Donella Meadows and Paul Hawken's Eco-Centric Perspectivism
Discussion
Eric Schaetzle:
"Perspective is the hardest thing to find in life, and the most precious gift we can give the next generation. A trustworthy perspective allows us to get through the day to day challenges, and an exceptional one might even help to prepare us for the unknown. Perhaps a holistic perspective was our earliest and most natural living experience. Can we move from an anthropocentric to a more ecocentric perspective (which as I understand it is also an Indigenous perspective)? This is a question that invites us to form, like Zhuangzi, a “perspective on perspectives”. We can see a continuum or spectrum of views. Modernity has overlaid upon our native holism additional information and models that may either contribute to reinforcing it, or alternatively fracture and break it apart. What promotes unity? What agitates and divides, taking us down one of many blind alleys off the central pathway? On one extreme are those viewpoints that are generally fatalistic and don't believe we are capable of producing a beneficial outcome on the global scene (perhaps these are partially a consequence of the sort of dynamics McGilchrist highlighted). But there are also ideas about how to change cultural thinking processes and usher in a more socially responsible ecocentrism, a rebirth. Who can articulate, interrogate, and implement, per Hansen, "behavior that skillfully follows a natural path"?
Scientists have been very clear that we need to stay away from tipping points in the climate system to avoid ecological collapses, an impoverished future and, in the worst case, a potentially irrecoverable planetary phase transition. Recently David Roberts noted "To hold temperature rise to less than 1.5° or 2°C this century will require enormous, heroic decarbonization efforts." The uncertainty surrounding when these events may occur definitely should prompt the sort of "heroic decarbonization efforts" required to avoid them. And yet, according to most observers, heroic efforts are simply not forthcoming (David Simon pointedly called our government "inert" and incapable of action in its current form). This produces a form of cognitive dissonance. Perfectionists, who cannot change the reality of political inaction and reduce the dissonant thoughts this situation gives rise to, instead change their beliefs about the necessity of action. That frees them to find some other goal, one that they believe is obtainable and consistent with their (now slightly altered) worldview, and pursue that instead. The retreat from reality to ever more constricted and abstract spheres of interaction further drives the resulting asynchronous relationships toward dissolution. A predictable pattern repeatedly unfolds: when perfection is found to be unobtainable, an "all or nothing" vacillation between fantasy and nihilism results. When progress toward realizing the vision of an ecological civilization (or any other goal) happens to stall or reverse, the Western mind tends to flip to nihilistic pessimism, renounce the goal, and pivot attention elsewhere. National attention on advancing climate change shifts to space tourism, or some other subject in line with the prevailing culture and its more extreme forms of expression (conservative, libertarian, individualist, and escapist), and we are collectively lulled into a sort of fatuous optimism. This mindset is far too brittle and inflexible to survive under conditions of rapid change. It refuses to engage until, that is, reality agrees to its terms of engagement. Of course reality does no such thing. The laws of physics are unforgiving. Roberts reminds us, "Our only choice is the proportions of the mix: action vs. impacts. The less action we and other countries take to address the threat, the more impacts we will all suffer." We must engage with reality on its own terms, not ours, despite any dissonance we may feel. We must abandon any pretense to perfection, adopt epistemic humility, and view all action along a continuum with varying proportions of action vs. impacts. Here, where we stand is as important as what we see, and along this continuum exist the tipping points for various species, societies, and ecosystems (Quaternary megafauna, genocides, ozone depletion, coral reefs, glaciation, rainforests, permafrost, etc.). Some points have been passed (oral traditions recount many previous collapses and cultural paradigm shifts), some narrowly averted or forestalled, and others are approaching at an accelerating rate. So, if not the pursuit of an absolute standard, or the probability of reaching it, then where does the urgency to act come from? It does not depend on historical patterns or the assurance of future success. We know that these neither have nor ever will meet any standards of justice we could apply. The need to act only depends on where we are right now and what we can do through our relationships. It's a sentiment Wendell Berry expressed in an interview with Bill Moyers, “We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” Zhuangzi would almost certainly agree; he knew very well that notions of success, and especially perfection, that are wedded to a single perspective can be a deadly trap.
