One consequence of having developed a perspective on the long-term fate of modernity is a major disconnect when communicating with others. Even among people who have a sense for our predicament, my views often come across as “out there.”
Let me first say that I don’t enjoy it. Having different views than those around me makes me uncomfortable. I was never one to make a point of standing out or of having a contrary opinion for the sport of it (we all know those people). My favorite teams as a kid were the local ones (Falcons, Braves, Mocs), like everyone else around me. I wear blue jeans basically every day, blending in to Americana. No tattoos, piercings, or “non-conformist” affectations. It is, in fact, because of my continual discomfort at having stumbled onto a divergent view that I am compelled to write and write and write about it. I feel trapped between what analysis suggests and what almost everyone else around me thinks/assumes. The discomfort means that I keep trying to discover where I’m wrong (my life would be easier!), but the exercise usually just acts to reinforce the unpopular view.
In this post, I want to try to turn the tables: make members of the mainstream feel uncomfortable for a change. It probably won’t work, but I’ll try all the same. I could have titled the post: “No, You’re Crazy.”
My mental image for this post is one of a fishbowl in a vast and varied space devoid of other fishbowls. The fish living in the bowl have each other, the enveloping water, a gravel floor, fake plants, a decorative castle, and manna from heaven morning and night. Concerns of the fish need not, and in a way cannot extend beyond the boundaries of the bowl. The awkwardness is that the bowl is wildly different than the rest of the space in all directions. It’s the anomaly that the inhabitants deem to be normal. The analogy to ourselves in modernity should be clear…
What happens when the caretaker of the fishbowl disappears: when the food stops coming, and the environment becomes fouled? The artificial context of the bowl ceases to function or even make sense. The best outcome for the fish might be to get back to a pond or stream where they could live within their original context: woven into the web of life, enjoying and contributing to a rich set of “ecosystem services.” But getting there is not easy. Once there, figuring out how to live outside of the dumbed-down artificial construct presents another major challenge. As good as the fish seemed to have it, the fishbowl turns out to have been an unfortunate place to live. I invite you now to re-read this paragraph, substituting modernity for the fishbowl.
Our Caretaker?
The caretaker analogy doesn’t work transparently well in our case, as the closest thing we’ve got to a caretaker is the trio of biodiversity, ecological interconnections, and evolution. That’s what got us here and those are the mechanisms that will govern the future trajectory of life on our planet. In this sense, we are actively killing our caretaker by eliminating biodiversity, dismembering the ecological connections that bind life together, and producing damages far faster than evolution can track/correct.
The Fishbowl View
Getting back to the main thread, what exactly is the fishbowl view? In brief, it’s the pervasive sense that the current material environment is a normal fixture of life, so that imaginings of the future automatically import these anomalous features—often imagined to get even “more so.”
A repetitive theme of my writing has aimed to provide a temporal perspective (Story; Lifetimes; Movie; Limits), and for good reason. Likewise, I harp on the vastness of space and uniqueness of Earth in supporting life. Both of these help to illustrate our fishbowl: unusual locality in space and time.
Imagine tracing an invisible line horizontally through a modern neighborhood that happens to pass through an actual fishbowl in somebody’s house. As you move along the line, you murmur to yourself: “not fishbowl…not fishbowl…not fishbowl…” before finally: “fishbowl!” But then as you continue along, it just as suddenly reverts to “not fishbowl…not fishbowl…not fishbowl…” …possibly forever. Earth is the same way in space, and modernity is the same way in time. Having been “born in the fishbowl,” it is hard for us to imagine any other state. Even intellectually recognizing that the past was much different, it’s hard to let go of the emotional idea that something like the present is forever.
Our spatial isolation suggests that we ought to care deeply about Earth and its precious ecology—the primary thing that makes this planet special and ourselves possible. Likewise, this unusual moment in time suggests that we don’t get too complacent in our assumptions about its permanence.
Transient Perks
When musing about the “far” future (few-millennia scale; not really that far), most people in my experience take it for granted that we will have some form of:
- electricity;
- computers;
- metals;
- houses;
- plumbing;
- cities;
- mechanized transportation;
- books;
- satellites;
- universities;
- nations;
- money;
- in short: almost all the things you lay eyes on when looking up from your screen.
