Looking Forward

                                                                                                              written 19 Dec 2021

                                                                                                          published 26 Dec 2021

                                                                                                                                         

            As we come to the end of the year, it is traditional to consider what we would like to change in the new year.

            I would like to see the US get serious about the climate crisis.  Despite the record-breaking weather extremes of the past year, adversely impacting every part of our country, there are people who still doubt this is real, or that there is anything humans can do about it.  People who know better, but still think they can make more money from "business as usual", fund the media, sowing doubt, leading the faithful to their own doom.  I wonder how bad it has to get before folks question their blind devotion to the sources of information that care so little for their fate.  When that awareness comes, will it be too late?

            Getting serious requires reducing atmospheric carbon emissions by 50% in the next 96 months, necessitating doubling or tripling renewable production in that time period.  Getting serious would be adequately funding the transition away from fossil fuels, so that everyone benefits from the change, not just the wealthy.  Getting serious is recognizing that we could all go extinct in a few decades, no matter who you voted for. 

            I would like to see the US come together about Covid.  Despite having free, effective vaccines, only 72% of the country is fully vaccinated, and only 31% have had a booster.  With colder weather, and increased holiday gatherings, the average US daily case load and daily death rate are 50% greater than three weeks ago.  This is beginning to stress hospitals in some areas, and omicron, the more contagious variant, has yet to sweep through.  

            But these averages hide disturbing details.  Counties that voted more heavily for Trump have lower vaccination rates, and three times higher per capita death rates, indicating that people are choosing not to deal with the pandemic.  We even see this locally with organized unmasked groups performing political drama in local businesses, supposedly asserting their individual freedoms, while treating their neighbors badly by ignoring the collective health issue.  Such arrogant refusal to recognize their responsibility to the society that supports them bodes poorly for successfully avoiding climate extinction.

            I would like to see America recommit to our democratic ideals.  Most of the Republican leadership has embraced cult authoritarianism, completely abandoning any pretense of program, integrity, honesty, or cooperation.  I hope Republican voters realize their leaders are only working for the billionaire class, not for the rank and file, and choose to no longer vote for them.

            I would like to see our society shift away from prioritizing money over real values, such as kindness, charity, compassion, beauty, happiness, peace of mind, art, and music, to name a few.  Everything is focused on lowest, short term costs and increasing growth, which are foolish and unsustainable on a finite living planet, creating a society which is angry, obese, anxious, ill, and unhappy.  Even our democracy is threatened by those that want to keep the system of exclusive gain running a few months longer, while the people and the planet are crying for attention and change.  Globally, eight white men own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people.  The Navajo's say of such greed, "they act like they have no relatives".

            I would like to see humanity respect the value and rights of other living beings and biological systems.  Fifty years ago, humans were consuming 100% of the annual productivity of the Earth, and that over-consumption is currently 170%.  This is completely unsustainable, destined to crash at any time.

            These all seem like unlikely changes, but I believe most people really want a world that is peaceful, healthy, and fair.  I have no idea how we get from here to there, but holding that as an intention is a start.  Recognizing the unsustainable, fundamental dysfunction of our current economic model is a start.  Acknowledging that all people and beings deserve respect and consideration is a start. 

            I am not a religious person, repelled by the history of hypocrisy, pain, and killing resulting from such rigid ideas.  But I feel the fundamental connection of reality.  Until we all begin to live from that unity perspective, our species is on borrowed time, with little future.  My New Year's resolution is to live life as if we are all sacred.

Caterpillar And Butterfly

                                                                                                              written 12 Dec 2021

                                                                                                          published 19 Dec 2021

                                                                                                                                         

            A caterpillar is an eating machine, focused exclusively on consumption, much like a capitalist corporation.  But unlike a corporation, a caterpillar is a living organism, part of a larger process.  At some point it stops consuming, forms a protective chrysalis, and totally dissolves, making way for the emergence of a butterfly.  The butterfly begins forming around multiple "imaginal buds" within the dissolved goop.  The caterpillar immune system attacks these growing buds as enemies, which accelerates the assembly of the butterfly.  A similar process may be at work within humanity.  

            Modern humans first emerged about 300,000 years ago, slowly increasing population to 20 million 10,000 years ago when agriculture began.  Increased food productivity allowed more rapid population growth, and we hit one billion in 1800, the beginning of the fossil fuel age.  Then population grew exponentially faster.  Humans reached 2 billion by 1930, increasing to almost 8 billion today, with another billion within the next 12 years.  Not only are there more of us, the technological revolution has amplified our impact, so we each consume more in the way of food, resources, and energy.  Exponential growth on a finite planet is unsustainable.  We are consuming the Earth to death.

