The Ostrich Factor

Garrett Hardin was a lad who not only thought a lot, but could also think well.  I recently discovered a Hardin book I had not heard of, The Ostrich Factor — Our Population Myopia (1998).  Hardin was an interesting blend of an ecological conservative, and a growth-hating political conservative who detested economists.  I hoped that this book would provide fresh insights on the huge and difficult problem of overpopulation.

After Living Within Limits was published in 1993, critics noted that Hardin complained about overpopulation, but failed to provide a remedy.  Hardin admitted that he had been intimidated by the explosive taboo on the subject, which incinerates every dreamer who blunders into it, foolishly preaching common sense.  Hence, the ostrich factor — never touch 800-volt issues that are surrounded by large piles of scorched skeletons.  You can’t win, so bury your head in the sand, and have a nice day!

There is a widespread fantasy, drilled into us by cultural myths, that our society is guided by reason and elevated moral principles.  It’s silly nonsense, but we have a hard time seeing this.  Many people waste their entire lives, sad victims of the tragedy of the consumers — powerful myths that compel us to spend our lives working, in order to move as much stuff as possible from nature to landfills, in order to gain the respect of our peer group, which suffers from the same mass hysteria.  Well-trained consumers never question 800-volt myths.

Modern society is focused on the individual, not the community or ecosystem.  I am all that matters.  If I can gain status and respect by wiping out forests or fisheries, or throwing the planet’s climate out of balance, I will.  I don’t care that I’m leaving behind a wasteland for future generations.  Of course, if future generations were able to vote today, or if we were raised in a sane culture, our world would be radically different and far healthier.

Hardin was fascinated by the poisonous power of taboos, and he invited an imaginary Martian into his book, to observe our society as an objective outsider.  (I wish he had used humans from the future.)  The two of them explored uncomfortable notions that will make some readers squirm and snarl.  They provide us with intense lessons about the powerful headlock that taboos have on our ability to think.  Taboos push many commonsense ideas off limits, severely handicapping our freedom to think, forcing many to live like two-year olds, ecological psychopaths, or chronically depressed shoppers.

Taboos vary from place to place and time to time.  I was surprised to see that Hardin only mentioned abortion once, with regard to a quote from 1886, describing a situation where abortion was legal, but contraception was not.  In that scenario, many physicians chose to break the law against providing contraception.

It is important to understand that many wild cultures had customs that encouraged population stability.  Their ongoing survival depended entirely on food from the surrounding wild ecosystem, and too many mouths led to painful problems.  Their utmost concern was the health and stability of the community, not the whims of individuals.  They shared and cooperated.  It was obvious to them that the carrying capacity of their ecosystem had genuine limits.  For us, living in a temporary wonderland of supermarkets, limits are hard to imagine — until we crash into them.

The emergence of agriculture redefined carrying capacity, which varied from year to year, depending on the harvest.  Limits on breeding weakened or vanished.  Hardin quoted Tertullian, a third century Christian thinker from Tunisia, who was spooked by the misery of overpopulation (when the global population was 150 million).

Tertullian wrote, “As our demands grow greater, our complaints against nature’s inadequacy are heard by all.  The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.”

Like Tertullian, Reverend Malthus (1766-1834) also lived in an era of turbulent growth, and he became a notorious heretic for reminding society about the existence of carrying capacity.  Two hundred years later, he remains fiercely detested, mostly by people who have never read him, because he pointed out a serious 800-volt issue, a super-taboo.  Never, never, never suggest that there are limits to growth!

Perpetual growth on a finite planet is obviously impossible, obviously insane, and insanely destructive.  Sustainable growth is an oxymoron.  But few goofy myths are more powerful.  We are constantly reminded that perpetual growth is the purpose of life.  Grow or die!  Our official religion is Growth Forever.  Fanatical believers are called optimistic, and optimism is “good.”  Hardin disagreed, “At the present rate of population growth, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the future.”

