Yesterday in response to a reader's question I wrote:
1) Can we solve our crisis by living a simpler low tech-low energy lifestyle like Gandhi proposed?
Yes, if we reduce our human population to less than 20 million. That means ~5.8 million humans will dieoff.
Daan Joubert of South Africa writes:
I am not sure what numbers you are talking about - 20 million remaining would require that 5.98 BILLION has to die off if we assume 6 billion people alive. Let's assume however that returning to a largely agricultural life style (90%+ of people producing food on the land) means that global population is reduced to approx 1.5 billion, i.e. by three-quarters. Irrespective when that happens, but presumably during the next 50 years.
Thanks for the correction. You are right of course 5.98 billion would die. Must be the new math! ;>)
Which ties in with what you wrote later:
Humanity is facing extinction. Not some distant time in the future, but soon. We need to move to solve our problems NOW!
OK. 3/4's is not extinction, but still pretty rough on those who will not survive and even the survivors.
My question would be, given this, what are the problems to be solved? My answer - personal survival (with 'personal' extending to include children and in my case future grand-children and close family).
Yes, I agree. Unless humanity changes its direction soon, and with a major application of brakes and strong steering, we are going over the proverbial cliff.
But then you continue with:
The only way humanity will have a positive future is if we change the rules. To do this all we have to do is change our minds. We will have to make the decision to work together. We can go out into our neighborhoods and introduce ourselves. We can start projects where we work together. The word community is a contraction of the two words common and unity. Or as I like to spell it, CommUnity. We can begin to restructure our lives based on working together, and we must embrace sustainability.
That means we will have to stop driving cars. Not immediately, but soon. We can move information instead of people. With our powerful communication technology we really don't need automobiles, and we really don't need airplanes. Eventually, we won't even need mass transit.
My question #1: If we all get to work together, love each other, stop using cars or even mass transit etc. etc., how will that prevent the dieoff of 75% of the global population? I fail to see how becoming a CommUnity (even overnight, tonight) will solve the energy problems, the consequent food problems and the global warming problems that between them will IMHO inevitably progress over the next 50 years or so until only 1 person in 4 remains alive and with a 90% probability working on the land in near subsistence mode.
You are right. The problems are not small. We humans have really made a mess. But, as a synergic scientist my field of study in on working together. There are no separate solutions. We share the same air, the same water, and the same planet. Many on the energy lists have envisioned the Mad Max scenarios. Of course we could choose that path before extinction. But, there is a better way. Life has had this type of crisis before. We humans are a form of life. We can be much more powerful working together than we can be working separately.
Life has faced this problem before. As evolutionary biologist Elizabet Sahtouris has explained in her article the Evolution of Governance she is discussing our ancient ancestors the bacteria.
From whatever perspective we choose to define our relationship with them, it is clear we have now created the same crises they did some two billion years ago. ... The bacteria's remarkable technologies (all of which still exist among today's free-living bacteria) include the electric motor drive, which functioned by the attachment of a flagellum to a disk rotating in a magnetic field; the stockpiling of uranium in their colonies, perhaps to keep warm; and their worldwide communications and information system, based on the ability to exchange (recombine) DNA with each other.
Yet, like ourselves, with our own versions of such wondrous technologies, the ancient bacteria got themselves deeper and deeper into crisis by pursuing win/lose economics based on the reckless exploitation of nature and each other.
The amazing and inspirational part of the story is that entirely without benefit of brains, these nigh invisible yet highly inventive little creatures reorganized their destructively competitive lifestyle into one of creative cooperation.
Their crisis came about when food supplies were exhausted and relatively hi-tech respiring bacteria ("breathers" with electric motor drives) invaded larger more passive fermenting bacteria ("bubblers") to eat their insides out - a process I have called bacterial colonialism or imperialism. The invaders multiplied within these colonies until their resources were exhausted and all parties died. No doubt this happened countless times before they learned cooperation.
Somewhere along the line, the bloated bags of bacteria also included photosynthesizers, "bluegreens," which could replenish food supplies if the motoring breathers would push the enterprise up toward a lighter part of the primeval sea. Perhaps it was this lifesaving use of solar energy that initiated the shift to cooperation.
In any case, bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers eventually contributed their unique capabilities to the common task of building a workable society. In time, each donated some of their "personal" DNA to the central resource library and information hub that became the nucleus of their collective enterprise: the huge (by bacterial standards) nucleated cells of which our own bodies and those of all Earth beings other than bacteria are composed.
This process of uniting disparate and competitive entities into a cooperative whole was repeated when nucleated cells aggregated into multi-celled creatures. Once these biological "governments" evolved, they continued to function beautifully. What nature's healthy bodies and ecosystems exemplify are beautifully unified democracies of diversity, organized by locally productive and mutually cooperative "bioregions," and coordinated by a centralized service government. The underlying and overriding motive is toward healthy production and consumption for all.
We humans, like the bacteria of old, have produced a major crisis. But humanity, like other living systems, is resilient and creative under stress. And we have the further advantage that we can see how other living systems have evolved and survived, and gain clues as to what we are doing dysfunctionally and what could set us on a path of viability.
The co-Operation of synergy is much more powerful than the conflict of adversity, and even much more powerful than the market of neutrality. Our lifestyles would change dramatically. Our lives would become simpler. We would as Buckminster Fuller explains Think globally, but act locally. That means we would live and survive locally. But we wouldn't be going back. We wouldn't give up our knowledge or experience or all of our tools. We would live simpler, but smarter.
Question #2: Will you or the average person still love their neighbours and work together in a spirit of harmony if the neighbour has some food and your own children are starving to death? And here an answer that sharing the available food will solve the problem does not apply - not when there is only enough food for 25 people out of a hundred. Equal sharing will simply mean all 100 will die.
Synergy is not the simple division of what is available. Synergy is much more than equal sharing. It is intelligent and co-Operatively sharing. It is the intelligently restructuring of what is available. There will have to be less of us. Reproduction will not need to slow just to zero growth, it will need to decline much more rapidly. If only a few of every other generation of humans reproduce, our population can decline rapidly voluntarily.
I have a strong affinity for the goals you are pursuing and I wish you well with what you are doing. But realism compels me to consider what conditions will be like when the energy depletion really begins to have an effect on food production and distribution.
And as I have said before, the ortegrity system sounds nice, but what if the company using it applies its power to devising methods on how to sell more SUV's??
Or on how best to move its current manufacturing plants from the mid-west USA to the Philippines where peasant (or child?) labour can do the job much cheaper? Creating a win-win situation for all the decision makers through larger bonuses and more share options?
The ORTEGRITY is a tool for synergic organization. It works by optimizing the relationships of all members of an organization. Its mechanism is to create win-win relationships. But this win-win relationship only describes the ORTEGRITY from the inside. Synergic science shows us that humanity and even the Earth are one system. We need win-win-win-win relationships. You win. I win. Others win. And, the Earth wins. The ORTEGRITY must also have win-win relationships with all humans outside the organization and with the Earth itself.
Humanity has never worked together is the way I am proposing. I think such a reorganization could be enormously powerful. And, could produce a quality and quantity of life well worth living.
I think with the GIFTegrity and ORTEGRITY. We have new options.
Why not try co-Operation? What do we have to lose?