No matter how efficacious the structures of governance are, we have always been dealing with proportions, not a black and white, either/or situation. Perfection was never attainable even under the best conditions, least of all those we find ourselves in today. And it was never the goal to begin with. The goal is to understand and guide the direction of the mix to the best of our ability, prepare for and adapt to those impacts we can anticipate, and pursue as much action (mitigation) as we can. If that action includes overcoming the sources of resistance within government, thereby making it that much less inert, then the proportions of the mix may change accordingly. Nothing is a foregone conclusion. Success and failure are entirely relative to where one stands, not some absolute reference point. "The nemesis will come to you if you insist on having a black and white, either/or way of thinking," McGilchrist warned. For if we insist, what will we do when we discover everything is actually shades of grey? This is why perfectionism and nihilism are opposite sides of the same coin, and that coin is decontextualized absolutism. Whenever we get close to one of those sides, the other is not far off. It is also why the pursuit of what the "blind left hemisphere" (McGilchrist) thinks is “perfect“ ends up creating so much damage to ourselves and each other. That sort of nihilistic pessimism is never far away in contemporary Western culture. It is far better to think in terms of proportions and continua, where we can still love the world, and each other, and find joy. The world isn’t perfect, but we can still try to make it better anyway, and that’s not a Sisyphean pursuit. The West became transfixed by Plato's perfect Forms, while in Eastern aesthetics the highest forms of beauty are "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete." Our pursuit of harmony with the planet will always be an imperfect relationship. "Platonic synchrony" is not sustainable, but "wabisabi synchrony" might be sustainable. As Peter Sterling wrote in "Principles of Allostasis", the goal is not constancy, but coordinated variation.
For properly functioning brains, fear is a powerful motivator to action. But not always. It is true that many people will deny the evidence of their eyes on account of their unwillingness to acknowledge the gravity of a situation and the fear of losing control. It may be that the entire nation is ignoring, or at the least minimizing, the evidence of climate change simply to preserve the illusion of control and reduce our collective fear of the implications. (Just as a person with concerning health symptoms may refuse to see the doctor out of fear of the diagnosis.) And it's not uncommon in those situations to turn attention to something more pleasant for distraction. But what concerns me more than fear is blindness born of disordered thinking and the inability to understand basic relationships, context, depth, and global modes of apprehension. This fragments one's perception of time. Events are seen in isolation, disconnected and do not reveal the pattern of accelerating impacts of which they are a part. The result? We see more requests for aid to address extreme weather events after they occur, but fewer requests to address climate change to prevent them in the first place. And this mode of thinking infects all of us, because we live in a social environment that serves to reinforce it. We are going to need a paradigm shift from atomism to relationalism if we are going to stop ignoring the evidence before us, out of fear or blindness, and respond appropriately to the global situation. We must transpose what many consider merely the decorative "filigree" for the very "fabric" of reality it truly is. If we understand how systems operate, then we can have both rational fear concerning the potential for greater instability and impacts, and be hopeful regarding the potential to mobilize to mitigate them. But if we do not have a relational understanding, we will live in a blissful state of blind ignorance punctuated by ever more frequent and disturbing moments of sheer terror, without any hope nor ability to create a better tomorrow.
If people had lived during the Eocene, how would they have responded to abrupt climate change? Our tree shrew ancestors were around then. But of course we aren't tree shrews anymore, so during our second trip we'll probably be doing things differently. If AGW has taught us anything, it is the remarkable realization that Earth is fragile and anthropogenic processes are capable of shifting the entire climate system into a new phase. What this means is that the "resist-accept-direct" framework doesn't just apply to regional ecosystems, but to the entire planet. Here's an imperfect analogy between the RAD framework and our available options. There are three possible responses an organism can have to disruption. 1) It can change its environment by mitigating/ resisting environmental changes. 2) It can do nothing, and die, go extinct; effectively accepting fate. 3) It can change itself by adapting, evolving, and otherwise direct/ guide the way it chooses to relate to a changed environment. It's important to note that the first and third of these options are complementary; the organism-environment system is 'coupled' so changes to one side invariably involve the other. Obviously, tree shrews couldn't mitigate the environmental changes that occurred during the Eocene, or put up any effective resistance, they just had the second two options (and thankfully chose the third!). And while there are historical analogues to climate change, there's really no suitable analogue for us. We are writing that story now. So it remains to be seen to what extent humans will use the options that are available to them. Like our early ancestors, we can certainly try to adapt to a much hotter world, a second Eocene. But the first option, the one that wasn't available during the Eocene, is the most radical response of all. It is the inflection point where we go past merely flattening the Keeling Curve (net zero) and begin to turn it downward (net negative). We are at the beginning of this "second Eocene". Can our global response to disruption begin with adaptation, but turning a new page in the history of the planet, end with resistance?
