I really like your "growth after crisis" drawing and description! It's important to paint a picture of a better future. It's easy to describe all the bad stuff but we should be "selling" our vision of a healthy and more equitable society.
Your first bullet list item... "A major crisis breaks your core beliefs." Agreed. It seems to me that humans will not deal with a climate crisis until it is their very own climate crisis. Sure, people have been dealing with climate crises for all of history, but someone else's climate crisis is not a crisis for me...so my core beliefs stay intact...for the time being.
I am reminded of an analogy... When I was studying permaculture and organic farming some years ago now, I became interested in soil microbiology...I was studying farm soils and native soils and compost heaps. I did a *lot* of hot composting which basically transforms organic waste into soil through a fairly well-defined succession of microbial communities, and I spent a lot of time studying these communities under the microscope. In general, in a well-managed composting scenario, the goal is to try to keep the microbes in the pile healthy, well-fed, watered...and *aerobic*...because anaerobic microbes often produce chemicals which are toxic to plants. So one goal is to make sure the compost pile has plenty of air/oxygen. This is typically accomplished by turning the pile, thus introducing oxygen and causing more aerobic microbe growth and therefore suppressing anaerobic microbe growth. As an aside, aerating soil is one of the major sources of the greenhouse gas CO2 in conventional tilled agriculture because tilling the land introduces oxygen into the soil which encourages more aerobic microbe growth (as you know, we aerobes inhale oxygen and exhale CO2).
Back to my story... As I said, turning the pile introduces oxygen into the melange and causes aerobic microbes to grow, and they eat the organic matter in the pile. The reason this is good for plants has to do with the different ratio of Nitrogen and Carbon in most microbes (i.e. bacteria) when compared to plant or animal cells but that story is for another time.
So if the aerobic microbes have lots of food, water and air, they thrive and reproduce and their numbers vastly increase and this leads to over-population. Aerobic respiration produces heat, so just like having too many people in a room can make the room become uncomfortably hot, the pile gets too hot for certain microbes and they get replaced by microbes which are more heat-tolerant. This cycle repeats until the pile is too hot and there are too many microbes competing for the limited resources of air...and they start to die off, and as the pile cools down, they are replaced by anaerobes who don't require air/oxygen...which by the way poisons your compost pile.
So... I have asked myself many times... Why don't the aerobic microbes agree to limit their consumption and thus save themselves from heat shock, suffocation, starvation, and a massive die-off?
Now you can (try to) make the anthropocentric argument that we humans are more likely to make better "decisions" than microbes...but I'm not convinced...and I don't think the fossil record is particularly convincing either.
A major crisis breaks your core beliefs. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Sometimes it's just too late...but one thing is certain...microbial life will be thriving long after human beings are forgotten.
I don't see this as a "well, we can't do anything so let's just give up" position. Rather I think it is good science. We humans try to solve problems because we evolved to try to solve problems...but we probably shouldn't ignore the likely outcome here... Without a major crisis, core beliefs will not change. We may not be able to shorten the timeline of our inevitable extinction (that darned fossil record again lol) by working together to mitigate a global climate crisis...but the journey is just as important as the actual outcome, n'est pas?
Thank you Peter! A question that keeps me up at night is: do humans *require* a major crisis to transform? I'm convinced that transformation *can* come out of a crisis, as this model shows. And some have argued that the impacts of the climate crisis need to get worse and hurt more people before there's sufficient pressure to address it as required. I don't want that to be true; I'd like to avoid avoidable suffering and harm! What humanity collectively ends up doing, with enough force to tip the scale, is of course what's being decided now...
I really like your "growth after crisis" drawing and description! It's important to paint a picture of a better future. It's easy to describe all the bad stuff but we should be "selling" our vision of a healthy and more equitable society.
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Thank you KJ! So glad you like my drawing, it's amazing how far we can get with a couple of pens and a notebook :)
Your first bullet list item... "A major crisis breaks your core beliefs." Agreed. It seems to me that humans will not deal with a climate crisis until it is their very own climate crisis. Sure, people have been dealing with climate crises for all of history, but someone else's climate crisis is not a crisis for me...so my core beliefs stay intact...for the time being.
I am reminded of an analogy... When I was studying permaculture and organic farming some years ago now, I became interested in soil microbiology...I was studying farm soils and native soils and compost heaps. I did a *lot* of hot composting which basically transforms organic waste into soil through a fairly well-defined succession of microbial communities, and I spent a lot of time studying these communities under the microscope. In general, in a well-managed composting scenario, the goal is to try to keep the microbes in the pile healthy, well-fed, watered...and *aerobic*...because anaerobic microbes often produce chemicals which are toxic to plants. So one goal is to make sure the compost pile has plenty of air/oxygen. This is typically accomplished by turning the pile, thus introducing oxygen and causing more aerobic microbe growth and therefore suppressing anaerobic microbe growth. As an aside, aerating soil is one of the major sources of the greenhouse gas CO2 in conventional tilled agriculture because tilling the land introduces oxygen into the soil which encourages more aerobic microbe growth (as you know, we aerobes inhale oxygen and exhale CO2).
Back to my story... As I said, turning the pile introduces oxygen into the melange and causes aerobic microbes to grow, and they eat the organic matter in the pile. The reason this is good for plants has to do with the different ratio of Nitrogen and Carbon in most microbes (i.e. bacteria) when compared to plant or animal cells but that story is for another time.
So if the aerobic microbes have lots of food, water and air, they thrive and reproduce and their numbers vastly increase and this leads to over-population. Aerobic respiration produces heat, so just like having too many people in a room can make the room become uncomfortably hot, the pile gets too hot for certain microbes and they get replaced by microbes which are more heat-tolerant. This cycle repeats until the pile is too hot and there are too many microbes competing for the limited resources of air...and they start to die off, and as the pile cools down, they are replaced by anaerobes who don't require air/oxygen...which by the way poisons your compost pile.
So... I have asked myself many times... Why don't the aerobic microbes agree to limit their consumption and thus save themselves from heat shock, suffocation, starvation, and a massive die-off?
Now you can (try to) make the anthropocentric argument that we humans are more likely to make better "decisions" than microbes...but I'm not convinced...and I don't think the fossil record is particularly convincing either.
A major crisis breaks your core beliefs. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Sometimes it's just too late...but one thing is certain...microbial life will be thriving long after human beings are forgotten.
I don't see this as a "well, we can't do anything so let's just give up" position. Rather I think it is good science. We humans try to solve problems because we evolved to try to solve problems...but we probably shouldn't ignore the likely outcome here... Without a major crisis, core beliefs will not change. We may not be able to shorten the timeline of our inevitable extinction (that darned fossil record again lol) by working together to mitigate a global climate crisis...but the journey is just as important as the actual outcome, n'est pas?
Thank you Peter! A question that keeps me up at night is: do humans *require* a major crisis to transform? I'm convinced that transformation *can* come out of a crisis, as this model shows. And some have argued that the impacts of the climate crisis need to get worse and hurt more people before there's sufficient pressure to address it as required. I don't want that to be true; I'd like to avoid avoidable suffering and harm! What humanity collectively ends up doing, with enough force to tip the scale, is of course what's being decided now...