Reading Nature’s Signals

To ask the right question is how we can reduce our negative impacts on the world. Choosing the right things to spend on doesn’t really do that, for two very good reasons. Most money you spend will have average impacts per dollar anyway, producing 3/4 lb of CO2 and contributing to an increase of 3% in what we try to control in nature, per dollar. So buying expensive “green” products does more harm than cheap products by having nearly the same average impact per dollar. You could buy cheaper products, but because you’d then buy more there’s no escape… either way.

The key is changing the question. It’s not what you buy, but what you use it for. Whatever you spend on, judge it by how well you or others can use it to change the future. It’s not what need you serve today but the lasting meaning of what you do with your choices. A switch to sustainability is one from satisfying wants to having a lasting meaning for the world around you.

We need to, as a whole community, get off the path we are on but seem captives in a spiral of seeing how far we can push our presently narrowing path before it closes out entirely. It’s like the housing bubble, but it’s a bubble of thinking we can and need to take ever increasing control of our environments. That we can control things better in the short term is the illusion that keeps us thinking we can control ever more things in a misbehaving world without losing control in the long term.

That is a complete illusion, of course, just the same way the limitless appreciation of housing values was an illusion, a bubble of misinformation created by a circle of little self-deceptions… that we all thought was fun but turned out badly. What we need to figure out is how to allow things that are naturally uncontrolled to take care of themselves, a different path to making peace with nature. from “What to do” 3/6/10

The real trouble with understanding your own accumulative effects on the world is that the human theory of cause and effect, like pool balls bouncing around transmitting effects from elsewhere, isn’t the way nature accumulates effects. Bouncing balls is not the glue nature uses, you might say. The effects of pressures and forces are real and all, but they nearly all dissipate as they bounce around, rather than accumulate. So…our usual idea of “cause and effect” simply does not apply. That’s a key reason for why good intentions often don’t have their intended effect…

Lasting cause and effect in nature is about how things that are organized from the inside develop on their own, make use of their environments as they develop. They may capitalize on the crumbs of opportunity you leave lying around, perhaps, as if the systems of nature, cultures and ecologies, were organisms engaged in foraging and dodging as their way of learning and growing.

Most things in nature which are organized and animated from the inside seem to respond to finding limits in one direction by poking around in other directions near bye. Complex human societies, one after another in history, seem to have collapsed because human cultures get stuck on directions of exploration that run out.

To me it looks like they just find themselves unable to look around and change with the times. It appears to be caused physiologically by our way of defining our realities as independent social agreements on what to believe, and treating those cultural realities as if they were the world we live in.

Today it seems new cultural realities are multiplying furiously, as if we were responding to a need to replace ones that had run out. They don’t seem to be leading the main culture anywhere, though, but developing more and more separate little cells, and just breaking the main culture apart. That we have a common physical world that physically determines our choices makes that one quite reliable universal connection we could develop. - from What To Do

Sometimes it pays to recognize circular arguments with no escape, and realize one or more of the core assumptions causing that needs to be questioned. The presently brutal and worsening job market in the developed countries is often discussed with a circular argument: that stimulus isn’t working so we need more, but governments run a risk of collapse if the jobs are not productive… That is now heard over and over, and it’s worth looking at it as painting a circle of common assumptions that everyone would like to escape.

The problem caused by economies becoming unresponsive to Keynesian stimulus was actually brilliantly studied by Keynes… His simple conclusion was that when stimulus provided by governments filling in as “spenders of last resort” didn’t work then investors would need to take that role, even to the point of ending the accumulation of investment to make economies physically sustainable. The assumption that is not variable is that we live in a finite world.

The circular dilemma of *instability in every direction* that everyone now sees facing the world economy, comes from unemployment and the economies not being responsive to stimulus… That is what JM Keynes addressed in his “widow’s cruse” proposal, when conditions “became so miserable” that net returns on investment approach zero, due to systemic over investment. What he proposed, and was roundly criticized for and eventually simply dismissed as “the fallacy”, … switching the “spender of last resort” from government to investors.

From a political view it does sound crazy, but from a systems science view it’s quite clearly the only choice. Kenneth Boulding pointed to the natural necessity of it when facing either temporary or permanent limits to growth too. I’ve also written on it a good bit as systems physics. It closely matches one of the tricky changes of plan that apparently all natural systems that become sustainable figure out how to do on their own. They switch to using the surplus they devoted to auto-catalytic growth to something else that’s productive when that self-inflation process becomes unproductive. (see development path model below)

It may “sound crazy” but it is actually a quite surprisingly practical solution. That is to persuade the Saudi’s, Chinese, our own super rich and other investors to *spend the economy back to health*, giving back to the economic system that made them rich instead of continuing to sit around and expect the world to make them ever richer when it is in fact actually failing badly.

