city are sinking at a rate of 3 centimetres annually. It is no longer difficult to imagine a time when Bangkok becomes the Venice of the East once again!

Meanwhile my thoughts are with you, my grandchildren. In our sun-burnt country the government has been congratulating itself on passing legislation that puts a price on carbon. The bill is intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This is crucial if we are to combat global warming. It has been a struggle to get this far. But don’t be fooled. The legislation is all but meaningless - full of exceptions and loopholes that encourage the maintenance of the status quo in those very industries that should be at the forefront of the transition to a carbon-constrained economy. The new law cannot possibly wean us off our irrational dependence on oil, gas and coal. It does not promote investment in the adoption of cleaner energy. In fact it does quite the opposite.

Like Thailand, Australia is in the front-line of global warming. Yet most politicians, their staffers and economic advisers do not really comprehend what is happening to the climate system on our planet. Indeed there are still those in parliaments around the world who remain convinced that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy or possibly a hoax perpetrated by the scientific community. Special interest groups and corporate money have hijacked the agenda, finding one excuse after another to keep polluting Earth while profiting from their activities.

Which is why I want to say sorry. I am sorry because my generation has failed you miserably. We have not been courageous enough to acknowledge our failure nor humble enough to take urgent corrective action. I am deeply ashamed to admit this to you and I realise I cannot expect your forgiveness. At the same time I want you to know that I did my personal best to draw attention to the reckless stupidity of my generation’s imprudent and arrogant intransigence.

Occasionally I have glimpsed hope. In far away places like China, Brazil, Africa and South East Asia my words have had significant impact. Prominent community and business leaders, government officials and parliamentarians have been gracious enough to listen, to reflect and to act on the basis that, even without complete knowledge, it is wise to take precautions when it comes to a complex issue like climate change.

In our country of Australia these same words have fallen on deaf ears – mainly it seems (ironically) from those who have been charged with the responsibility to lead. I have been branded an outlier. An alarmist. Even a heretic. Such labels are not personal, you must understand. People are simply afraid. When all is said and done there is nothing more terrifying for a leader than the imperative to act without any certainty about what to do. My powers of persuasion have been inadequate to overcome addiction to a system in which considerably more value is put on immediate economic benefit than on your future health and well-being. No other case can be put to those who value money more than human life. They remain oblivious to their ignorance and selfishness and we should not expect that to change. This means you must take matters into your own hands. You cannot wait for governments to act or for business to change.

So the legacy I pass on to you, my beloved grandchildren, is far from the abundant, promising one I inherited. It has been poisoned by rampant materialism, in-built obsolesence, and a culture of declining frugality. To make matters worse our thirst for material goods is aided and abetted by a vast public relations machine inciting us to buy more and more stuff we do not really need.

In 1945, the year of my birth, there were barely 2 billion people inhabiting our planet. The future for humanity was one of hope and optimism. Later this month, somewhere on the planet, a child will be born. He or she will become the 7th billion citizen of planet Earth. Yes the six billionth child is only 11 years old. By the time you leave university there will be 8 billion of us, all struggling to achieve a better quality of life, a dream that has become all but impossible to achieve - even in the world's most developed countries. The huge demographic shift in the human population since the end of World War II has had a devastating impact on the environment. A tidal wave of humanity is migrating into the cities. Crushing poverty is everywhere. We are locked-in to human-induced atmospheric pollution (from carbon dioxide, methane and aerosols) that will trigger more frequent and extreme weather events. Nutritious food, potable water and energy are becoming more scarce. Sovereign indebtedness and social inequalities put entire nations at risk. And if all of that wasn’t terrifying enough we are beginning to witness the collapse of life-critical ecosystems necessary to provide for our future well-being.

Yet amongst all this chaos the most affluent of us tenaciously aspire to even greater wealth and greater power. If this situation persists the demand on Earth’s finite resources will be excessive, conflict will increase and climate refugees will be counted in the millions!

I hope you will appreciate that, like many others, I did not realise how much damage I was doing. But now, having lived what many of my friends in Soweto, Belo Horizonte, Chennai and even Shanghai would term a profligate lifestyle, squandering so many of the vital resources you will need to ensure a healthy, stable and secure existence without so much as a second thought, I see that my extravagant ways have made things very problematic for you. It is not just me you understand. All of us with knowledge are culpable. Politicians and their advisers, industry leaders, courts, the media...

