News You Can Use?

I work for a non-profit conservation organization where at one time a common practice would be to circulate amongst its staff cutting edge science papers that consisted of research that was relevant, revealing, and potentially guiding to how the organization worked to fulfill its conservation mission.  It was with those halcyon memories in mind that I came upon this particular summary of a publication in the Journal Nature:

http://www.sfu.ca/pamr/media-releases/2012/study-predicts-imminent-irreversible-planetary-collapse.html

Relevant quotes:

Global-scale forcing mechanisms today “include unprecedented rates and magnitudes of human population growth with attendant resource consumption, habitat transformation and fragmentation, energy production and consumption, and climate change,” says the study.

Human activity drives today’s global-scale forcing mechanisms more than ever before. As a result, the rate of climate change we are seeing now exceeds the rate that occurred during the extreme planetary state change that tipped Earth from being in a glacial to an interglacial state 12,000 years ago. You have to go back to the end of the cataclysmic falling star, which ended the age of dinosaurs, to find a previous precedent.

“Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly. More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. It’s a very tall order.”

Organizations exist under the assumption that you can “get there from here”, that there is a workable solution that lies within the reach of our institutions and socio/political/cultural systems.  This article suggests otherwise.

As such, it is not likely to be circulated amongst organizational staff – no one within the non-profit I work for (or anywhere else) for that matter knows what to do with this type of information other than hope that it is wrong and continue on.  If the paper is to be believed, it suggests that the game is all but up for modern human industrial cultures, and that there is little hope to be gained for avoiding collapse and its associated mass human traumas within the next few decades.

Its interesting to observe how the analysis → conclusion → strategy →strategy implementation flow chart problem solving approach that is hard wired into our institutions systemically rejects any piece of information that has no chance of coming out the other side of the process intact, no matter how valid or sound the flowchart input analysis.  For the current example, there is no meaningful organizational response to the information in this article, other than to acknowledge that either attaining organization mission is impossible if the message is on target, or acting as if the analysis and conclusions are flawed and not to be trusted.  And we humans have an abundance of very effective psychological mechanisms that stop us from landing in a state of cognitive dissonance, which intervene before we actively and openly contemplate such dilemmas.

One of my favorite all-time quotes is from the author Ed Abbey, who wrote: “there is hope, but not for us”.  My hope lies within the knowledge that it is possible to achieve a way of life that is congruent with and accounts for the limitations, foibles, and beauty of human life, and yet is consistent with a sustainable co-existence with all other species of creation.  I’m not quite sure what this way of life looks like, but whatever it is, but I am quite confident that it is at the opposite of the spectrum from what we currently have.   And we won’t be able to get there from here without the collapse of the unsustainable. 

For better or worse, therein lies my hope, its realization ever so unlikely to be witnessed by my own eyes,  a hope that inherently consists of uncontrollable events incomprehensibly horrible coming between where we are now and its actualization.