On Depth and Deepness

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
--Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

We recently read a game-changing work by paleoclimatologist Curt Stager, entitled Deep Future:  The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, and its implications have somewhat staggered us.  Stager asks that mainstream thinkers move beyond the question of global warming to consider “then what”?  This is a natural concept for someone whose daily fare involves the study of geological time – not days or weeks, or even years or decades, but minimally centuries and milennia.

Why, then, if we wish to discuss one book, do we start with a quotation from a different book, nay even a totally different author?  Simple, really.  Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy forms the intellectual backdrop against which the depth of Deep Future may be plumbed.

Progressives, Liberals, Hippie Freaks, and other post-modern intellectual types append the word “deep” to practically any form of endeavor in which they wish to express the notion that even after all the measurements have been taken, and all the facts have been explained, there’s still something else going on. 

This is the ineffable je ne sais quoi of every pseudointellectual charlatan of the last two hundred years, and yet the concept lingers.  Why?

We would contend that this notion, the idea that the truth is something other than what you happen to be seeing, or hearing, or touching, or tasting at any particular moment, has such staying power because ideas which tend towards preference for empiricism and inductive reasoning have every bit as much susceptibility to the bias of invalid predicates as do the a priori prejudices of religion – which is to say, garbage in, garbage out, and the more sophisticated your input mechanism, the more sophisticated your garbage.

Basically, ecological economists like McKibben get into arguments with environmental economists, and on the basis of rational scientific evidentiary inquiry, the environmental economists (who have much better math skills) are right practically every time.  The ecological economists, though, get invited to better parties, because they have a more robust message to spread, having moved beyond simple measurement of sensory data as is expected of an impartial observer – the role science has always claimed for itself – into the more contentious role of social activist – a role the environmental economists claim is inappropriate for anyone involved in the exercise of “science”, not because activism is wrong (the environmental economists are almost universally also politically active in advocacy of a wide range of issues), but because activism is not a form of inquiry.  The activities, they say, ought by nature to be separate.

The ecological economists, though, counter that the very act of deciding what to measure is a form of activism, and that the environmental economists, even those who vote for radical political candidates and petition for radical direct-democratic causes, are actively supporting status quo economic and political structures through their adherance to status quo scientific methodology.

Fascinating stuff, really, if you’re sufficiently geeky for it.

And this is where Stager’s Deep Future comes into play.  Stager is not the first person to use the word “anthropocene” but he is the first to introduce us at Myrtle’s place to the idea.  We are living in the first geological epoch which is not merely marked by the presence of a particular species, but is defined by that species.  Everything about our world is changing, and it is changing because we have changed it. 

Most paleoclimatologists tend to mark the beginning of the anthropocene, the Age of Humans, with the invention of the steam engine in the 17th century, but there are those who argue that many thousands of years before that, when humans were still hunting and gathering, we wiped out large mammals, and chopped down forests, and began belching excess carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere in quantities larger than the ecosphere could reabsorb.  Much if not all of the holocene, they argue, should actually be subsumed by the anthropocene.

And when what you are studying is the impact of everything done by humans upon everything surrounding humans, dividing what you are studying from what you intend to do about it becomes a blurrier proposition.

 This is the point at which we become less sympathetic to those who insist upon scientific and academic integrity and more sympathetic to those who argue for redefining the very field of inquiry from economic growth to something less tangible – economic satisfaction. 

Stager, of course, ignores economics altogether, because his field is climate, and he does a remarkable job of explaining the various scenarios in which global warming will eventually peak (in as little as a few centuries, or as many as 50,000 years), and will be replaced by a time of global cooling, as all fossil fuel is already spent, and all the excess carbon is eventually subsumed in the oceans, and things “return to normal” at some far future time.  He then turns to a discussion of the various scenarios of necessary cultural adaptations to the changing climate, and the sorts of communities that are likely to thrive, and those that are likely to suffer.  The time frames?  Far longer than most contemporary climate writers have bothered to speak about.

But when Stager speaks of the conditions to be faced by future civilizations, it gives us pause to think about posterity in entirely different ways.  We are all used to the platitudes of politicians who speak of leaving a legacy for our descendants, a world in which our children and grandchildren have at least as much opportunity for success and happiness as we have enjoyed, and these platitudes have replaced much of our serious ethical thinking, because they are easier than would be a studied analysis of what we are actually passing on.

We are used to the notion that we can grow out of any crisis, that by the time one resource is depleted, technology will have found its replacement.  This notion is a prima facie lie, but we have continued to believe in it since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution because it is a comfortable fiction.