Politicians are paid to protect us but also to safeguard your future well-being. Instead, they repeatedly lie to us, cheating you of a secure future by advocating phoney carbon offset schemes, spinning fairy tales about “clean coal”, setting ineffective targets and legislating in ways that allow the dirtiest, most toxic, industries to continue polluting the atmosphere. Why? Because far too many people are profiting financially from our addiction to fossil fuels.

With leadership in abeyance, any pretence of a moral imperative quickly fades. In a situation where there is such a dearth of honest leadership from those in power there is no question that many corporations will feel free to continue plundering and scarring the environment, driving species to the point of extinction, ignoring grievances from local communities and writing off the destruction of nature as inconsequential to their mission. Driven purely by profits I have no doubt their intention is to extract every last drop of oil and gas from tar sands, shale and tundra. Unless, that is, the community rises up as one and demands that they stop committing ecocide.

The media is even more guilty of intergenerational crime. Instead of advocating the truth they routinely wheel out a few of the usual cranks and crackpots to cast doubt on the integrity and validity of scientific knowledge. As a consequence our most eminent scientists have become wary of giving policy advice to governments for fear of being labelled impractical idealists, dishonest or incompetent.

And even as the science community struggles to find better ways of communicating the urgency to those who have their heads stuck in the sand, we are racing towards an impending catastrophe that is not of your making and can still be avoided. This is my generation’s bitter legacy to you. You are now left with the problems we have knowingly created.

The real tragedy is we already know what must be done. Furthermore we have the technology to turn things around. The coal, oil and gas industries argue their continuing relevance based upon cost and availability. As far as the latter is concerned they are correct. There are vast amounts of coal still in the ground. But if we factor in the incalculable damage done by coal to people and their health, in addition to the various subsidies and licences granted the coal industry, it is patently clear that half-truths, subterfuge, vested interests and apathy on our part are the only things keeping “Old King Coal” a merry old soul.

Preventing runaway climate change and thus avoiding ecosystem collapse is avoidable if you act quickly. But you will need political will and huge amounts of investment capital. You must also be prepared to fight for your future. Peaceful civil resistance may yet be needed to overcome organised opposition from the fossil fuel lobby.

Here is what you must do. Stop mining coal as quickly as possible. Recent estimates point to around 170,000 deaths annually world-wide from coal burning-based electricity generation. It is by far the most dangerous fossil fuel in use. Phasing-out coal emissions and moving to solar, wind, thermal as well as 4^th generation nuclear energy (together with greater energy efficiency) is the safest and least costly route to a sustainable planet. But you cannot stop there. You must also outlaw hydrofracking, strip mining, mountaintop removal and similar ecologically-devastating practices. Find ways to limit or extend the use of conventional oil and gas. Restore the world’s forests and oceans. Impose strict mining constraints on unconventional fossil fuels such as methane hydrates and tar sands. Finally, but most importantly, reject the loophole-ridden “cap and trade” game in favour of a comprehensive “fee and dividend” system. No exceptions and no trade-offs. Only by these means can each citizen choose how to change their living habits so as to become more sustainable.

Alas there are many people with special interests who will try to stop you, stall progress and create other distractions. Possibly they do not have grandchildren. Or perhaps they are so selfish that any integrity they once had was sacrificed on the altar of money long ago. Be prepared for a huge outcry from the fossil fuel lobby. But do not be deceived by their crocodile tears. Eradicating fossil fuels as rapidly as possible will create more jobs, generate a far healthier economy, restore a safe climate and evolve a sustainable planet for you and for your children.

Massive change of this kind is your last chance. I am sorry it has come to this.

With love to you all

Grandpa.

Thinking for a Change

The dilemmas facing humanity have become so complex they can only be resolved by comprehending the situation from a higher level of collective consciousness. Once that new state of awareness has been reached, however, we will be able to choose a profoundly different evolutionary path to that recently pursued with such self-interest and short-sighted enthusiasm.

Disruptions to the way planet Earth works, particularly those induced by the ingrained habits of seven billion people all aspiring to similar levels of affluence, can no longer be ignored. At some stage myths must give way to truths if disaster is to be averted.