It takes the kind of brilliance displayed by Barack Obama in observing that if the Republicans in the US Congress had decided to take over the government’s ability to function, then they had implicitly assumed a responsibility to govern too. That brilliance didn’t make them do it, of course, but at least it pointed to the problem. Today, investors have largely taken over control of the world’s financial institutions and governments, in fact, and need to take responsibility for assuming that role.

www.synapse9.com

I think the answer is, well, yes of course… Most people seem to
intuitively confuse increasing their access to resources with increasing the
supply when increasing their access to resources actually decreases the earth’s
supply.

This is another way to understand the various mysterious efforts
to reduce the impacts of growth by streamlining and accelerating growth, which
of course multiplies its impacts. It basically means we are not being
self-critical and asking the hard questions. The easiest data to display the
effect with is the world energy/GDP balance:

Improving technology makes it appear that our resource supplies are increasing when it’s really the depletion of resources of ever higher cost that is increasing.

Nearly everyone assumes that improving efficiency would reduce energy use but it has actually been increasing energy use by a ratio of 1unit of efficiencies to 2.5 units of new uses created. It seems to have had had that reverse effect for as long as anyone has kept records (see notes
Inside Efficiency. Improving efficiency does increase OUR PERSONAL resources, and so reduces OUR PERSONAL resource constraints accordingly. It just doesn’t increase the earth’s resources or its resource constraints.

This translates into a serious unavoidable natural liabilities bubble for
economies designed to serve personal needs rather than become sustainable. As solving resource needs that way begins to create a problem of needing to do it ever faster, you run into natural obligations to escalate investment for
declining returns. It applies to any system that sustains its growth by
accelerating resource depletion, as all our traditional development schemes seem to do.

So, increasing the resources at our command (our demand) seems to be thought of as our supply… but accelerates depletion
of the real supply

The same general principle of systems ecology applies to the development of any other kind of resource available to be exploited. Though it starts out
continually increasing our supply of things, improving technology to create more
supply accelerates depletion (the earth’s supply), leading to a liabilities bubble.

All directions of development are subject to the same natural terminal limits of increasing investment leading to diminishing returns on investment. It occurs as a system runs into increasing difficulty on approaching natural limits to its
resources and ability to reorganize itself.

The way the principle is used in systems ecology, since simple conceptual models don’t adequately describe any natural system, is to rephrase the principle as a question. You then search the environment for indications of when the implied points of diminishing and then vanishing returns are approaching. You start by asking for any development system what complications might arise as it tries to control ever more of its environment.

I think people are definitely confusing their supplies and the earth’s supply,
quite generally. The trouble seems to be that it is done so very habitually that
even professionals can’t really discus the matter, so much of our common
language and popular ideas are mixed up that way.

From Jim Maendel on a Linkedin Foresight group

Phil,
[I was] just looking for smart people to join our group. After checking out your site, I believe you may be overqualified. Your stuff is brilliant. I found this portion on the market pundits fascinating:

“Well, I’ve been wondering for a long time why the flows of change are so hard for people to see, and do think there’s some kind of “fixed world illusion” to contend with. There’s a list of reasons why we don’t update our information regularly and so miss the flows of change because of that. It’s a little speculative, but another detail caught my attention recently, that even when repeated changes in “normal” are quite dramatic, people often only have to “sleep on it” to readjust and see even very short lived situations as if they were permanent and a brand new permanent “normal”.

Nearly every pundit and media source from 2007 to the present has radically changed their stories about the economic collapse nearly every week… for example, always seeming very comfortable with the “ever present” finality of their quickly changing stories. It’s like there’s a “reset button” that they all keep using, that hides the facts of accelerating change.

I’ve been wondering about what that has to do with sleep. Could it be that the way the mind digests information collected during a waking day is similar to how your computer loads new software updates when you shut it down to reboot? Could both need to operate with a fixed system that is regularly updated when turned off? Sleep might clear the memory and refresh the world image. Perhaps relieving the conscious mind of continual complex rethinking accounts for our not noticing how our own world is changing.

That would be a very efficient design concept, having brain’s that refresh their model of life every night and give you an fresh but changeless new “snapshot” copy every day, an ever changing “blank page”. If you live in a stable world it’s only a minor defect that the strategy would arrange our awareness as always of a fixed world, moving you through life one fixed frame at a time, that you would not need to consciously account for. That sort of defines the “fixed world illusion”, as well as the common experience of life in a changing world as an “ever present”….

from The Bump on a Curve Notepad

I’ll have to chew on this site for a while. Jim
—-

Jim,

Thanks so much! Once you start uncovering these things, how perception is just not working as intended… they sometimes come out in bunches. Another one that connects a lot of what ruins so many of our solutions is the unintended way nature is producing multiplying problems. It’s in direct response to our overextending our attempts to multiplying solutions.

Maybe the main one is “doing well by doing good”, putting money into problem solving to take more money out… The problem with that is in a constrained environment (like we’re in) that multiplies our problems faster than the solutions. It also takes money away from the interests supposedly invested in.

