Yesterday’s presentation Dr. Jack Alpert – Imagining a Sustainable Civilization.. – CACOR Zoom 2022-02-16 (canadiancor.com) brings a key issue to my mind. Oft-quoted is the notion that we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that caused the problems.
While Jack’s calculations are no doubt sound, they are based on sustaining exactly the sort of civilization we have at present. Perhaps by atrophying the human presence to less than 1% of today’s we could ignore the pattern of overshoot for 300 years.This is a far better outcome than blowing the human project in the next generation or two, but hardly up to the potential of our remarkable species.
Life has sustained itself for hundreds of millions of years. My suggestion that we (re)hitch our wagon to the planet’s life processes was met with something like, we would never settle for what that offers.
Are we indeed better than what life offers? With extreme cultural manipulation, we might secure the world for our children and grandchildren, but besides our individual attachment to direct offspring, how do our grandchildren differ from those of descendants 50 generations down the road? Does our responsibility to the 10,000 generations that made our lives possible not reach beyond our own self-interests?
Furthermore, human potentials harbour far greater possibilities than our technical accomplishments. Huge advancements in our abilities to think, to love, to enjoy and to innovate need not involve complex material and energy intensive contrivances. We can sort through all the possibilities available to us and select for those which use little or no external energy and resources beyond what is required to keep each generation alive and healthy. These basic requirements are what have sustained life through the ages. They will not fail if we work with, rather than against, them.
It is far easier to try to imagine what we are used to, but like the person who lost his keys down a dark ally, who looks for them under the street lamp because the light is better, the key to a long human future is not to be found in the convention.
Or so it seems to me.
Yours, Mike Nickerson
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“It is from the clash of differing opinions that the light of truth shines.”
19th Century Visionary
7th Generation Initiative / Sustainability Project
Thank you, Mike Nickerson, for your commentary. For the first time ever, and I have attended almost all of the CACOR Zoom talks, I left the session with Jack Alpert before the conversation ended. The level of despair and resignation was simply too much. The approach was such a contrast to the talk a few weeks earlier by Thomas Homer-Dixon, who in his most recent book argued that “Sometimes it’s a mistake to fasten too quickly on constraints: it just makes those constraints appear inescapable and robs us of any chance for genuine change” (this week’s CACOR quote). Now, the Homer-Dixon approach may turn out to be naïve, but the Alpert approach closes the door before it is reached.