As Paul Gilding points out so eloquently in his recent book The Great Disruption there is plenty to be positive about. But only if we think differently and more deeply about the human condition and rise above those beliefs and practices that have become an impediment to genuine progress.

Three priorities have surfaced from the fog of scientific evidence, propaganda (and sheer mischief) surrounding issues like climate change. First, policies aimed at putting a stop to unsustainable activities must be scaled up. Second, smart technologies must be applied to the underlying causes of our problems rather than to their symptoms. Third, we must reframe our thinking to embody entirely new possibilities for reimagining what we do (that is both socially desirable and economically feasible) and how we do it.

These priorities are as relevant for business as they are for governments and civil society. The time has long since passed when business could simply mind its own business. Indeed many of the institutions and practices conceived within the 19^th century model of industrial economism, a model that initially brought such affluence to so many, appear now to be steering us down a path to ruin. I am aware that it is impossible to prove such a thesis. But nor do I intend waiting until I have evidence I am correct.

There are many alternatives available to us, ranging from cleaner, adaptive industries and smarter, benign practices to fewer toxic raw materials and biomimicry as a model for organizing and innovating. Most of these alternatives are preferable to what currently exists. However we need to let go of old prejudices and fears that the future will inevitably be worse than the past if such new options are to be implemented quickly. This is the prime lesson informing Gilding’s thesis.

All of which is easier said than done of course. Tackling any one of these imperatives would be difficult enough. Finding ways to adopt all three presents a formidable challenge, not least because the customary ways for administering human affairs have shifted responsibilities to others. Deliberately reframing our thinking to escape the gravitational pull of the past will demand an expansive emancipation of mind, liberation from obsolete ideologies and dogma, and a collective, progressive and audacious awakening to higher levels of consciousness concerning our shared purpose.

Changing behavioural patterns is relatively easy. We do it all the time. Government policies, corporate marketing and public relations campaigns all effectively play on our desires or fears in order to manipulate how we behave. But whereas most present-day marketing efforts are commercially orientated, using psychology to escalate consumerism - even where prosperity without economic growth would be a more sane goal in today’s circumstances - we are failing to use those same mechanisms to endorse the reduction, re-use and recycling of our most precious resources. Clearly much has still to be done even in that regard. But changing our underlying beliefs is far more difficult.

Ultimately though, permanent behavioural change will stem from the structural redesign of our most life-critical systems – particularly those in which human beings interface with nature and with each other. It is often forgotten that all systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get. That is why natural systems remain so resilient.

The problem is that none of our social systems have been designed to consciously evolve. We are, quite literally, trapped in the past. That is precisely why our thinking has to change. In effect we must become architects of our own evolution rather than pawns in a game we assume to be controlled by others.

The inevitable transition to cleaner, low-carbon sources of energy (like solar and hydrogen for example) together with the use of smarter, more efficient, distributed networks that reduce the amount of energy we use, will eventually enable the complete eradication of toxic fuels. At the same time the industries spawned from this transition will generate untold wealth. Designing a sustainable and secure food system capable of providing nourishment for seven billion people or more is also desirable – and readily achievable. Re-engineering the fundamentals of the global economy to eradicate waste, promote equity and protect the resources we all share is also realistic.

But there is a catch. Before the trapeze artist leaps into space he must step off the platform on which he is standing. Systemic reinventions of this nature requires a strategic, emotional and “transcendent” commitment to the new story in addition to an appreciation of systemic design that is rare, so devoid of integral intelligence has our conditioning become.

In terms of systemic design and renewal there are two crucial keys to success. Both rely on our capacity and willingness to reframe our notions about what really matters, to boldly step into new ways of knowing and being, and to openly engage with others in that metamorphosis.

The first key is the ability to imagine and communicate an alternative social “meme” (together with compelling narratives) that supersedes more utilitarian goals – at least encompassing happiness, love and compassion in healthier balance with material wealth and well-being. This key unlocks hope and restores fairness. The second key is the ability to elude the curse of knowledge that traps us in an industrial past and allows us to make significantly different choices about the future. This key unlocks a sense of new possibilities and restores trust.