With regard to population, our culture asserts two rights simultaneously.  (1) Right to life.  The UN decrees that “every man, woman, and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition.”  (2) Right to limitless reproductive freedom.  “Every woman has the right — perhaps with the agreement of her mate(s) — to determine how many children she shall produce.”

There are no natural rights; rights are legal inventions.  Note that these two sacred rights are not accompanied by sacred responsibilities.  Hardin concluded that overpopulation would not be resolved by the voluntary choices of individual families.  In a finite world, unrestricted freedom is intolerable.  Survival is mandatory; freedom is not.  Effective solutions should be based on community-sensitive rules, ideally produced by a policy of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.”  Our wild ancestors generally succeeded in doing this, because their cultures saw limits as being perfectly normal, not draconian.

Hardin knew that “coercion” is an obscene word in a culture that worships individualism, but he noted that we submit to coercion when we stop for red lights, or when we bike on the right side of the road.  Coercion is often reciprocal.  Money is coercion.  There are many things we will eagerly do for money that we would never do for free.  We are often coerced by nothing more than a sweet “pretty please.”

Hardin thought that one world government was impossible, because there is not a single world culture.  Trying to get different cultures to agree on anything is a challenge for advocates of multiculturalism.  Because of this, Hardin offered no silver bullet solution for the world.  Each culture will have to design its own method for limiting population.

Predicaments have no solutions, but problems do.  Overpopulation is merely a temporary problem, and there are two solutions.  (1) We can make a commonsense effort to live below carrying capacity.  (2) We can bury our heads in the sand, make no effort to influence the future, and let Big Mama Nature mercilessly do the dirty work.  The commonsense approach saves a lot of wear and tear on the ecosystem, and makes life far less hellish.  It is enthusiastically endorsed by the spirits of future generations.

Hardin, Garrett, The Ostrich Factor — Our Population Myopia, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998.

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Four

OK, so our modern civilized world is lost, but we’re starting to wake up to the notion that we’ve travelled a long ways down a dead path, because we have been guided by a dead vision.  We didn’t create this vision, we inherited it, and we have (so far) been unable to summon the power to acknowledge its fatal defects, reject it, and outgrow it — a long and difficult process.

Luckily, as we move beyond the temporary bubble of abundant energy, the unfolding collapse will undermine the dead vision.  The portion of the vision related to perpetual growth and insatiable consumption will be run over and killed by economic decay.  Unluckily, the portion of the dead vision related to the notion that humans are the divine owners and masters of the world is likely to persist, as we return to a muscle-powered way of life — but it will be weakened and vulnerable.

Following the Black Death, many survivors lost their faith in religion.  Why worship a god that permitted such immense horror?  In the wake of our collapse, many minds will likewise be roaring with resentment about all aspects of industrial civilization.  Our glorious era of astonishing innovation and human brilliance will shapeshift into a hideous calamity of unimaginable stupidity and unforgivable destruction.

“Never again!” will be the mantra of the survivors.  But how thoroughly will they comprehend the mistakes that created the disaster?  How likely will they be to continue the practice of unsustainable habits, especially soil mining, animal enslavement, and metal making?  One of the most powerful medicines of all is understanding.  What knowledge would be of great importance to our descendants?  How can we help them escape from the tentacles of our dead vision, and safely return to wildness and freedom? 

They will need to understand a reality-based version of history that discards the daffy myths and tells us who we are, warts and all — how we stumbled into this mess, and how our mistakes snowballed into the current disaster.  They will need to understand genuine sustainability, an extremely important subject that our society keeps chained up in the basement.  This is why I’ve written two books on sustainability — to shine a light on a clan of thinkers who are not wind turbine salesmen, or sustainable development hucksters.

Unfortunately, our institutions of education, religion, media, and government are manifestations of the dead vision, and they seem committed to going down with the ship.  To them, real history and genuine sustainability are matters of heresy that must religiously be beaten and stoned.  Sustainable living will never become our goal if we don’t know what it is, or why it’s essential to the health of the land, and the survival of our species.