I’m not here to tell you that none of these things can or will persist, but to say: it’s not at all obvious. Welcome to thinking outside the fishbowl. It may seem crazy to suggest that we would lose all or most of these things, but outside the fishbowl it seems even more crazy (unsubstantiated, unexamined) to assume they’ll stay.
The items in the list above are quite new to the planet. Do you presume that we’ll have electricity a few-thousand years down the road? Consider for starters that having only utilized it for 150 years (ballpark), 99.95% of the time Homo sapiens has been on the planet has been without electricity. That’s 99.995% of the time humans of any form have been on the planet, and 99.999997% of Earth’s history. What about something as old as cities, use of metals, writing, or money—let’s say 5,000-years-old as an approximate catch-all? Even these things were not around for 98.3% of Homo sapiens, 99.8% of humans, and 99.9999% of Earth history. Being recent even on the scale of our species’ longevity carries the implication that the species could very probably outlast these transient features.
I recognize that a simplistic numerical game of this sort does not in itself prove anything about the future: just that these everyday elements are new on the scene, and therefore are presently indistinguishable from transient phenomena on relevant timescales. What tends to seal the deal for me is that these practices are joined at the hip with unsustainable modes of living that are driving ecological collapse. Unsustainable means transience: failure.
The Role of Imagination
My suspicion is that when people imagine the future, they are not taxing their imaginations very heavily but doing something more along the lines of extrapolation based on the familiar. When someone assumes we’ll have electricity in 1,000 years, it’s usually not because they have analyzed the continued availability of necessary materials and infrastructures, assessed the state of ecological health after 1,000 more years of continued high-tech life, or thought through issues of geopolitical stability and international trade in the context of potential deterioration of resource availability, climate, agricultural yield, market hegemony, and any number of other necessary conditions. No: the thinking seems to run little deeper than that it’s here now, so will be here then. The assumptions are not critically questioned.
Imagination is extremely tricky, because we can imagine in an instant things that have no biophysical basis and cannot transpire. Try it! The problem is—as pointed out previously—it is far easier to imagine the one way something could work (like preserving electricity ad infinitum) than the myriad—and thus more probable—ways such a thing could fail to happen.
I will admit that my starting point was just like that of most people: an unquestioned assumption that life would continue in recognizable form, only “giving up” things if superior substitutes became available. No reversion, for all love! What I realize now is that I wasn’t actually thinking about, analyzing, or fully contextualizing the situation. I’m ashamed to say that I was using the lazy, facile, common form of imagination: untethered from biophysical realities.
What Could Go Wrong?
Keeping the example of continuing to use electricity indefinitely—as a stand-in for many other items on the list—it seems easy to imagine its preservation simply because we have it right now. We’ve figured it out and would seem unlikely to forget how to produce it. Don’t we lock in that knowledge, and isn’t it possible or even likely that knowledge is the secret ingredient that can turn a “transient” into a new normal? What’s missing are the broader contextual and material conditions that are present today and are not guaranteed or even likely to persist. Consider for instance this exhausting heap of potentially relevant points (or skip if weeds aren’t your thing right now):
- Commercial electricity began in 1882, well after fossil fuels had transformed capabilities, and has thus only existed alongside temporary fossil fuels.
- Materials processing to make the necessary components have relied on heat from fossil fuels all this time (hard to replicate using “renewable” electricity).
- Fossil fuels are finite, and it isn’t clear how we would maintain current manufacturing capability (and mining) to support electricity without them.
- Producing, distributing, and utilizing electricity requires almost exclusively non-renewable resources: materials in addition to fossil fuels.
- Non-renewable resources are a sort-of one-time inheritance, not an indefinite guaranteed flow.
- Manufactured things break, corrode, and are discarded, so that their materials eventually become lost or (energetically, entropically) useless.
- Recycling is never 100% effective, and often recovery is well below 50%. Even aspirational 90% recovery is down to half the material after 7 cycles (taking decades, not millennia).
- Maintaining technology dependent on non-renewable materials requires perpetual mining, which gets progressively harder (and destructive) until it’s essentially prohibitive.
- Together, these spell a metal-starved future, making many present capabilities progressively harder to maintain.
- Manufacture of electronic equipment relies on non-renewable resources from global or at least widespread regions, access to which is also relatively new and fragile—and something we’ve never managed without fossil fuels.
- Depleted soils, aquifers, and other hits to agricultural productivity could lead to enough hunger and disruption that the stability required for maintaining high-tech industry is eroded.