Unfettering an economy based on value exchange in the context of abundance (rather than one of compounding debt in a framework of financial scarcity, for example) could emancipate new forms of enterprise employing many more people than today’s sunset industries. Using renewable sources of energy to establish industrial ecologies that transform and adapt to a warming planet is far wiser than defending the past in an attempt to protect that which could destroy us. [Industry lobbyists take note!] Likewise, accessing peer-to-peer digital media to invite the collective expression of policies and even constitutions (instead of putting our faith in the increasingly detached whims of a few elected representatives) might provide a platform for a far more democratic and empathic society. And so on…

Such strategic choices become possible because of the most fundamental shift in human history: the emergence of a mode of inventiveness (comprising intelligence, foresight and wisdom) that allows new ways of being, thinking and doing to be envisaged and, through cooperation and invention, to be attained.

No doubt humanity can flourish. But only if we learn to transcend obsolete beliefs and fears to engage in deeper conversations that (i) include all salient features of the system we desire to create, (ii) anticipate the intended and unintended consequences of those desires, and (iii) lift the human spirit out of the mire of believing the past cannot be surpassed and that our situation is dire and will only get worse.

In facing a range of complex dilemmas it does us no good to continue to deny the truth. The global outlook is tense. Natural disasters, the spiraling cost of food, geo-political conflict and the collapse of natural systems all seem to herald an end-game in which the extinction of our species is conceivable. We are witness to cascading failures in the systems that support life. Family incomes are being squeezed. We try to do more with less. Politicians focus on trivia. Simple things seem not to work as well as they once did. We fret about how best to survive the present even though we care passionately about the planet and our children’s future.

Yet the solution is in our own hands. Burying our heads in the sand and ignoring reality will not help. Quarantining ourselves from reality we begin to lose the thread of affiliation that otherwise nourishes and sustains us. We cannot isolate ourselves from the truth however hard we might try. It only aggravates our anxieties.

Over a century ago an ambitious geo-engineering project was implemented. Responding to a major planetary issue of the time two German scientists, Haber and Bosch, made nitrogen-rich fertilizer available to farmers, thus significantly increasing the annual amount of nitrogen fixed on land. The unintended consequences were catastrophic: the human population mushroomed exponentially.

But having created the problem we must live with it. By participating in the actuality of our predicament we can restore hope while exploring practical pathways into the future. Our starting point is not the changing of a light bulb nor the purchasing of a more fuel-efficient car. On the contrary renewal begins with a sense of responsibility to each other and to the planet. Re-envisaging a new purpose for humanity must now become our prime goal. We must think big for a change.

A Moment In Geological Time

The sun rose again this morning. Looking out of my window, eighteen floors above the streets of Bangkok, I still see familiar skyscrapers punctuating the horizon. And as the ambient noise of human activity begins to cut through the lazy dawn it is clear that life is going on much as before.

Or is it? Something extraordinary is happening. You can almost feel it in the air. I do not mean the imminent arrival of my son Dominique Oliver Hames into the world, although that too is very special. I am not talking about an Armageddon following the return of Jesus Christ to Earth in a “rapture” moment or the likelihood of aliens observing us from afar even though there are possibly billions of planets, some just like ours, in the Milky Way. I am not referring to the waves of civil disobedience that have been sweeping across the Arab world of late, mixed reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden, the cascading failures of a global monetary system based upon compounded debt, nor even the inexorable rise of China and the corresponding economic and moral collapse of the US empire.

On the contrary I am suggesting a phenomenon that will have us scrambling to re-write textbooks and re-examine the most deeply-embedded of our hypotheses concerning human identity and purpose.

It turns out we are living through and contributing to a defining moment in geological time. As incongruous and as unlikely as it seems, the human species has become a force of nature, the sheer scale of our activities reshaping the Earth’s surface and the natural processes upon which all life depends. Unlike fateful events of a transitory nature this intervention actually does change everything! Not necessarily for the worse as many claim, although the final outcome is far from certain and probably will be for some time.