We can’t grow forever, nor should we want to.  The ecological, physical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual costs are simply too high.  The scars on our planet and on ourselves are too obvious for all but the most hardened to ignore for too much longer.  Growth has not made the masses happy even where growth has been the most impressive.  Growth has definitely not made the masses happy in those places where resource exploitation has been the greatest.

As it turns out, the legacy we ought to be passing down, if we are to reclaim any kind of life worth living in future years, addresses both the needs of “deep economy” and of “deep ecology”.  Learning to live sustainably has the potential to soothe our tattered nerves, and to level off our abuse of our planet and our neighbors.  Living, and buying, and eating, and entertaining on a local scale will do more for our personal happiness than any amount of growth could, and will do far less harm to the world around us.

These are things we all know intuitively, if only we allow ourselves to listen to that quiet voice in the back of our heads that says, “Yes, this is pleasant.”  There is a concept in Sweden that the Swedes insist has no valid translation in English – “Lagom”.  We at Myrtle’s think we know an idiom from the American South that is a fairly close approximation:  “Plenty good.”  And we say plenty good is good enough. 

Plenty good is as deep as depth ought to get.

Get the Good Stuff... But Only a Little Bit

“We still think of air as free.  But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water.  The price tag on pollution control is high.  Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.”

--President Richard M. Nixon

Asking is the worst possible way to find out what someone values.  If you really want to know what someone believes, don’t ask them, watch them.  What you spend your time doing, what you spend your money buying, what you spend your energy daydreaming about, these are the things you cherish.  These are your values.  These are your Gods.  We all claim we have a certain set of principles, a certain theology, but what we say is invariably different in some fundamental ways from what we do, and it is not what we say, but what we do which reflects what we really believe.

This is as true of groups of people as it is for individuals. 

There are frequently political clamorings for government to have to balance its budget because “We have to live within our means, why shouldn’t the federal government?”  The disconnect in this statement never quite seems to percolate through to our cultural awareness… Do individuals really have to live within their means?  Are they doing so?  And what does “live within our means” really mean?  Is it as simple as a calculation of financial ways and means, or is there more to the equation? 

After all, the American obesity epidemic really comes down to people not living within our means, consuming far more calories in Big Macs than we are expending via getting out and exercising.   There are other debts besides monetary debts, and we are collectively running up huge deficits in more ways than we can possibly keep track of.

Do Americans simply not care about social inequality, ecological devastation, obesity, and impending economic devastation?  Expressions of concern are almost universal, crossing all party and philosophical lines – Ronald Reagan bowed to public sentiment and joined “Hands Across America” – clearly, though there are serious disagreements about methods, objectives are fairly universal – we all agree with the beauty pageant contestants who clamor for their one wish, world peace.

People do care about social inequity and natural resource iniquity; they simply don’t see.  Why not?  The inescapable conclusion when observing the sociological and ecological components of the American economy is that Americans do not value balance, because our collective actions have been so thoroughly unbalanced for so long.  So why the dissonance?  How can someone driving a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle, clearly oblivious to their economic, ecological and social budget busting, have the wisdom to say the federal government ought not spend more money than it possesses?

The best possible explanation is that a fallacy inherited from neoclassical economics dominates our collective consciousness.  The neoclassical Venn diagram for discussion of sustainability shows “Social”, “Environmental” and “Economic” components of development as top level spheres, with the union of the three being the shaded “Sustainable” area.  Where only “Social” and “Environmental” unite, you have “Bearable” conditions; where only “Social” and “Economic” unite, you have “Equitable” conditions, and where “Environmental” and “Economic” concerns unite, you have “Viable” conditions.  Thus, in the neoclassical model, the center, the united “Sustainable” area, represents a compromise between these three entities.

This model is tidy, which neoclassicists appreciate, but it is fundamentally flawed.  A more accurate picture shows that “Environment” is the top level sphere; “Society” is not a separate sphere, but a subset of “Environment”.  “Economy” is a subset of “Society”.  Talk of united concerns between any of these three aspects misses the point entirely – there are no economic concerns which do not impact society and the environment; neither are there any social concerns which do not impact the environment.

All economics are social; all economics are environmental; all social exchange is environmental.

The relevant question, then, is not whether social and environmental concerns should be part of our thinking about economic issues, but rather are we willing to accept that economics ought by order of precedence to be the lowest level concern?  Environmental and social issues take precedence because if either of those spheres collapse, they will by nature take the economy out with them. 

Witness what happens to local economies during environmental or social catastrophes – who can do business in the middle of a hurricane, wildfire, tornado or earthquake?  Who can do business in the middle of a riot?  Where is the free market during protests and counterprotests?