Fortunately, the system is rotting from within.  In its prime, this system vigilantly protected us from fresh ideas and healthy visions — the cultural gatekeepers never allowed this information to enter our madhouse.  But the madhouse walls are crumbling. 

Recently, we have entered a delightful bubble of freedom.  For a limited amount of time — until the lights go out, or freedom is squashed — anyone can publish a book, release a song, display a painting, share a video, or discuss ideas with people from around the world.  For a limited amount of time, we have access to a global communication system.  Anything you do can be made available to billions.  If the moment is ripe, fresh ideas and healthy visions can go viral, rapidly spreading — and these days, large numbers of minds might be intrigued by fresh ideas and healthy visions.  Amazing things could happen.

Today, seven-point-something billion people are sitting ducks in a no-man’s-land between two powerful unfriendly forces.  On one side is climate change, which has many uncomfortable surprises in store for us.  On the other side is the end of the cheap energy bubble, and the collapse of industrial civilization, which will also bring many uncomfortable surprises.  In other words, big trouble is coming, big suffering.  The bill for our experiment in tool making has come due, and it is enormous.

Along with big trouble comes big opportunity.  Mother Nature will mercilessly resolve the overpopulation problem that we have ignored, a problem that has made sustainability impossible.  Another barrier to sustainability, our industrial system, will run out of energy, disintegrate, and rust in peace, terminating our dreadfully meaningless consumer society.  The final barrier to sustainability resides between our ears.

When the lights go out, our crippling isolation from the family of life will thankfully end.  There will be nothing to eat in the refrigerator, and all of our glowing electronic screens will thankfully go blank forever.  We will have no choice but to go outdoors, devote some serious attention to the living world, and develop a profound sense of respect for its power and beauty (and edible aspects).  We will have the precious opportunity to shift to a healthy path, and remember how to live like wild and free human beings once again.  Will we do it?

We at last come to the mother of all questions.  If people educated in industrial cultures survive the storm, will they regroup and repeat the same mistakes we’ve been making for thousands of years?  Or will they wisely perceive these devastating mistakes as important lessons to be learned?  What happens if the dead vision has no serious competition when the lights go out?  Game over?  Maybe climate change will make it impossible to repeat our cardinal mistakes.  Maybe it won’t. 

What if people imagined new visions before the lights went out, and shared them with the world?  What might happen if the moment was ripe, and these visions became as popular as Avatar, Lady Gaga, or Harry Potter?  What might happen if millions of minds received healthy doses of stories depicting real history and genuine sustainability?  What might happen if we acknowledged the existence of reality and began to have deep, meaningful discussions about it?  Could this awakening make a vital difference for those who live in the aftermath?  Could it help the present generation make better choices?

Those whose minds dance outside-the-box are not sodden with despair.  Big change is coming, and the rich and powerful can do nothing to stop it.  There is a faint light at the end of the tunnel.  The gang rape of the planet is running out of fuel, and will eventually cease.  Better days are on the way — a long era of healing.  Sooner or later, with or without us, the family of life will once again return to balance.

The ancestors remind us that there was a time before civilization, industrialization, overpopulation, the madness.  There will also come a time when they have long been forgotten.  There is no undo button, but there will come a day when the storm has passed.  Joy!

God Save Me From A Normal Life - Part One

Returning to genuine sustainability in the near future is impossible, because there are far too many people in the world.  There is no way to feed them all without causing deeper permanent injuries to the ecosystem.  Sadly, humankind displays almost no interest in doing what needs to be done to address overpopulation.  It’s much easier to unplug our brains, close our eyes, and assign the unpleasant business to famine, war, and disease.  So be it.

Our extreme overpopulation is possible because we are living in a temporary bubble of abundant energy.  Unsustainable industrial agriculture can produce far more food than the unsustainable muscle-powered farming of earlier times.  But the days of cheap energy are behind us now, which means that the outburst of unusual growth and prosperity will wind down, stop, and reverse.  Sooner or later, industrial civilization as we know it will run out of fuel and collapse.  Industrial agriculture will no longer be possible.  The next 50 years are going to be radically different from the last 50 years. 

