Are we the enemies of creation?

Following on from my last blog post I look further here into what the future might look like. I am following the premise that if in one way or another, the world is eventually ecologically devastated and industrial societies do slowly, or rapidly, collapse would a Mad Max like world emerge? What might a future society look like and would it in turn survive very long?

I recently went to see Mad Max: Fury Road. A film in which one of the worst possible futures mentioned in my last article has come to pass. In the wake of nuclear war and environmental degradation civilisation has collapsed and the people who are left have gone, well, rather mad! The straggler society that emerged in Mad Max is a brutal dictatorship where women are treated as chattel and the omnipresence of death is palpable. Hopefully this will not be the future in reality as if so there will be precious few of us to see it and probably even fewer who would want to.

Something else that comes through in the film (without giving away too much of the plot) is that though we might not necessarily be able to do anything about the grand tides of history and the situation we find ourselves in we can do something about the sort of company we choose to keep and how we conduct ourselves.

If in one way or another, the world is eventually ecologically devastated and industrial societies do slowly, or rapidly, collapse would a Mad Max like world emerge? What might a future society look like and would it in turn survive very long?

There is of course no certain answer to this, though it is certainly possible to imagine. The form it takes in Mad Max is ‘the citadel’:

Technologically the society in Mad Max is quite well positioned. The Citadel has cranes and wind turbines (most likely for some electricity generation and for pumping water from deep underground aquifers). The system of cogs and gears that runs the access gate to the fortification is also hand operated. That sort of technology (with a few metallurgy skills) will last! It also has intensive agricultural production in a defensible position elevated out of way of most desert dust storms.

Socially, however, it is a monstrosity. In this regard its long term prospects look far more dubious as it stands. If a society were to emerge from the ruins of an old one as well as a suite of example technologies that might have a chance of lasting into the future there are a number of social factors that need to be present as well; The society has to be able to maintain itself as a culture and want to pass on technological traditions, as well as not destroying itself through infighting, being absorbed or obliterated by their neighbours or by destroying its ecological foundations.

A writer I rather like, Dimitri Orlov, has done some excellent citizen-science style anthropology work looking at the question as to what sort of societies endure. He looked around the world at communities that abide for many generations as their own entities maintaining their own way of life and having healthy offspring who in turn do the same with theirs. These societies varied greatly in the sorts of adversity they faced and in the ways they lived. Orlov came across some general themes about how those communities organised themselves that are some good ground rules if you want to endure as a community. He (as part of a much larger body of work) came up with a list of 13 commandments which I have provided an abbreviated version of below.

The XIII Commandments of Communities That Abide

1.    You Probably Shouldn't come together willy-nilly and form a community out of people that just happen to be hanging around, who don't have to do much of anything to join, and feel free to leave as soon as they get bored or it stops being fun.

2.    You Probably Shouldn't trap people within the community. Membership in the community should to be voluntary. Every member must have an iron-clad guarantee of being able to leave, no questions asked. That said, do everything you can to keep people from leaving because defections are very bad for morale.

3.    You Probably Shouldn't carry on as if the community doesn't matter. The community should see itself as separate and distinct from the surrounding society

4.    You Probably Shouldn't spread out across the landscape. The community should be relatively self-contained. It cannot be virtual or only come together periodically.

5.    You Probably Shouldn't allow creeping privatization. The community should pool and share all property and resources with the exception of personal effects.

6.    You Probably Shouldn't try to figure out what to do on your own. The community should have collective goals and needs that are made explicit.

7.    You Probably Shouldn't let outsiders order you around. It's best if the community itself is the ultimate source of authority for all of its members.

8.    You Probably Shouldn't question the wonderful goodness of your community. Your community should have moral authority and meaning to those within it.

9.    You Probably Shouldn't pretend that your life is more important than the life of your children and grandchildren (or other members' children and grandchildren if you don't have any of your own).

10. You Probably Shouldn’t try to use violence, because it probably won't work.

11. You Probably Shouldn’t let your community get too big. When it has grown beyond 150 adult members, it's time to bud off a colony.