A number of leading Earth scientists have suggested this is happening from observing a set of life-critical, natural, recycling systems. For example, carbon and nitrogen cycles are both speeding up. While natural fluxes of carbon dioxide are many times larger than the amount put into the atmosphere each year by people burning fossil fuels, the effect of human intervention is disproportionate. It is possible that even a small increase can can cause a catastrophic tipping point to occur in the climate system. A recent report by the International Energy Agency now suggests human intervention in the carbon cycle will generate global heating of between 3 and 5 degrees celsius over two or three generations. That posits a degree of global chaos for which we are not at all prepared. 

Over the past century the nitrogen cycle has accelerated by almost 150 per cent. Although some of this increase is accidental it has mostly arisen through a deliberate attempt by scientists at the end of the 19th century to increase the supply of nitrogen fixates into the food chain. The Haber-Bosch process harnessed the atmospheric abundance of nitrogen to create ammonia, which could then be oxidized to make the nitrates so essential for the production of artificial fertilisers. Unfortunately Fritz Haber and his associates failed to anticipate the scale of unintended consequences flowing from this early attempt at geoengineering. Their intervention increased the human population by a quantum!

There are numerous other salient factors to be taken into account which arise from an acceleration in these natural cycles. The oceans are acidifying and warming faster than predicted. Sediment flows in the world’s great deltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding faster than they can be replaced. Seasons are shifting. Water supplies are threatened by retreating glaciers. Extinction rates are higher than normal. The Arctic ice shelf is melting, puncturing the permafrost and allowing vast stores of methane to leak into the atmosphere for the first time…

Human curiosity, possibly more than a sense of responsible stewardship, obliges us to enquire into the source of such shifts. It is actually quite simple. We have become Creator, architects of our own evolution, not only at a nanoscale level of genetic and cellular manipulation but at the macro level of geological shifts. In effect humanity’s disruption, modification and acceleration of natural processes has triggered the age of homo sapiens. The Anthropocene age has dawned and there are important consequences to consider.

The evolutionary clock is ticking loudly. As hard as we might try we cannot wind back the hands. Returning to a more reassuring or comfortable past is ethically untenable as well as an impractical illusion. Instead we must learn to live wisely with our creation. At a minimum this means safeguarding the continuing viability of life-nurturing systems - such as clean air and pure water; halting the rampant despoilation of natural ecosystems - such as the rainforests and the oceans; prioritizing our most critical needs (like nutritious food, love and happiness) more prudently and transparently; enhancing environmental, social and institutional resilience; commissioning new technologies responsibly; and creating an ecology of mind grounded in appreciation, abundance, sufficiency and collaboration.

Simply put, it is time to let go of past frameworks - and with it the fears, superstitions, protocols and practices that constrain potential and set us against each other – to design a future capable of generating sufficient well-being and prosperity for everybody. That objective will be impossible to achieve through incremental or cosmetic changes to current ways or fiddling at the inconsequential fringes of the existing paradigm. We need an archetypal metamorphosis: a suite of profound transformations  that will shift human praxis from competition to cooperation, from economic growth to well being, from inequity to integrity, from despair to hope and from inward-looking interests to a planetary consciousness.

I find the idea of metamorphosis, resulting from positioning human development at the centre of the natural sciences rather than some kind of peripheral sideshow, genuinely inspiring. On the one hand it sounds simple and obvious. Indeed it is. But in order to accomplish a panarchical transformation of such ambition and scope we would need to initiate a wave of societal innovation, the audacity of which is unprecedented. For what we are proposing here is nothing less than an awakening to a conscious human evolution where human purpose and intent is reconceptualised at its most fundamental levels. At the same time a transfiguration of this nature would presumably offer profound alternatives to the popularly held view (of a synthesis between biological and digital life forms) proposed by some overly-enthusiastic technocrats as the most likely future for our species.

Consciously designing a world that can comfortably accommodate ten billion people will require all the empathy, compassion, ingenuity and imagination we can muster. What I am intimating is a contemporary renaissance of humanity and the human soul possibly unlike anything we have previously envisaged.

Just as the natural world is working differently as a result of our presence, so the world we are creating will need to operate differently from the one which effortlessly accommodated two billion people at the end of World War II in 1945. We have to adopt ecological design criteria and alternative governance methods; invent more aligned, responsive and adaptive institutions based on an appreciation of the need to conserve our common wealth; find smarter ways of producing life’s necessities by working with nature rather than against it; reduce waste; establish an economy in which prosperity is decoupled from corruption and motives of greed or self-interest - all the while embedding efficiencies to ensure that our planet can continue to provide abundantly for us all and not just the privileged or wealthy few.