We’ve spent our entire lives living in a massively unsustainable, planet-killing way of life.  So did our parents and grandparents.  To our minds, this way of life seems perfectly normal, and we expect it to continue forever.  Actually, it’s a bizarre accident in the human journey, it’s moving into its final stages, and it can never happen again, thankfully. 

A huge obstacle to the healing process is our perception of history.  We’ve all been taught that our industrial civilization is nothing less than a miracle.  It’s always getting better, and the best is yet to come.  Does this sound like a problem that needs to be fixed?  Well, what it sounds like is a history that has little relationship with reality.  Bogus history provides us with a false identity, and it enables self-destructive thinking and living.

Thus, a primary task in the healing process is deliberately unlearning bogus history.  We mistakenly assume bogus history to be the truth, because it has been repeatedly hammered into our brains during many years at school.  It becomes the foundation of our worldview.  Bogus history hides the enormous problems of progress under the bed, and presents us with glorious myths of brilliant achievement.

If we gaze in the mirror and see the reflection of a being lucky to be living at the wondrous zenith of the human journey, then the notion of genuine sustainability is purely absurd, and not worthy of consideration.  But what if we see the reflection of someone who has had the misfortune of inheriting a hideous treasure of mistakes and illusions from 300 generations of well-intended ancestors?  In this case, genuine sustainability takes on the appearance of the antidote, the cure, something precious — a lifesaver.

Unlearning bogus history is like taking a powerful laxative that vigorously cleanses us of our false sense of identity.  Happily, this process has begun.  A growing number of radical thinkers are seriously questioning the value of domestication, agriculture, civilization, and industrial society.  They are coming to appreciate the intelligence and virtues of nature-based societies. 

The doddering drooling defenders of the mainstream work hard to keep these new thinkers safely locked away in the lunatic fringe cage, but their efforts will fail.  These new thinkers are displaying the first signs of powerful wisdom to emerge in the entire history of civilization.  They announce that our way of life is a mistake, and it’s rapidly destroying us.  Comprehending this essential idea enables and encourages clear thinking, intelligent change, and great healing — beautiful breakthroughs long obstructed by the idiotic old myths of progress and perpetual growth.

We must have history.  We cannot live with vision and power if we don’t know who we are, and where we came from.  After we’ve thrown bogus history overboard, we’ll need new histories that have deep roots in reality.  At the foundation of the healing process are learning, thinking, discussing, simplifying, and exploring nature (rewilding).  This work can be pursued at low cost, with greater freedom, outside the realm of formal institutionalized education, by people who want to make meaningful contributions with their lives.

Once upon a time, Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.”  This is why many nature-based societies encouraged people to discover their calling via vision quest ceremonies.  Living with a vision provided us with a direction and purpose in life, and helped us avoid getting lost and wandering aimlessly.

Societies also need a vision to live well.  In nature-based societies, vision was provided by the time-proven traditional culture.  The way to a good life was to carefully follow the path of the ancestors.  In today’s disaster-based societies, the guiding vision enshrines perpetual growth — a dead-end path of infantile excess that fuels catastrophic ecocide, and pandemics of mental illness and degenerative disease. 

Our disaster-based culture is bloated with fantasies of unsustainable science fiction futures, like the Jetsons, Star Wars, or colonies on Mars.  Nature exists outside the walls of these bleak humans-only prisons.  We dream that tomorrow will be a technological wonderland — robot-driven electric cars, smart highways, smart grids, high-speed trains, Internet everything, windmills and solar panels, and on and on — nothing sustainable, and nothing that is necessary for a healthy and enjoyable life.  This vision has no future, because the temporary bubble of abundant energy has no future.  Perpetual growth on a finite planet is impossible, and pursuing it is insane.  It’s time for a new vision.

To be continued.