12. You Probably Shouldn't let your community get too rich. Material gratification, luxury and lavish lifestyles re not good for your community.

13. You Probably Shouldn't let your community get too cosy with the neighbours. Always keep in mind what made you form the community in the first place.

    Now this is a very general list – you may, for example, in a Mad Max world not really have any neighbours! I think it does provide a useful template though for the sorts of social set ups that have long term viability. Hierarchical societies can endure for centuries but they are often are not the most pleasant places to live and tend to use resources in a rather extravagant way. In the long run egalitarian societies have a better shelf life as well as tending to be a lot more pleasant to be in. A more cooperative equal society in a Mad Max style world most likely has much better long term prospects.

Such a society would not come about by itself though. Human beings can live in socially constructive, ecologically benign ways but we are not inherently predisposed to doing so. It may be that the rise and fall of civilisations is something outside the agency of individual people or political movements but you have to fight if you want to make your society a better place. This can mean hand grenades and armoured cars but it doesn’t have to if you’re not in quite as dire as a situation as Furiosa Imperator.

I titled this piece ‘Are We the Enemies of Creation?’ as there is a tendency amongst many people in the green movement (myself in the past included) to think that the human race is like some sort of virus that is inherently destructive. This obviously can be the case, and anyone sitting in a Mad Max world watching howling dust storms rip across the earth might quite reasonably think so! It is not necessarily so though and certainly not inherent to how human beings are. It has a great deal to do with the nature of the society in which people live:

For most of human existence we have lived in small egalitarian social groups as hunter-gatherer’s having a relatively limited impact on the environment around us (though we did manage to eat our way through various ice age species like woolly mammoths, they must have tasted great!). It is only relatively recently, in the past 10,000 years or so since the dawn of agriculture that hierarchical societies with a much greater ecological impact have developed.

Hierarchical societies depend upon a flow of resources from the periphery to the centre in order to function. The development of agriculture has been linked to the development of the first hierarchical societies with the first usable surpluses in the form of agricultural produce such as grain as the first means via which social complexity could build and one group of people could gain leverage over another. As societies have become more socially and technologically complex this trend has extended dramatically; from the ownership and use of people to physically taking other people’s land empires have been able to expand and develop.

The level of socio-economic complexity a society can sustain depends on the net energy surplus available to it, on a solar budget the most complex society that you’d be likely to see is something like ancient Rome. The discovery of fossil fuels completely changed the rules of the game in this regard. Humans discovered half a billion years of fossilised sunlight energy and we have since burned through it in a few very brief centuries and it has given us staggering amounts of energy surplus to play with. The result of this has been to have an orgy of consumption and resource over extraction and completely knock the biosphere of the planet out of kilter.

The description I give above should be taken more as an allegory rather than as a literal historical narrative as to the development of civilisation (as it is obviously much more complex than this).

A great deal of social good has come out of industrialism, billions of people have been pulled out of poverty, great social transformation has enabled a much greater level of social diversity and fluidity in societies and the average lifespan has increased dramatically. The idea of development (as long as its on people’s own terms) is a worthy and noble endeavour. I am no primitivist who wants to go and live in a cave!

The main problem is that our current way of doing things cannot continue forever and the longer that it does the worse the end outcome. Plenty of good work is being done promoting low carbon electricity generation etc. but at present this will still not be enough to alter the major trends of increasing pollution which will trash the planet.

One thing that is evident in Mad Max is that almost everyone is sick, the effects of widespread radiological poisoning are everywhere and people's ability to have healthy offspring is majorly in doubt. There is a certain amount of truth to the line ‘you are what you eat’. If everything you’re eating is radioactive the answer tends to be dead fairly quickly. Hopefully we won’t ever have to deal with the radioactive fallout from a nuclear war but there are still plenty of toxins which are now alarmingly prevalent in the biosphere that could lead to similar results.

  

Fortunately, you can avoid most of it if you eat a mainly plant based diet where you know where the inputs come from. In other words, food you’ve grown yourself in soil you know is at least reasonably clean. Which brings me round to answering my initial questions that if our civilisation collapsed what a future society might look like and might it look like Mad Max?