In that context it is vital we seek to transform how we think - about our relationship to the planet and to each other. This will require a profound transition of individual and collective consciousness. That is the extent of the task facing us. The scale of this challenge is astonishing.

To comprehend the dynamic complexities entailed in such a transformation we can use the carbon cycle, which I referenced earlier, as a typical example of the entangled nature of the issue. You are probably already aware of the claims being made by our leading climate scientists. But I will restate some relevant statistics if only to ensure you are up-to-date with the most recent science.

According to the International Energy Agency, Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount in 2010, reaching the highest carbon output in recorded history. Not even the financial crisis, considered by many observers to be the most serious global recession of the past 80 years, has done much to curb rising emissions. The eminent economist Nicholas Stern, noting this fact, stated that the heating resulting from increased emissions "will disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict."

In spite of an extensive and prolonged search from numerous sources I have found no credible information that is seriously at odds with this prediction - apart from the banal observation that we cannot possibly know for certain. This being the case, in order to avoid the most damaging effects of global heating annual energy-related emissions will need to be no more than 32 gigatons by 2020. If emissions in 2011 rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule. This would make it all but impossible to keep the rise in global temperatures to within 2° Celsius, the tipping point, many scientists believe, before exponential feedback loops lead to abrupt, asymmetric and potentially irreversible changes to the climate system.

I confess that I find this news terrifyingly bitter-sweet. As the room for maneuvering contracts by the day, urgent action is still not forthcoming – even when it comes to the relatively less painful implementation of energy efficiencies through reduction, re-use and recycling. Instead, the reverse seems to be happening. For example, since the earthquake and tsunami damage to the Daiichi reactors at Fukushima earlier this year several countries have been re-evaluating nuclear power. Germany has seemingly declared a halt to its nuclear reactor programs although it had been on the verge of doing so for some time. Japan is teetering on the brink of electing to go down a similar path. Community paranoia over nuclear energy has been evident since the accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). Yet it is one of the safest forms of electricity generation. It also happens to be one of the major technologies for producing electricity without carbon dioxide. The gap left by scaling back the world's nuclear facilities is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels, at least in the foreseeable future. Some of these can be made cleaner, that is true. But they remain damaging to our climate in spite of the reassuring messages being disseminated by the oil, coal and gas lobby.

Then there are locked-in emissions to consider. About 80 per cent of the power stations likely to be in service in 2020 are either already built or under construction. Most of these are fossil-fuelled power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early. So they will continue to emit carbon – possibly for a further 40 years or so.

Add to all of this the fact that the significance of climate change in international policy debates is being taken less seriously than it was a few years ago, mostly as a result of intensive lobbying and fear mongering from certain sectors of the business community, and that developed nations have really only managed to reduce carbon emissions by importing goods from countries like China, and we have a recipe for catastrophe. At least without a shift in consciousness….

It is worth repeating here that it is not just global heating caused by increasing amounts of carbon in the air that is of concern but how climate is intricately linked with other life-critical systems. For example, we are witnessing an unprecedented rise in the cost of staple foods like rice, grains and potatoes. Food is getting more expensive as successive grain harvests fail. Unless urgent action is taken to reform the global food system the cost of these staples will more than double within 20 years, forcing many more millions into poverty. Half of that increase will be directly caused by global heating while the remainder will be the result of a combination of factors including geopolitical conflict, soil erosion, a scarcity of arable land and water for irrigation, and access to affordable energy.

But let us step out of our linear thinking habits to incorporate ever more salient data. If we pause to examine the entire contextual system of human behaviour in the environment over a period of several hundred years (the panarchical relationship) the picture of cascading problems becomes much more evident. Take the sum of around thirty environmental trends (including for example, ocean acidification, worsening oxygen levels in large cities, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, desertification, falling water tables, declining fish stocks, or methane venting from melting icecaps) and we can plot exponential deterioration over at least the past 75 years. It is clear our species is changing how nature works. There is no other feasible explanation.