            This situation has been written about, with increasing alarm, for decades, but like a mindless caterpillar, relentless consumption and economic growth prevailed.  We are now experiencing the leading edge of the collapse of our fundamental biosphere. 

            As I write this, the mid-west is beginning to assess the damage from a wide spread extreme weather event, including an F5 tornado that stayed on the ground for over 200 miles, ripping the heart out of every community it touched.  Climate change is getting harder to deny, as the impact and costs increase every year.  Species are going extinct at unprecedented rates.  But perhaps there is a butterfly waiting in the dissolving goop of what we used to call normal.  What might that butterfly look like?

            The root dysfunction of our old civilization is belief in separation between individuals and nature: acting as if exclusive gain at the expense of others and nature was progress.  The consequences of this flawed model are now increasingly obvious all over the world.  This suggests an alternative: a new civilization that embraces the profound, sacred connectivity of reality, an ancient perspective still honored by indigenous cultures.  If we apply the technical knowledge that we have gained in the last few thousand years toward the nourishment of all life on the planet, imagine what we might accomplish!

            There is no model within human history for this kind of massively aware, cooperative society, but we can look to living systems for inspiration, since life has been dealing with these same issues for billions of years.  Looking to life for inspiration is called biomimicry.  Our own body, a large multicellular organism, is a wonderful example of the kind of collective that might arise on Earth: becoming a self-aware planet.  In such a connected system, killing the other is the same as suicide, so we could eliminate all the resources, anxiety, and energy currently spent on "defense", and those organized systems could instead work to clean up the messes we have created, improving the quality of life for all beings.  In a connected world, extreme wealth inequity would be recognized as a form of dangerous illness, like gangrene in the body, not something to envy or praise.  Humanity has expanded to the point of driving all other species to extinction, disrupting the larger order in the same way that obesity causes other bodily systems to fail.

            This vision requires a change within our dominant human awareness, which may seem impossible.  But this message has been taught for thousands of years.  Next Saturday is Christmas, honoring the birth of Christ, who stated that the most important commandments were: "Love God" and "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:30 & 31).  This is an affirmation of the unity of life, which is found in every spiritual tradition on Earth.

            We each have the power to choose to live in this unity perspective.  This is the butterfly emerging.  All the people who hate, and are working to stop this from happening, trying to preserve the old exclusive order, are just like the dying caterpillar immune system.  But that system is gone.  The future is the butterfly.

 

Concept And Experience

                                                                                                              written 5 Dec 2021

                                                                                                        published 12 Dec 2021

                                                   

            There is a contrast between concept and experience.  

            Concept is defined as ideas, or stories, that are fundamental building blocks of principles, thoughts, and beliefs.  Whenever you are thinking, you are in the world of concept.  Concepts are not of the moment, even though you are thinking in the moment.  The stories we hold about our past are all concepts, as are the fears, hopes, and plans we have about the future.  When you start to investigate your inner landscape, you will find that most of your attention is involved in concepts. 

            Experience is in the now.  It is the direct perception of what is happening in this moment.  But upon investigation, our experiences are quickly interpreted within the vast array of concepts that make up our description of who we are.  For example, I look outside and see one of our cats perched on the cat condo.  The direct physical experience of perception is immediately framed as "outside" and "cat", which are concepts that give me definition in relationship to my ongoing reality.

            There is nothing inherently wrong with this process, but it is important to notice that we experience in the moment and conceptualize outside the moment.  If we aren't paying attention, we can mistake the concept we create for the experience that initiated it, and believe they are the same thing.  It is in the experience that we engage reality, but it is in concept that we create our understanding of reality.

            This can work in reverse as well.  I am a woodworker, and make things.  I am strongly rooted in the conceptual, and carefully visualize what I want to make, and plan out the details and sequence of construction.  However, when I have completed my project, I sit and observe what has been created, because the reality of the piece is different for the conceptual plan and vision that guided my work.  In that moment, I experience the piece rather than the concept that guided it coming into existence.

            Experience is the natural domain of most living beings.  One of the transformative steps in the evolution of modern humans was the development of language, which was the beginning of concept.  Language is abstract sounds, given conceptual meaning within the group that speaks that language.  Writing of language came much later, and was just as transformative a step as speaking.  The first writings were very limited, and were often just stylized pictorial representations.  Alphabetic writing systems were another step into concept, as the individual letters no longer had any relationship to the words they convey, but the simplicity of the system allowed an explosion of literacy within the society.  Writing allowed wisdom gained from experience in the moment to be shared across space and time, but it deepened the immersion of humanity into concept, and allowed a distancing from experience.