Any future society that has a suite of sustainable technologies and has a social makeup that means it has a chance of lasting more than five minutes will of course need food.

There is one type of practice which can be adopted universally and which at the moment can help make the world a better place and in future may well be essential to just sheer survival, Permaculture. It is an integrated design philosophy (the name derived from ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’) centred around simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and features observed in natural ecosystems to create sustainable systems that provide for people’s own needs and to recycle their waste. It can integrate housing, sanitation and social organisation as well as food production, into its makeup and has three main principles:

·    Care for the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. This is the first principle, because without a healthy earth, humans cannot flourish.

·    Care for the people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.

·    Return of surplus: Reinvesting surpluses back into the system to provide for the first two ethics. This includes returning waste back into the system to recycle into usefulness.

It bypasses the resource depletion aspect of industrial agriculture which is dependent on fossil fuels by aiming to generate a net energy surplus in food production and reinvesting the rest. Such a philosophy and design principle can be used in conjunction with the societal 13 commandments for a thoroughly sustainable society.  It gives a possible glimpse of a future society that definitely has a future.

  

You don’t necessarily have to be able to fight like Furiosa to fight for a better society. To quote the co-founder of Permaculture Bill Mollison on teaching Permaculture “I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.”

We are only the enemies of creation if we destroy; hopefully we will never have to find out what a future society trying to avoid Mad Max is like but it can’t harm to pick up a trowel and join the fight!

The fragility of our accomplishments (and the beauty of our dreams)

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

The imagery in this poem is a powerful reminder of the transience of even the most seemingly permanent and grand human endeavours, all things must pass, emperors and empires come and go. In our own civilisation, which is unique in its global scale and technological complexity, there are a number of visions of the future that are imagined which range from Panopticon nightmares to Jetson-esque technofantasies to post apocalyptic wastelands.

People have always been fascinated with the idea of predicting the future and imagining what it might be like and though it is nigh on impossible to predict specific future events with any degree of accuracy it is certainly possible to draw out trends. For example, it is observable that we are using resources at an unsustainable rate globally and altering the chemistry of the earth’s atmosphere with potentially disastrous results and that these trends look likely to continue. Whether or not a new hapless Arch Duke Ferdinand will get shot or other equally random black swan event is obviously much harder to say.

Unfortunately our visions of the future are just that. They are projections that are contextual to where their creator is from and say as much about that society in that moment as any potential future one. At any one point in time in a society there is a dominant narrative or narratives which form the social zeitgeist and there are established social institutions with a vested interest in the content. These institutions naturally are interested in self preservation and typically are resistant towards social change that could be perceived to undermine their position giving rise to what could be called 'societal inertia'.

For example, there has been a great disjuncture in terms of response to the threat of climate change recognised by climate scientists and political will to address the issue. Constant obfuscation and delaying tactics against regulation and the science of climate change by the fossil fuel industry and some governments mean that unfortunately we are now well on our way to living on an ice free planet with a CO₂ level above 500 parts per million as opposed to a pre-industrial average of 280ppm.

  

Visions of the future are sold to us all every day by a range of entities. Companies who would like us to buy their software need us first to buy into a vision of the future where i.e. ubiquitous virtual reality headsets (or whichever other silly gizmo de jour) are seen as a normal and positive thing. The same analogy can be made with a political party trying to get you to vote for them.

Having some intellectual tools to hand to examine the vision of the future they are presenting to you certainly can’t do any harm. Looking at the assumptions that underpin a view of the future can be very helpful in determining whether it is even possible, let alone desirable. The world may well be a better place with everyone having virtual reality headsets; I do however think such a future is rather unlikely as the physical resources do not exist to make it possible (more details about which can be read in article link below). The same schoolchild errors are made in a range of predictions about the future; infinite economic growth on a finite planet does still not appear to have registered with most economists, however insistent the laws of thermodynamics are.

Though it is not possible to work out the future in advance in any detail it is certainly possible to make at least an educated guess on what is more and less likely and what sort of future we might actually want. Recognising how such processes work is the first step to changing their course.