When I was born there were just under two billion people on the planet. Later this year the figure will have grown to seven billion. By the end of the century it is likely to exceed ten billion. In spite of such ballooning population growth our desires and behaviours have not changed one iota. We still aspire to become more affluent than our neighbors. We still rely on technology to solve our problems. We still wait for a crisis before we act. We still delegate our responsibility for each other to those less capable than ourselves. I have no doubt that unless excessive consumption is outlawed, which is highly improbable, marketing gurus will continue in their obsessive quest of getting us to buy more and more stuff from manufacturers being urged to produce more and more goods, a large proportion of which will eventually go to waste.

The truth is there to see. Yet even now, against such dire scenarios, politicians and industry lobbyists in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world's last remaining reserves of fossil fuels in the name of corporate profits and economic development. Furthermore they all seem to be willing to fight each other for resources that will pour even more carbon into the atmosphere, thus pushing the climate system into unknown territory.

How can this be? If it was simply the storyline to the latest James Bond movie we would applaud such imaginative fantasy and gasp at the implausible stunts. But Dr No and Spectre are no more than naive delinquents in this political playground. This is real. No repeated denials or political posturing is going to make it all vanish. Science is telling us that nature has limits and that we need to dismantle the fossil fuel industry (as it is currently structured) as fast as we possibly can. We cannot win. Yet we persist, choosing to ignore science, preferring the hubris of inaction and denying the risk to future generations and to the poor who have few means to protect themselves from the impacts of a changing climate.

It appears we are not fully awake to this reality but sleepwalking. Sleepwalking towards a crisis that is of our own making and that might still be avoided – if only we were more sensitive to the dangers and can see the wisdom of changing our minds about how we choose to live our lives.

Nor is being awake the only issue. As I have repeatedly said, changing our minds entails a shift in consciousness so that we perceive the systemic nature of the risks confronting us with greater clarity and can take appropriate and rapid corrective action. Only then will we be in a position to transcend potentially catastrophic consequences. In view of the implacable nature and recklessness of those who continue to pollute the atmosphere I wonder if this is really possible, especially in view of the increasing urgency of our predicament, given that individual epiphanies must necessarily occur along with any collective shift of consciousness.

After the debacle at the COP15 climate change talks in Copenhagen (and in spite of scientists warning us that climate change poses the greatest threat to our species in its history, that we are running out of time, and that we may even be facing the prospect of our own extinction) it is clear that many political and business leaders are inept at dealing with complexity. Moreover the majority are ill-prepared to tackle intertwined issues that would loose them votes or profits. Leadership has become a lost art. Disregarding autocrats and the existence of ingrained corruption in most sovereign states, nearly all representatives of the modern world-system are either unwilling or incapable of putting aside self-interest for the common good. Meanwhile public awareness will increasingly lead to frustration and protest. More attuned to the truth, yet distressed by its existential nature, communities around the world are increasingly opting to vent their anger and bemusement in various forms of civil disobedience and protest.

But if we are bemused by the extent to which human behaviours are causing climate change, concerned by the lack of clarity concerning the potential impact of continuing fires, droughts and floods on our lifestyles, and puzzled by the lack of concerted and coherent government action, at least let us be clear about one thing. We the people, social witnesses to official dithering, scare-mongering and apathy, are no longer the revolutionaries. Nor for that matter are the scientists, environmentalists or outliers crying out for societal transformation via a shift in consciousness. In this instance the real radicals are those political and industry militants, together with their benefactors, who refuse to relinquish their financially-driven motives, who will go to any lengths to protect their collapsing ideology and who mindlessly insist that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy designed to bring down capitalism. In due course this open defiance of rationality, coupled with a reluctance to put the common wealth before individual profit, must be called to account. Through inaction and hubris these radicals are pilfering the prosperity and viability of future generations. They are now the anarchists and their selfish sedition must not be allowed to succeed.

But how can we overcome such a compelling force when most of the investment capital required for securing even easy gains (e.g. the rapid advancement of energy efficiencies in conjunction with the deployment of proven renewable technologies) is stashed away in the vaults of governments and corporations fixated on quick profits, big profits and gratuitous homage to obsolete economic theories?

