What has brought us here will not take us there

I have been thinking a lot recently about the messiness of listening to elders. Having come from India, from a culture that is founded on respecting elders and listening and following their views, I am constantly battling the tensions between the wisdom that comes from old age and experience, and the ways in which that experience limits the possibilities of change and renewal.

As I wrote previously, I realise more and more each day that much of the advice that my parents gave me when I was young was spot on. I just wasn't mature enough to understand what they were saying. At the same time, the ways in which their experiences have shaped their outlook on the world makes elders bound to the past, a past that has created the present. Last week during the Union of Concerned Scientists and Erb Institute conference on communicating climate change, it was difficult not to notice generational gaps in discussions, and the frankly limited actions that many of the elders in the room thought would be sufficient in changing how the general public viewed climate change and acted on it.

It is clearly the youth that will be living in a drastically changed world, not the sixty and seventy year-olds deciding policy. It was not encouraging to hear from Ana Unruh Cohen, assistant to Congressman Ed Markey (D-WA), that even though the youth were instrumental in garnering public support for the Waxman-Markey bill that would have changed the face of this country, the youth were not present at the table when the policy was being debated and finalised. In the end, of course, the bill did not pass. But the choices we make today, the policies that are passed, the lessons that are taught, are those that we will be struggling with and dealing with in the future. We are where we are today because of what has been presented to us by the past.

It is clear though, that what has brought us here, what the elders have put in place, will not get us to where we need to be. Nothing less than the way in which we fundamentally conduct ourselves in the world will allow us and future generations the resiliency of coping with a changing climate. Climate change presented as an energy problem will only cause future conflict over scarce lithium and rare earth metal reserves. Addressing the problem so builds no resiliency. Following that thread of thought, an ecologically sustainable world is possible only if everything is up for debate.

All is not lost, though. There are some things we can learn from some very inspiring elders. There are ways to create communities of people that are dynamic and resilient, all with a deep respect for other people and most fundamentally this Earth. I am excited to write about these things over the next few days.

What came first and the wisdom from the world

I hope to tie together a few threads of thought with this post today. I mentioned in a couple of posts (here and here) the fallacies and deficiencies of the current framework of "sustainability" thinking. What the dominant framework does is the following - it puts "economic" sustainability on the same footing as "social" sustainability and "environmental" sustainability. The global North, i.e. the agenda-setter and dominant rhetorical force, has successfully morphed the concept of "sustainability" to mean "sustainable development," the foundation of which are these deeply ingrained notions of what "economy" means (and you can read about that in those posts I've linked). At the very heart of this "economy" is the notion of technology, and the new. The new has come thick and fast in our world, and not a month goes by without us being bombarded with advertisements and images of what other people think is "good" for us. New knowledge is being successfully marketed and turned into products so that people can make money. In fact, it is this notion of new knowledge that the global North, and increasingly the large nations in the global South, thinks will get us out of this "sustainability" bind. But, with this new knowledge has come constantly increasing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.


This world existed long before humans arrived on it. Epochs and eons have passed, species have gone extinct, and new forms of life have constantly evolved and appeared. A tree is the outcome of millions of years of slow and steady and constant evolution. A tree is a beautiful example of the outcome of a dynamic equilibrium; the tree has responded to changes happening so slowly that you cannot see them in happening now. These responses are delicately balanced, guaranteeing the survival of the tree. Such is the wisdom of from world. This wisdom stems from the dynamism of population and the unforgiving forces of air, land and water, driven by the sun. This is the wisdom that has led to the adaptation and evolution of rivers, lemurs, bats and snow leopards. With this wisdom, we realise that how these creatures have behaved and evolved has allowed them to fill a role and fill a place, just perfectly. This has inspired the greatest human thinking. Countless people have wondered about nature, and I hope we all have. The wisdom from the world has imprinted on Onwas and the Hadza, who have survived successfully for thousands of years, and are in tune with place and time. Yet with our definition of "economy," we have moved away from this natural wisdom, and are now desperately hoping we can get it back. But this wisdom exists, and is lying dormant. Our "economy" we feel is the best driver of human action, and is the only raison d'etre for human life. Some hope that the "economy," based on new knowledge, can lead to "sustainability." In effect, we have tried to, in a couple thousand years, tried to accomplish what it has taken everything else on Earth much longer to come to - a dynamic equilibrium, constantly evolving, yet inherently sustainable.

Realising change in reflection

If you observe much of what happens in nature, there is a spectrum of timescales. There can be abrupt events that occur over the course of seconds and minutes, like earthquakes - a quick release of energy. We have events that happen over the course of days, like hurricanes - a slow buildup of energy release from latent heat, and a movement across water, potentially hitting land. Some events happen over the course of weeks and months, like seasons and the falling of leaves - there is an almost imperceptible change from day to day, just like the changing height of a child. Changes in climate and population occur at an even slower timescale; it takes many decades for the radiative effects of carbon dioxide to be felt, and unless for some reason there is an extinction, masses of fish can slowly grow or decline over time. In general, though, it seems that nature operates at timescales that are too slow for us to flow with. It seems as there each day and week is a new local, momentary equilibrium. What happens in most natural phenomena, except say earthquakes, volcanoes and bombardment by coronal mass ejections, is that there is a constant feedback between various forces. There is a constant tug and push of daily influences of solar radiation, changing vegetation patterns, changing ocean acidity, and, whether we like it or not,constantly rising carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. Depending on the year and the ocean capacity, fish populations may rise slightly one year, but then the next year, because of say, a decline in plankton, the populations may drop. Feedback is at play, and natural systems respond according to the sum of the positive and negative feedbacks; systems are dynamic and ever-changing. 

I am reading a draft of an article by Professor Princen, in which he talks about feedback in our social constructs. He mentions that in economies that are centred around resource extraction (our economy), during boom times, positive feedback is immediate and clearly tangible - we get 8% return on investments, gasoline prices drop and everyone is happy. Positive feedback makes us think that more of the same can never be bad. (And regardless of whether we have Democrats or Republicans in office, we have more of the same.) Negative feedbacks in our society are either one of of two: diffuse (slow rates of cancer rise because of petrochemical release into waters) or abrupt (like earthquakes, miners getting stuck underground for more than a day, huge oil wells blowing out). Unfortunately, our society is adept at avoiding the internalisation of negative feedback. In the end, it is difficult for us to recognise, realise and admit that the sum of these feedbacks is changing the landscapes we, and other living and non-living beings inhabit. For all of our instant access to information today, we have to reflect back on vast amounts of time to make any meaningful decision about where we are headed and what we should do. Yet at the same time, the signs pushing for change are constant - miners continue to die, thousands per year (you just don't hear of them), constantly increasing rates of obesity and cancer, and year after year of record high temperatures and seasons.