- Demographic trends by themselves could lead to a substantial diminution of human population, the associated disruption also making it difficult or impossible to maintain electricity production and distribution.
- Economic collapse brought about by the inevitable failure of requisite growth, substantial future uncertainty, resource wars, loss of confidence, a shrinking workforce, or any number of other factors could leave industry in ruins and reliable electricity diminishingly rare around the world.
- Climate change plays its own role via geopolitical disruption and storms that make electrical distribution increasingly difficult to maintain (on top of many other environmental challenges), all while exacerbating ecological damage.
- Underneath all of this is ecological health: without it, life on Earth struggles and the domino effects are beyond our reckoning, as helpless dependents on the web of life’s integrity.
- Having initiated a sixth mass extinction, carried out by access to energy, continued powering of modernity (via electricity, for instance) most likely means compounding ecological harm, piling up accelerating extinctions, under which conditions high-maintenance humans are unlikely to fare well. (More likely, electricity will stop before modernity manages to extinguish most species on the planet, giving humans a chance to try again without electricity/modernity.)
- Core question: is electricity (and all that must come with it) compatible with ecosystem health, biodiversity, and evolution? Answer: we have no idea; but it certainly has not stood the test of time, and the present alarming declines should be a massive warning sign indicating: one is probably crazy to think so. What enormous set of concerns must we ignore to imagine it could work?
Okay, that dose of context is a lot to take in. Maybe not every point delivers a death knell to electricity and its associated/required practices. But why would each one in isolation need to kill electricity when even one or a few operating simultaneously could do the job. The way the real world works is that lots of things are happening all at once, interrelated, and beyond control. Perhaps more important is that I threw this list together off the top of my head and probably missed the main factors that will actually spell the end for electricity. For those who assume we will preserve the capability, what is the fully-contextualized analysis that simultaneously knocks out all these concerns and also the ones I failed to conceive? Whence the improbable certainty?
What about Knowledge and Innovation?
I know that it can be hard to imagine that clever humans, having invented electricity, would ever be without it from this point forward. A huge part of the conceptual difficulty is that no one alive today has ever lived on a pre-electrified Earth: we lack the personal experience of any other lifestyle (life in our fishbowl). Similarly challenging is that the story for generations has been one of steady accumulation of capabilities, far outnumbering the few capabilities we’ve lost.
I would say that we overvalue human thought as somehow transcendent and as overriding physical realities. It’s connected to human supremacist thinking: that we are as gods. We imagine knowledge as locked in forever. I suspect that many readers tripped over the “lost” clause at the end of the previous paragraph. It seems inconceivable that we could lose anything!
All you have to do is listen to an old-timer to pick up things that we used to be able to do but can’t any more. We tell ourselves that these quaint losses are obsolete, but their absence is genuinely missed (I’ll bet you also lament the loss of some things that are no longer realizable). In one category, species losses are irreversible. On the way to extinction is population loss and rarity. It is not hard to believe that a kid 50 years from now will almost think adults are making up stories of magical fireflies, polar bears, flying rodents (bats), honeybees, or the night call of the whip-poor-will.
We also lose technological practices. Unthinkable in my childhood, NASA no longer launches humans into space (since 2011). The instant response is that this is a temporary setback, soon to be remedied. Doesn’t it illustrate, however, that trends are reversible? Is it truly beyond the realm of imagination that in 100 years human spaceflight will be a thing of the past on a planet depleted of energy deposits, struggling to feed people, reeling from ecological harm that finally revealed its fundamental importance? Likewise, a person can no longer purchase a ticket for supersonic flight across the Atlantic. Supersonic passenger service failed for all sorts of reasons, and may very well never return.
The anticipated objection is that we don’t lose the knowledge to do these things. Not right away, sure. But how many generations of lost practice does it take to translate into lost knowledge? We’ve already lost knowledge on past ways of living. After 500 years of no human spaceflight and a much-simplified material way of living, I doubt humans would confidently claim to still possess the knowledge to launch people into space. The point is that material conditions are more “real” and powerful than human knowledge, which itself tends to rely on particular and sometimes transient material conditions for preservation. Use it, or lose it! Things that seem permanent within the narrow confines of the fishbowl may look completely different (fleeting) in a broader perspective, once the fishbowl construct runs its course. Expecting otherwise seems crazy to me.
