There's something repellent about most paleo-environmentalists, something deeply wrong in their value systems that oozes into their words and deeds producing mean-spirited acts. But it isn't just their values that are repellent, their reasoning is defective as well, perhaps a feedback phenomenon from their values.

They are misers, convinced that there is only so much loot around and determined to get their propers, what they feel is owed them in some way. This is simple greed masquerading as fairness. Consider this miserly rant:

Less than a quarter of the Earth's surface actually sports much in the way of life. The rest – the dark deep ocean, the high mountain peaks, the deserts and ice caps – isn't totally lifeless... But it's hard to make a living in a place where nature's bounty consists of a few bacteria going pokily about their business deep beneath the frozen ice. No, for our purposes, we've got a quarter of a planet.

No, we have a universe. At present we have little more than this planet, but we have all of it not 1/4. The deep oceans, mountains, deserts and poles written off as worthless above are very valuable. They are directly valuable for their contributions to the well being of the planet as a whole as well as being sources of particular goods. But they also participate in planetary processes, a perpetual mixing and recycling of material. Increasingly they are being colonized, an important issue since we will in due course colonize even less hospitable environments in the universe.

One way to wrap our brains around the implications of that many people sharing a small planet is to do some math, divide up the usable part of the globe by the number of folks who want to use it. This would give us a sense of what a fair share would be for each of us.

In miserly fashion the reason to focus on the handy loot is to get down to the real business of grasping as much as possible. The math spoken of is miser-math, or as the poet said "here's one for you, nineteen for me", since there is no intention at all of an equitable sharing. The overwhelming majority of the loot will be reserved for official use. Only the crumbs left over are subject to equitable sharing.

To be really fair, though, we should probably not use up everything right away. Our kids and grandkids may want to eat, drink and breathe, too. So, we should probably only take as much as we can while allowing nature to renew itself.

No, we owe our kids increased well being rather than table scraps, leavings that we did not consume. Our task is to improve the world so that they can have a better start and reach a higher percentage of their potential than we did. The insights we have had are communicated to them, as our ancestors communicated to us, allowing ever better understanding. For example, rather than burning trees and dung as our ancestors did for energy, we burn petroleum which has a much higher energy output per unit of carbon. We are increasingly de-carbonizing civilization yielding more useful energy and less smoke. The move from carbon to hydrogen that has been occuring as we move up the energy ladder continues with current efforts to use even more hydrogen and less carbon, even perhaps moving to a pure hydrogen economy in time.

...our natural “capital” is a gift we've inherited simply by having the good luck to evolve on such a bountiful planet. And in using that capital, we should leave enough nature undestroyed that future generations can draw upon it as well. We should leave the capital alone and live off the interest.

No, we should put our capital to work to create more capital rather than sitting back and relying on usurious proceeds from "preserved" capital. Misers are lazy as well as greedy and always seek ways to prosper effortlessly, uncreatively, and unproductively.

How much nature is that per person? Well, luckily, some ecogeeks have worked that out for us. They've found a way to measure the impacts of our lives on the planet, what they call our "ecological footprints." In a fair and sustainable world, these ecological footprints would work out -- in Matthis Wackernegel's equations, which really smart people seem to think are pretty accurate, if not perhaps a bit optimistic -- to about 1.9 hectares per person (that's 4.7 acres). In other words, if you divided the usable part of the world up by the number of people who want to use it, we'd each have find a way to meet our needs sustainably from the bounty of a little under 2 hectares.

No sane person would do this though since there are ever more of us and that is one of our most valuable sources of capital increase. More minds as well as hands make the work lighter. Our evolution from carbon to hydrogen is due in no small part to our breeding success and increased longevity.

But the planet is shrinking for another reason: we're using it up. We each get 1.9 hectares, and we're already using 2.3. Where's the extra half a hectare coming from? It's coming from nature's capital. Every year, we cut more forests, graze more cows, drive more miles, dump more trash -- gobble up more stuff, and spit out more waste. And since we're already gobbling and spitting more than the planet can sustainably take, the result is that every year nature has less to offer us.

Nonsense. Hunting down all the mammoths and eating them was not the end of the world, it was inspiration for a change of diet. The way to become ever lighter on the land is to become ever brighter in our methods rather than sinking into miser mode and hoarding the loot already accumulated. Every year nature has more to offer us. Actually, nature has always been offering far more than we could grasp. Nature is not a miser, we are just too ignorant to recognize a sweet deal sometimes. We are getting better.

Here too, really geeky guys with supercomputers have gone to work, and one thing they've found is pretty shocking: as they'd put it, we're already using between 40 and 50% of the world's "net primary productivity."

This is surely wrong since we only have a glimmer of the earth's productivity, but more importantly it is miser-think again which seeks to divy up a hoard rather than being productive in turn. Looting the earth is not our best option since we are quite capable of producing our own loot. Learning to think like creative humans rather than miserly looters would be beneficial. Fortunately misers are in the minority if not as rare as we would like.

But enough fisking, the point has been made. Miserly approaches to human cultural evolution aren't just repellent expressions of mean-spirited values, they don't work. Trying to squat on a mountain of gold and consuming however meagerly results in eventual starvation. This is unhuman, inhuman, non-human. Humans create rather than consume. All living things do so but humans do it intentionally. We have cleverly figured out how to increase the productivity of land by cultivating it and increased the energy available by using fossils that otherwise were no longer part of the working set rather than burning trees. These are just obvious examples and there are many, many more.

As we grow more capable we come to understand the defects of previous methods and so invent ever better ones. Live and learn. This is no mystery, not secret knowledge available only to adepts. Even the misers know that they are deeply wrong but see an opportunity for profit if they can persuade others to do their bidding. In a perverted way even the misers are creative, if only in the destructive arts. They are also instructive, if only serving as examples of the misery of miserly behavior, a lesson for youths of the consequences of meanness of spirit and sloppy thinking.

This isn't a game - well it is but it's a real game - and there are real consequences for poor performance. Turning inward and refusing to create, refusing to produce, and refusing to evolve to ever more competent methods of survival guarantees stagnation and eventual collapse. It's been tried, most memorably in China and Japan which turned inward and sought to remain feudal forever rather than risk evolution through contact with strange people and ideas. It just made them weak and backward, easy pickings for more vibrant cultures. What would happen if a whole planet, the whole human species tried that? It would fail for internal reasons eventually since it is inhuman but as a thought experiment we can consider external events too. It may not be aliens who show up, maybe it's just an asteroid that will rock our world, but we can be confident that something will do so.

Why give up? Why not try to endure and become ever better. Why not try to become a multi-platform heterogeneous species able to thrive in diverse places rather than huddling like misers on a single planet waiting for Lucifer's hammer to fall? To fail so weakly is a failure of imagination as well as a retarded aesthetic sensibility. Only a miser could love it.

» Grand Designs from Crumb Trail
Alex Pang comments on a review of Bruce Mau's book Massive Change, a sort of latter day manifesto of the descendants of the 19th century Arts & Crafts movement, the up scale Luddites of their era attempting to stand......[read more]
Tracked: March 11, 2005 12:27 AM