The venerable Tom's Dispatch has a powerful essay from Chip Ward called "How Efficiency Maximizes Catastrophe." It uses honeybee climate collapse disorder to illustrate a hugely important point: where nature overprotects, and uses redundancy with abandon, mankind attempts to engineer everything to the last decimal place, with all redundancy removed in the quest for maximum profit.
A suicidal cultural pattern, probably. Excerpt below the fold.
Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You're going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. "Resilience thinking," the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace "efficiency" as the organizing principle of our economy.
Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one "best" way of doing something -- usually "best" means most profitable over the short run -- and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We're skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.
Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one "best" way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.
In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.
Ask Umbra on buying carbon offsets
If REDD can’t save this….
Climate-news poem: Tck, tck, tck edition
Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:37 pm
29 Jul 2007
In evolution, for example, there is a trend towards gigantism. The sabertooth tiger...the wooly mammoth. However, what's good in the short term for bullying around a bunch of shrimp is not good when some gigantic cataclysm hits.
Microsoft for example was seeming invincible -- until the Internet arrived and people figured out how to build software themselves. Now its crumbling into a heap and Linux and OSS is taking over.
John Bailo
Supratext:
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Kit Stolz Posted 4:04 pm
29 Jul 2007
After seeing the worst floods in two hundred years, the Brits (from the liberal Prime Minister, to Jon Finch, an Oxford University scientist, to the conservative Daily Telegraph) agree that this is not just a rainy summer, this is climate change; or, as some say, climate chaos.
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:23 am
30 Jul 2007
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Matt G Posted 2:32 am
30 Jul 2007
Nature's actually pretty good at optimization - it just has a much longer history than we do and has learned more lessons. It's wasteful, both to mankind and to the environment, to build a levy that can withstand anything. But then it's wasteful to build one that won't withstand enough. I think as we come to understand how we're changing our world, we will begin to understand how much is "enough".
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Colin Wright Posted 3:43 pm
31 Jul 2007
This implies to me that we have to throw out capitalism, a system I think may have been appropriate for growing an economy as fast as possible without regard to environmental consequences and with unlimited supplies of cheap energy and other resources. Now it seems to me our situation demands a rethink of how we "make our living" if we are to save the Earth.
Now of course centralized command-and-control economies have also been discredited. So we really need to come up with something new. I think we could put our collective heads together to come up such a new system. But I just don't see enough people thinking outside of the box.
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JMG Posted 4:14 pm
31 Jul 2007
In other words, we need what are essentially Scandanavian policies. Necessaries (food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education) are distributed equitably according to need; luxuries are available and distributed through capitalism. High taxes well-accepted because they provide high services, which support high quality of life and longevity.
I'm not sure how many people are aware of what a radical thing that Norway has done with its North Sea oil wealth, to take just one example of how much better we could have it: they banked it. They recognized early on that it would be a one-shot deal, and rather than squandering the wealth on a big party for a few billionaires, they took the money and banked it to meet the needs of the whole society (which is a good thing, because they've already peaked).
So I'm not sure that the thinking hasn't been done--most of it has, and the best practices are in place in various settings. The developed country that does the worst by its citizens is, you guessed it, the good ol' USA, where painting government as the enemy was raised to an art form by Ronnie Ray-gun, reading scripts prepared by leading economic thinkers like Uncle Milty Friedman channeling Any Rand.
What our system of state capitalism has to contend with is that while it's very, very, very good for a tiny slice at the top, it's very bad for a vast chunk in the middle and disastrous for the vaster chunk at the bottom.
The job of the media is to prevent those at the bottom from understanding any of this, especially how our economics works to transfer wealth to the wealthy and how our politicians are bought and sold in a market that could be put out of business in an instant if campaigns were publicly financed (which is why this is derided as "welfare for politicians" -- because it threatens the masters who need to keep politicians in dire need of contributions at all times).
Alas, this is a very wasteful way to organize a society, as its "winner take all" nature inevitably means that the wealthy have the absolute right to squander vital resources just as much as if they literally took the bread off the tables of the poor -- which is what we're gearing up to do with biofuels.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Rune Posted 1:26 am
01 Aug 2007
By the way, there was an interesting conversation that turned into an exploration of the concept of resilience about a month ago.
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:03 am
01 Aug 2007
In addition, I think we should be talking about the public/private apportioning of the ownership and control of the four main aspects of the physical infrastructure -- transportation, energy, water, and communications. Maybe having energy and transportation in private hands -- utilities and cars -- is not sustainable in the long-term, and local governments need to own energy-generating facilities, and mass transit will have to replace most cars. But obviously such a move will be a multi-decade type movement.
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