Climate change mitigation consists of actions to limit global warming and its related effects. Climate change adaptation is the process of adjusting to current or expected climate change and its effects. Many climate actions address both mitigation and adaptation (see a Venn diagram), and you are right that we do need to do both. But without mitigation, adaptation alone cannot avert the risk of "severe, widespread and irreversible" impacts. While we know some of these are already occuring, it is important to remember that impacts exist along an open-ended continuum. At the extreme end of this lies runaway climate change. Adaptation alone cannot foreclose that possiblility. These days there has been a proliferation of groups that pursue "deep adaptation", while comparatively fewer on "deep mitigation". This shouldn't be surprising given our hyper-individualistic culture, as Iain McGilchrist points out. Consider the Gaia hypothesis of Margulis and Lovelock. They proposed that both living and inorganic components of Earth synergistically regulate and maintain a number of variables within the narrow limits necessary for life on the planet. So for example, if it got too cold, they would respond in a way that increased global temperatures, or if too hot, they would respond to cool it down. Gaia operates using negative feedbacks, actively mitigating disruption. And perhaps that may be a better way to explain this. We need to focus on actions that produce negative feedback, so that we can mitigate the disruption ocurring to the climate system. Planetary problems call for planetary thinking, and we are now a major part of Gaia's immune system. We'd be well advised to adopt her perspective on the problem, and solve it in the way she's done before. Focusing on mitigation means understanding there are levels of "intervening in a system", and that there is an "order of effectiveness" when doing this. Taking action at a more effective level might save more lives than when intervening at a lower level. This is what Donella Meadows was talking about in her leverage points paper.
For those of us (writers, poets, artists, etc.) who want to create a positive, realistic story for the future, if our stories are grounded principally in trying to strike the desired emotional valence, they may tend toward irrelevance and bounce us between the heights of fantasy and the depths of nihilism. ("Bloomers and doomers" resolve their anxiety about the future by adopting some abstractly decontextualized positive or negative outlook and focus more or less on only the organism or only the environment.) Erica Eller asked “Which do you think sums up our situation most: anthropocene, pyrocene, or...?” To which Stephen Pyne, who coined the neologism "pyrocene", replied “They all have their value - a collective pantheon. We shouldn't reduce it all to one jealous Word that will have no others before it.” (For a list of these see Table A1. “-cenes”, which lists no less than 91 of them, and is certainly not comprehensive). Each offers a different mythos and central organizing principle for structuring a particular worldview. Pyrocene, a worldview centered on the Promethean technology of combustion, certainty lends gravitas to Ken Caldeira’s statement: "For us to even have a chance of addressing the climate problem, it will need to be simply unacceptable to build things with smokestacks or tailpipes that dump waste into the air. This change could happen." But Pyne is right, no single organizing principle, no jealous Word, can completely capture this epoch or describe an ideal mindset. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche famously wrote "the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing be." And this is exactly what is happening today, a collective exploration of what it means to be alive in this moment. Instead of an epoch, we must ground our visions of change in a proper understanding of relational dynamics. Recall what David Roberts wrote, "Our only choice is the proportions of the mix: action vs. impacts. The less action we and other countries take to address the threat, the more impacts we will all suffer." That follows from an understanding of the dynamics of coupled organism-environment systems on a global scale. The future is radically context dependent. Not only Roberts' "action vs. impacts" reflects this, but also Donella Meadows' "places to intervene in a system". In addition to asking "What are the relations to be improved?", and "How are they improved?", Meadows' encourages us to ask "For whom, or what mindset, are they improved?" The very act of asking this question allows us to step outside our limited, parochial perspectives and see things new. Then change becomes possible.
As Feng Youlan wrote "Things are ever subject to change, and have many aspects. Therefore many views can be held about the same thing.” Chwałczyk's paper, "Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names" confirms this: "There are now at least 80–90 proposed alternatives to the term Anthropocene.” Each of these alternative names is intended to incite a cognitive leap in regard to achieving a new perspective on the relationships among subjects and objects in a variety of situations. This is the first step. The second step is producing a meta-analysis or metanarrative of this perspectival profusion, such as that initiated by Chwałczyk, to turn the process back on itself. Now we get a 'perspective on perspectives'. Whereas the first step may seek to align us with an objective understanding of environmental conditions, the second step addresses the interrelationships among the perspectives and 'perspective takers'. This is a frequent source of social and political conflict. The desire to deny and suppress perspectival diversity and assert dominance rather than understand it may be a bigger obstacle for addressing environmental disruption than understanding the physical basis of climate change. Donella Meadows' leverage points paper prompts us to ask just that question about effective interventions: Which is a bigger obstacle to addressing environmental disruption? A failure to grok climate change, or gridlock generated by mutually incomprehensible views? Both are significant. Let's assume a much greater proportion of the public groks climate change. Still, they may not act due to disagreement regarding solutions to address it. (A reality all too familiar today.) But if a greater proportion of the public groks the interrelationships among their various perspectives, perhaps they can stop squabbling long enough to reduce political polarization and social strife to a tolerable level, learn from each other, and create the conditions for a new renaissance. We often look back to James Hansen's 1988 Congressional testimony as the moment America was given a wake up call on the threat of global warming. It went unheeded. Today we have more evidence of AGW than ever, but political and social dysfunction has only increased. This is our Achilles' heel preventing us from using the tools and knowledge we have today to mount an effective response.