If today's knowledge of the world is compared to that of the past the differences are astounding. As our technical knowledge of the world has increased so it increases further, in the nature of the exponential function. There is also no guarantee that information gathering will carry on and that it won’t be lost - if anything history offers a picture strongly counter to this. It seems quite plausible that the future will be more localised, with economic growth a thing of the past and that much of our current extremely complex and brittle technology may not function in future due to a mixture of economic, social and resource constraint issues (again article link for details). Whether or not we allow ourselves to descend into a 1984 or MadMax type scenario will in large part depend on our actions collectively.

Life and human artifacts are always transitory to some degree but it appears that the main artifacts we are leaving for our descendants, if we are not careful, are going to be hazardous mounds of waste and very little of our own accomplishments and accumulated labours other than a series of Ozymandias style relics.

Imaginings of the future can as much serve as cautionary tales of what we should best avoid in the present as well as what we should strive for; dreaming is as much preventing the nightmares from becoming actual as it is making real our utopias.

To my eyes much of the valiant efforts over the past century of  people campaigning and fighting for equality and against greed and militarism have in large part kept the nightmares at bay as much as we have made the world into some sort of utterly new paradigm.

One of the most fun ways that people engage creatively with possible futures is through sub cultures like ‘Steampunk’, an aesthetic largely based on Victorian futurism ideas. One writer I rather like John Michael Greer has put forward 7 sustainable technologies that he thinks will be around in a few hundred years and I’ve listed them below with a Steampunk theme.

Dream about what sort of future you might like to see and start working towards it, it can be rather fun!

The future could close in like the jaws of some great slathering beast or spread before you like the vista of an open road into a blossoming land of new possibility.

The choice is yours...

1. Organic intensive gardening:

2. Solar thermal technologies:

3. Sustainable wood 
:

3. Sustainable wood heating:

4. Sustainable healthcare:

4. Sustainable Healthcare

5. Letterpress printing and its related technologies:

6. Low-tech shortwave radio

6. Low-tech shortwave radio:

7. Computer-free mathematics:

Who knows what houses people might live in...

or what might be fashionable to wear..

The Parasite

A guest post from a friend & illustrator Ross Howell:

Arthur C. Clarke was an excellent Science Fiction writer, one of the best. He wrote excellent stories from great tracts to relatively short ones such as  "The Parasite". If you've not read any of his stories I would strongly recommend them, they are very imaginative and often have a somewhat dark twist at the end. 

One of the best ways a story can be brought to life is through subtle illustrations that bring the words to the fore.

I will from time to time pop up the odd illustration either alongside Cora's work or of my own. Tune in any time you like and have a peruse!

Below is an extract from "The Parasite" to give you a feel for what I am proposing:

"'Omega doesn't belong to our age: he's somewhere in the future, immensely far ahead of us. For a while I thought he must be one of the last men - that's why I gave him his name. But now I'm not sure; perhaps he belongs to and age when there are a myriad different races of men, scattered all over the universe - some still ascending, others sinking into decay. His people, wherever and whenever they may be, have reached the heights and fallen from them into depths the beasts can never know. There's a sense of evil about him, Jack - the real evil that most of us never meet in all our lives. Yet sometimes I feel almost sorry for him, because I know what has made him the thing he is.

'Have you ever wondered, Jack, what the human race will do when science has discovered everything, when there are no more worlds to be explored, when all the stars have given up their secrets? Omega is one of the answers. I hope he's not the only one, for if so everything we've striven for is in vain. I hope that he and his race are an isolated cancer in a still healthy universe, but I can never be sure.

'They have pampered their bodies until they are useless, and too late they have discovered their mistake. Perhaps they have thought, as some men have thought, that they could live by intellect alone. And perhaps they are immortal, and that must be their real damnation. Through the ages their minds have been corroding in their feeble bodies, seeking some release from their intolerable boredom. They have found it at last in the only way they can, by sending back their minds to an earlier, more virile age, and becoming parasites on the emotions of others."