Acceptance of this basic tenet leads to a wholesale rejection of common wisdom on a host of contemporary concerns.  “We have to increase domestic production of oil,” for example, is a fallacy accepted by most of the philosophical spectrum in American politics.  The justifications for drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas come down to economic independence and security against instrusions of socially unacceptable foreign enemies – the hegemony of OPEC nations strikes most Americans as being more important than biodiversity or global warming.

We do not, however, have to increase domestic production of oil.  Economic growth is not our primary concern; environmental security is our primary concern, and the petrochemical industry has demonstrated quite clearly for the entirety of its existence that it is incapable of coexisting peacefully with the environment.

Pursuit of economic growth through energy consumption has lead to irreversible climate change, has polluted our water supplies, has killed off several ecospheres, has put carcinogenic hydrocarbons in the food chain and has, in short, drastically lessened the survivability of contemporary social structures based on a consumption-driven economy.

Drilling for more oil, in other words, doesn’t make us safer; it makes us immeasurably less safe, both in terms of the immediate environmental dangers inherent in climate change, etc., but also in terms of the social and economic strains which will become inevitable as the results of unsustainable consumption manifest themselves.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, in their 2008 “Living Planet Report” summarized the dangers:

“Humanity’s demand on the planet’s living resources, its Ecological Footprint, now exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by about 30 per cent.  This global overshoot is growing and, as a consequence, ecosystems are being run down and waste is accumulating in the air, land and water.  The resulting deforestation, water shortages, declining biodiversity and climate change are putting the well-being and development of all nations at increasing risk.”

“But we have to have oil, so it’s better if we have American oil,” the argument goes.  This is nothing more than saying we ought to only impale ourselves on hirikiri knives manufactured in Pennsylvania, because the steelworkers there should take precedence over Japanese knifemakers.  We’re just as dead regardless of where the knives (or oil) are produced.

An ecological economist looking at the initially described problem – insufficient energy exists in order to meet the demands of the economy –would ask several different questions:

• Can the energy demands be mitigated (ie, what energy conservation methods need to be tried first)?  
• What sustainable methods for delivering these energy needs can be substituted for the unsustainable method of burning fossil fuels?  
• Are there opportunities to localize energy production to the specific places where energy consumption will be occurring?  
• Can those primarily responsible for consuming the energy be made more directly invested in the creation of that energy so as to reduce impact on those who are not consumers?

“That doesn’t sound like economics to me,” say the more mathematically and statistically grounded critics.  “It sounds like philosophy or even theology.”

There is some merit to this argument; ecological economists make no secret of the need to inject values statements into economic writing.  However, they further point out that neoclassical economics may claim to be a “positive” (empirical or evidential) science, but it is inescapably “normative” (values laden), which goes a long way towards explaining how the same data set can be used to defend so vigorously diametrically opposed ideas such as laissez-faire capitalism and determinist Marxism. 

All economic theories with any sort of following have of necessity at some point demonstrated strong predictive abilities which have garnered intellectual agreement among various students and researchers; however, the diversity of theories can only be explained by means of a differentiating grid, and in the case of theoretical frameworks, that differentiation comes in the form of normative “ought” statements, not positive “is” statements.

Which leads us back to our original premise – we value that which we pursue.  Evelyn Waugh wrote in The Razor’s Edge that “anyone can be a saint on a mountaintop.”  The true test of ethical systems lay in which hard choices adherents are willing to make.  Paying a little extra for the organic fruits and vegetables raised with fair trade practices, for example, seems like a sacrifice, but it is a far more ethical decision than selecting the lower priced alternatives which really represent a subsidy for laziness and sloppiness, a subsidy paid by future generations. 

Your great-grandchildren, in other words, will be paying more for everything because you just had to have that gas-guzzling SUV, that extra Big Mac, that brand new iPhone, that vacation at Disney, and on and on.

Do we want to continue to pursue economic growth at all costs?  Or are we willing to start putting our money where our mouths are?  Because ultimately, ethical behavior will mean we must consciously decide we are going to be satisfied with less.  If we truly care about future generations, we will decide that quality of life is far more important than quantity of dollars produced.

Ultimately, we have to decide we will pursue development, but not growth.  This means investing in technologies which produce non-polluting outputs using significantly fewer resources, none of which are non-renewable, and doing so across all sectors of the economy.  “Smaller is better” needs to replace “supersize me” in every aspect of our lives.

Heck, Myrtle isn’t even our biggest chicken.  The meek shall inherit the Earth; let’s just make sure it’s worth inheriting, okay?

Happy farming!