A paleoclimate analogue with similar atmospheric composition is definitely useful for inferring what the state of Earth's climate and ecosystems will look like once they've reached relative equilibrium with the higher GHG levels we currently have. And it might also tell us something about the transition process from one climate state to another. Depending upon the rate at which GHG concentrations increase, this transition will be more or less disruptive. Natural climatic forcing and anthropogenic climate drivers both operate on the same spatial scale of the entire Earth. But the rate of change for these systems (technology, culture, and Earth systems) are not synchronized. Whereas the temporal scale of nature is typically on the order of thousands to millions of years, humans have sped up the rate of change to that of just decades to centuries. This significant decoupling must be accounted for somehow within our models. If not, it reduces their relevance. That’s why so much effort is placed on trying to understand how human societies might react as impacts increase. This is the main topic of the IPCC's shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs, read this explainer). Will the global response be coordinated or unilateral? Will it lead to new synergies or expanding sacrifice zones? What possibilities, like black swan events, are we underestimating? The first question we all want to know the answer to is "How will the planet react to AGW?" And we can provide a fairly good answer to that. The second question is much more uncertain: "How will human societies react to the planet reacting to AGW?" Speculating on some of the SSPs outlined in the recent IPCC report is very interesting. Societies will almost certainly continue to deploy more renewable energy and 'natural geoengineering' strategies to mitigate global warming. But if cultural polarization remains unabated, thus frustrating a sufficiently coordinated and well planned response, the increasing impacts of AGW may eventually exert so much pressure that they override debate, lead to unilateral decision making, and consequently the deployment of more 'brute force geoengineering' methods with unknown local and global consequences. In other words, an uncoordinated global response to AGW hasn't been ruled out, and it may make it much more difficult (or nearly impossible) to anticipate and prepare for local conditions. As we prepare for life on a climate changed planet, we will need to contend with both much hotter temperatures, and potentially much hotter temperaments (figuratively speaking). Thus, answering the "How will humans react at scale?" question, and intervening to steer those processes, might be the highest leverage point that influences everything else. Of course, all this remains to be seen.
Paleoclimate data is very useful, specifically data for conditions similar to present. An ideal record is of sufficiently high resolution over time. Although the sampling interval (temporal resolution) of data from 55 million years ago is very long, by correlating CO2 and temperature it does give us an idea of the prevailing ecological conditions and helps us to measure Earth's "climate sensitivity". It should also allow us to make a rough correlation between the "rate of disruption" and "rate of extinction". To these we now must add the new variable of projected "socioeconomic sensitivity" - the rate at which socioeconomic pathways (social metabolism) change in response to environmental disruption. We can ask: What is the rate of disruption today? When was it similar in the past? For example, if the PETM played out over millions of years, while AGW is orders of magnitude faster, then will the disruption occurring today be correspondingly more dramatic? What are the implications for rates of extinction and shifts in socioeconomic pathways? On the other hand, if the rate is faster but the duration of change is shorter, will the impact be less certain? All of this underscores the need to understand how climate sensitivity results in different levels of disruption given various changes in climate drivers. More severe disruptions tend to lead to more ecological and social upheaval. Today we now have a variety of socioeconomic factors and intervention strategies to consider. Some of these seek to influence the drivers of climate change by means of introducing negative feedback. As we look at our available options, which leverage points will play a role in determining the shared socioeconomic pathway we eventually take? For decades now, it hasn't been for a lack of knowledge that we haven't taken action on climate change. We've known for years that outcomes run the spectrum from bad to very bad. So instead of continuing to ask "How bad will it get?" (as fascinating as that may be) we need to start asking "Where can we intervene?" The key here is locating the most effective points within the system structure. This means turning our focus to thinkers like Donella Meadows and her "places to intervene in a system", and organizing our efforts around these in a very clear manner.