For me the real crisis facing homo sapiens is not climate change per se, nor any of the resulting effects articulated above, but the erroneous set of assumptions about human nature that condones excessive production and consumption at a time when the impact of such behaviours on those who do not have access to similar resources and opportunities are self-evident. Most of these assumptions, with their emphasis on individual self-interest and competitive materialism were laid down during the 18^th century Enlightenment. They have been taken, incorrectly as it happens, as fundamental to human endeavour ever since. Indeed these beliefs are trotted out with tedious regularity as the primary defence and rationale for globalisation. It is worth examining how these assumptions are flawed in today’s context. 

In his topical book The Empathic Civilization US economist and futurist Jeremy Rifkin is unequivocal about this issue. Human beings, he says, are naturally empathic. It is built into our biology. Yet most of our assumptions and hence our business, social and governance institutions, are founded on an entirely different set of cultural and behavioural norms. Namely, that we are intrinsically competitive. “In 19^th century Europe this impulse regarding human nature was mindlessly embraced by the newly-conceived sovereign states where they were commonly perceived as autonomous agents entangled in a relentless and never-ending battle with other sovereign states in the pursuit of material gain and the protection of its citizens.”

Rifkin notes that recent discoveries in neuroscience and child development (for example mirror-neurons - nerve cells that enable human beings and some other species to feel and experience another's situation and emotions as if they were one's own) pose a credible challenge to these long-held assumptions. The detection of mirror neurons suggests we are social and empathic creatures after all and that we constantly seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows. This view also happens to reinforce observations made by Russian zoologist Pyotr Kropotkin who, barely 25 years after Darwin’s pioneering work, observed cooperation within and between species in the icy tundra of Siberia. Such discoveries overturn many of our previous beliefs concerning human motives. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society.

Uppermost in any ontological re-framing of the human condition, Rifkin postulates, is the proposition that human evolution can be measured not merely by the expansion of supremacy over nature “but also by the intensification of empathic connection to a broader diversity of living beings.” Throughout the sweep of human history we have seen successive technology revolutions leading to leaps in economic prosperity. They have also brought about shifts in consciousness, which has then led to further technological advancement… This cycle has also been accelerating until today’s scientific innovations have the potential to change paradigms in decades rather than over centuries.

Once again Rifkin’s assessment is precise. “Forager-hunter societies relied on oral communications and their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great agricultural civilizations were, for the most part, organized around script communication and steeped in theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution in 19^th century Europe was managed by print communication and ushered in ideological consciousness. Electronic communication became the command and control mechanism for arranging the second industrial revolution in the 20th century and spawned psychological consciousness.”

Like Rifkin I have no doubt that today’s distributed technologies, peer-to-peer social media and the potential for cleaner, renewable, open source energies, will create an opportunity for human civilisation to transcend current dilemmas by virtue of the most momentous evolutionary step we will ever have taken. By abandoning parochial self-interest and embracing an appreciative sensitivity towards the diverse richness of life we will step into a new epistemology (a biospheric consciousness) where the depth of social intimacy and interaction will become both the primary design principle and central nervous system for a new pangaian society.

With good fortune and foresight that giant step might also steer the human narrative away from fear to one of hope and inclusion. In an age where information frequently overwhelms us, where faith has been torpedoed by its own institutions, where we can design, manufacture and acquire more or less anything we can imagine, and where our access to a range of mind-blowing experiences is virtually unlimited, we lack just one thing: an overriding sense of purpose for this Anthropocene age.

Why have we been given the skill to invent technologies that enable instant communication and constant connectivity? Where is the real added value? Is it just to be entertained or to hasten commercial exchange? Surely not. But what additional benefits are created, over and above material gain? What (if anything) in all of this nourishes the human soul or our deep desire for empathy through connection? What is the transcendent purpose that extends beyond mere tribal or religious affiliations and national identity to embrace the whole of humanity? And how should we engage with this? 

Along with these unknowns there are many reasons to be optimistic. Transcending the civilizational worldview can help create a new global ethos in which the rich and diverse variety of relationships comprising the planet’s life-sustaining forces can harmonise and come into a new equilibrium. It can move us beyond the disconnected, self-interested and utilitarian ideals that burden our daily lives with matters of ultimate inconsequence. It can rise above the state-dominated geopolitical mess we have fashioned to allow new forms of planetary management and governance to evolve. Above all it can restructure our lives to become more collaborative and empathic.