The world is changing and so shouldn’t we. That seems to be the basic argument behind the concerns that climate change is not part of our natural evolution.
Who says that humans have to keep living the same way they have done for the last 14 000 years? The delicate balance that has fed our ravenous appetite for resources is breading a new sensitivity as the system that sustains it, veers violently out of balance. The challenge: change. But at which level?
One of the key restraints to our evolution on a broader level has been humans’ obsession with events. Living in the here and now we seem hardly to have escaped the cave man looking over his (sic) shoulder for that saber toothed attack. We urgently need to break out of this way of seeing the world if we are to progress. The biggest challenges the world faces now are processes, not events. Poverty, climate, pollution and obesity are process issues, that need to be approached systematically rather than with point solutions. By becoming such a clear and present danger through devastating climate events (ironically) we are finally appreciating the process view of the world. The way things link together is the key to how we can improve them. A better understanding of the processes involved in managing any system leads to far greater energy efficiency, more so than any pointial intervention could ever hope to achieve. In understanding our cultural and economic evolution as an ongoing process that does not consider the status quo as the holy grail of genetic destiny we can see that the current “climate crisis” is providing a stimulus in the right direction: the ability to sustain human progress at a lower level of energy consumption. Why is this important?
Life fights entropy. As living organism we constantly use energy to maintain order in a chaotic universe. Like ice crystals fighting in the sunshine we fight and consume within the universe to keep our order in tact. It would be far more interesting however if we could reorganize at a lower level of energy.
This is the fundamental learning challenge that Climate Crisis poses to us as a species; how do we live, love and prosper, at a lower level of energy? How do we sustain the memes and genes that have such an amazing ability to build information exponentially, without giving in to there selfish and mean nature.
A number of trends are developing. The first and most prominent is moving from individualistic action, to coordinated action. Exposing humans to the soul of the ant as Eugene Marais would say. Network economies are begetting network people. Robert Scoble as a node in the twitter network becomes no more than a nerve cell in a super brain that is constantly charging information back and forth. And doing so far more efficiently than ever before. In it we see the first glimmer of ego becoming subsumed into a large distributed learning organism.
How long until this sentience break free from the carbon based life forms that feed it? This could potentially be this round of advanced intelligence on earth’s greatest achievement: surviving the big long freeze as pure information, only to emerge in a new Eden when the sun has charged it’s batteries again. Puts a new perspective on the tree of knowledge.
This aspect of how the internet is beginning to make us immortal and creating a new form of what it means to be human, is being studied in great detail by Derrick de Kerckhove.
The second is the reduction of complexity. Climate crisis is forcing designers to be more effective with less resources. Less packaging, less paper, less widgets gadgets and whatever are now required to make things work. And they work for longer with less. Just look at the difference between the LED and the light build for an example of how we are achieving higher levels of organization with lower levels of energy. In effect we have taken on entropy and we are winning. And is the same happening on a global scale? Less languages, less species, less seasons? The big business challenge will be our ability to sustain markets with falling populations.
Fortunately we are also developing the ability to be more flexible. Meshing and mashing our way through complexity without the requirement for big complex and energy intensive infrastructure to sustain us. This ability links supply and demand more intimately than it has been at any stage of our development. The next step will be to move from engineering and heavy industry to biology as we produce custom CO2 feeders on demand. Or the way in which we have addressed the mortgage crisis with global efficiency. The correction was not as disruptive and energy intensive as in the past.
So just exactly why are so many people concerned about climate crisis? In one sense it is a lack of trust. In another it may be that people are still too comfortable with simplistic causal explanations of what is happening. In a sense this is what Marcus Fairs calls “Narrowism”. Is that extra flight to Tokyo bad? I don’t know, because it may be saving our ability as a species to communicate, and that is how we are beating entropy. We should have faith that we have provoked exactly the kind of response from the planet that we need to learn and grow in order to evolve from this form of speciest adolescence.