The transformation of mind needed to guide us into an inherently uncertain future isn't a transformation from a "Holocene mind" to an "Eocene mind". (This of course does have many advantages when it comes to being able to flexibly switch to longer term perspectives with greater spatiotemporal depth.) Rather, it's a transformation of mind from seeing a world of static "things", to seeing a world of dynamic "relationships". The IPCC report gives us very clear reasons why we need to do this. The culture of the Western world has distorted the relationship between people and planet. The IPCC report underscores this by identifying the context of dynamic planetary processes, how these are interrelated with one another, and how our decisions past, present, and future, have shaped and will continue to shape the future of the planet. We must heal these relationships, then the 'world of things' will follow. When we see relations as primary it becomes easier to move from the Holocene to the Eocene, or to any other climatic conditions that may result. In a relational sense, the word "adaptation" requires we understand that adaptation is always in relation to a specific context. That means we must ask "To what are we adapting?" Context, contingency, dependency, and causality are essential considerations. And so we might try to predict the future by gathering evidence and making inferences. This attempt to resolve uncertainty is primarily a "left hemisphere" thought process; it provides us with mental clarity and fortifies our sense of purpose. While the recent report on climate change from the IPCC was ostensibly created to give us as much understanding of possible future pathways as possible, the actual conclusions reveal a future that is far less certain than most people would like.
In answer to the question "To what are we adapting?", rather than selecting an Eocene-like future or a future of dramatic GHG reductions, the relational mind understands that what and how we will adapt fundamentally depends on our evolving relationships to each other and the planet, on choices that haven't been made and actions not yet taken. The IPCC report describes multiple pathways, each of which depend upon the amount of action we do or do not take to mitigate climate change. These depend on our ability to transform society in response to a transforming world, a world that is reciprocally responding to our transformations in a circularly causal manner. Instead of giving us a single trajectory toward the Eocene, we see many different scenarios. In some of these GHG emissions peak then decline, others model a continuing rise in emissions. Each has different impacts on Earth systems and processes. It's relational through and through. The precautionary principle can shed light on how we respond to this dynamic situation. It says that if some course of action, such as rising GHG emissions, whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown, carries even a remote chance of irreparable damage to the ecology, then it should be resisted. This is also what the authors of the IPCC report are telling us. And the best way to resist our current course of action begins with transforming our minds, to see how the relational processes we are a part of are in fact always changing and evolving, and giving rise to multiple highly contingent pathways into an undetermined future.
Our understanding of culture shows that there’s a relationship between our minds and our actions. As A.N. Whitehead said, “As we think, we live.” When and how is the transformation to a relational mindset made? It can either be made by choice or when it becomes impossible to ignore any longer. The people living on the frontlines of climate change cannot ignore it. They see very clearly the relationship between the environment around them and their survival. They know their lives are contingent upon the choices we make and actions we take today. As for the rest of us… there is an old combat adage that states, “War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” For many people living in wealthy Western nations this describes their experience of climate change. They carry on with comfortable lives, distracted by one-sided perspectives on the world, until the moment a forest fire, drought, hurricane, or other extreme event disrupts their comfort and reminds them that they live in a world of relationships, and that they deny these at their own peril. The irony of AGW is that, although on a geologic timescale we are indeed being catapulted into an uncertain future, for a significant number of people this is experienced all too slowly to consciously register. Also ironically, during those moments of AGW induced sheer terror it is of course preposterous to imagine that anyone would indulge in a moment of calm self reflection to reconsider their relationships and perspective on life. By then it is simply too late. So what is to be done? To the extent that any of us are blessed with the ability to rest, reflect, and plan for the future, we must take that opportunity to reconsider our relationships in light of the precautionary principle, make climate justice a priority, and transform them accordingly.
According to Paul Hawken, "The true cause of global warming is disconnections in all systems. We are disconnected from each other; we are disconnected from nature... Regeneration is about reconnecting those broken strands. You heal a system, whether it is an ecosystem, social system or an immune system, by (re)connecting more of it to itself." That promotes system integrity, and it's one of the many reasons why Hawken believes that, in order to see and understand these relationships, "the human heart, mind, and imagination" are the most essential tools we have. For those who are familiar with the psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist, this is a recognizably "right hemisphere" approach to addressing climate change, and it provides the crucial underlying vision and philosophy for developing a plan. Hawken has done just that. The two goals he had for his book Drawdown were "to map, measure and model the most substantive solutions and to determine if drawdown was possible" and then "bring the carbon that is increasing atmospheric warming back home from whence it came." His new book Regeneration is "a what- and how-to-do-it-book and website" that advances these goals further, by identifying and leveraging important connections between the social and climate justice movements. "