            Humanity is now so steeped in concept that people can believe they know something about reality because they have embraced a detailed concept.  However, the experience of breaking a bone is quite different from the concept of breaking a bone.  There is a relationship, but they are not equivalent.  The conceptual portion of the brain is good at discerning differences and sequences, which are essential for gathering meaning from the written words.  But it is easy to mistakenly generalize such differences to the larger world, with possibly disastrous consequences.  For example, President Reagan said "if you have seen one redwood tree, you have seen them all," conflating his limited concept of a redwood tree to the reality of all redwood trees.

            Another significant conceptual obsession was the creation of money, which allowed an expansion of trade by creating a concept of value that could be easily shared within the community that agreed with the concept, even though money has no inherent worth.  These days, most money doesn't even exist in physical form.  But civilization is willing to sacrifice all real values for more of this concept, to the point of killing real people and the entire planet.

            Concept is a shallow reflection of the reality of experience.  It is a powerful tool, which has allowed humanity to out compete all other species, and expand across the planet to unprecedented scale.  But we have lost touch with the natural world that we arise from, and still depend upon. 

 

 

 

Corporate Limitations

                                                                                                              written 28 Nov 2021

                                                                                                            published 5 Dec 2021

                                                                                                                                      

 

            Wikipedia defines a corporation as "an organization authorized by the state to act as a single entity.  One of the most attractive advantages business corporations offer to their investors is limited liability, meaning a passive shareholder in a corporation will not be personally liable for obligations of the corporation, or for torts (involuntary harms) committed by the corporation.  There is significant concern that limited liability in tort may lead to excessive corporate risk taking."

            The last line is significant, because limited liability is a fiction in the interconnected real world, where all actions have consequence.  As capitalist theory has devolved over time, the corporate obligation has been narrowed to prioritize only shareholder returns, without regard for any other part of society.  In fact, a special category of corporation had to be created to allow a company to consider employee, social, and environmental concerns, in the face of shareholder legal pressure for maximum short-term return on investments.

            The limiting of liability encourages investors who might be too cautious to make more speculative investments, thus furthering economic development, but it legalizes irresponsibility.  When the impact of a corporation's actions exceeds the valuation of the limited liability, the corporation has no further fiscal or legal responsibility, which means someone else has to pay the price.  This capitalizes the profits, and socializes the losses.

            For example, a mining company can operate until the profitability of the deposit drops, then declare bankruptcy and close the mine, leaving a mountain of mining tailings leaching toxic waste into nearby rivers or groundwater.  The investors in the company have taken the profit, but leave the extensive cleanup costs to "someone else".  A more recent example in the news is abandoned oil wells.  Thousands of wells that are no longer economically profitable have been abandoned without incurring the cost of safely plugging the wells.  The consequences of such irresponsible, but legal, corporate actions are born by the larger society in the costs of an actual cleanup, or in a degraded environment and higher health care costs if nothing is done. 

             Two methods have evolved to minimize the social costs of corporate irresponsibility after the profit is gone: regulations to address the issue before it occurs, and taxes to extract funds in advance.

            Regulations, with the power of legal penalties, impose limitations on corporate activities that are risky or socially expensive.  This forces mitigation costs to be factored into the profit pricing structure while there is profit to be made, which actually saves money overall.  For example, it is cheaper to remove pollution from water during a manufacturing process than it is to try to treat ground water after it has been polluted.  The difference is who foots the bill.  But regulations can be difficult to define and time consuming to pass into law.  In addition, corporate economic power quickly captures regulatory boards, which are subject to political forces, shifting the system from preventing harm to the society into one defining how much harm will be permitted. 

            Taxes are the other way society defends against corporate irresponsibility, providing funds from the profitable portion of the economy to pay for the social and environmental damage done by irresponsible corporate activities.  This is less targeted, since all profit making is taxed to pay for the actions of a few.  But it does fund some cleanup costs, which would be even more costly if left unaddressed.

            Republicans, who are quick to point out the "moral hazard" of giving people health care or extended unemployment benefits, never address the moral hazard of legalizing corporate irresponsibility.  They focus on the exclusive gain portion of business, completely disregarding the social costs.  As a result, we have been subjected to decades of attacks on "job killing regulations", without ever considering why these regulations were imposed in the first place.  There has been a similar long-term assault on taxes.  

            Capitalism looks for the profit in any activity, then expands to maximize the take, and the economy has benefited as a result.  But the unaddressed costs have expanded as well, and have now reached the level where they can no longer be ignored.  We are eroding the habitability of the entire planet in the pursuit of short-term profits for a few.  If humanity doesn't address this imbalance on our own, nature will surely address humanity.  There is no planet "B".