The way investing in healthcare is making us need more healthcare as well as making healthcare completely unaffordable is an example(1). How making the economy more resource efficient is multiplying the rate at which it uses resources is another.(2)

Pushing against constraints in a non-expanding environment, investing in competitive learning to “raise all boats” will often have the opposite effect. It may just give the fast learners and easily solved problems more resources… and take resources away from other people and their oability to take care of themselves. How our solutions become self-defeating seems mainly that as the world changed we weren’t paying attention.

So, how we’re all caught up in self-defeating solutions is definitely something to look at!

1) http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2010/03/01/the-troubling-truth-the-trouble-with-good-when-being-good-at-controlling-nature-we-create-addiction-take-for-instance-the-healthcare-case/
2) http://www.synapse9.com/pub/EffMultiplies.htm

Jan 25,2010 comment Re: Alternative Energy Newswire’s We need not make any important sacrifices for natural life style

I wish I could get the next level of thinking to spread as easily as the old thinking keeps spreading… The waves we’re making in nature are indeed simply too big, but we regularly take the wrong message from that.

It’s so important to not take that as meaning that there is something wrong with making waves in nature. What we need is to discover why the waves we make have kept getting so much bigger.

My little essay “Throwing our energy at impossible dreams” (also linked there) is about these kinds of logical tricks nature plays on us, particularly when so many of our environmental relationships are changing all at once. There’s a problem with trying to reduce impacts by buying better products. That’s part of the formula for economic growth. It’s actually been by learning to produce things more efficiently that we kept adding %’s to the scale of our uses of the earth, and outgrew its limits in the first place.

There are two kinds of addition, addition by totals and addition by %’s. For some mysterious reason, pure social convention of it seems, people don’t distinguish between them. The physical difference is that the first kind of addition is self-limiting and the other kind of addition measures ever multiplying imbalance. Somehow in the past two hundred years we came to define social stability as addition by %’s, or ever multiplying imbalance in relation to the earth.

It means we organized all our institutions around making waves “just a bit bigger” all the time. That actually creates waves of ever multiplying scale. That we add by %’s instead of by totals is why our equations never add up, or add up only to ever more dramatic mistakes now. Green products or blue, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter in the least if we skip over the need to learn how to add up the totals.

Could we change the questions we’ve been asking.. and learn how to add maybe? I don’t know. It’s an enormous blind spot it seems.

letter to NPR -

You say “all things considered”.

How about looking around to see what you’ve been missing? If familiar ideas seem exhausted, what chance is there someone with surprising new observations on our various “wicked problems” would have something worth looking into?

What if such a person were a physical systems scientist, who’s been right about how the present financial crisis would develop for 30 years, and has not really needed to change their story over and over like virtually everyone else, but to only confirm it over and over? What if they still maintain the problem is an accumulation of misinformation in the economy, and that makes it basically correctable?

If there’s something about money, our *measure* of wealth, causing it to multiply when the *reality* of wealth doesn’t, nothing will work right till that’s fixed.

The economy is a physical process, running into continually increasing difficulty with the physical world, and still projecting growth with ever less difficulty… Why don’t you ever hear about that on ATC??

Try me. I can help.

letter to NPR -

You say “all things considered”. How about looking around to see what you’ve been missing? If familiar ideas seem exhausted, what chance is there someone with surprising new observations on our various “wicked problems” would have something worth looking into?

What if such a person were a physical systems scientist, who’s been right about how the present financial crisis would develop for 30 years, and has not really needed to change their story over and over like virtually everyone else, but to only confirm it over and over? What if they still maintain the problem is an accumulation of misinformation in the economy, and that makes it basically correctable?

If there’s something about money, our *measure* of wealth, causing it to multiply when the *reality* of wealth doesn’t, nothing will work right till that’s fixed.

The economy is a physical process, running into continually increasing difficulty with the physical world, and still projecting growth with ever less difficulty… Why don’t you ever hear about that on ATC??

Try me. I can help.

See the original which had a typo in the name. This entry created to point to it.

.. pointing out how holding corporate money to a higher standard of truthfulness can now becomes profitable with the supreme court’s removal of all controls on corporate speech ..

Friends,

I’ve been sort of waiting for this.

“Fiduciary duty > noun: the legal duty of a fiduciary to act in the best interests of the beneficiary”

It occurred to me some time ago that it would be possible to completely reverse a supreme court decision on campaign finance like what we just got today.

You just need to force “fiduciary duty” to be reinterpreted from having its *habitual meaning* to its *natural language meaning*. Fiduciary duty actually requires acting in the best interests of stockholders and the public *without qualification*.

How it has been treated is meaning that trustees are only obligated to maximize their own short term financial gains in which shareholders would get some share, as if money were the only interest stockholders and the public could have. The world has changed radically in the time since that usage developed.

Now that business is directly causing major threats to the survival our the ecology and economy by broadly shirking responsibility for their environmental impacts and disrespecting their own natural limits and sustainability, the tables are completely turned. Businesses make the physical decisions for how our life support system evolves and adapts to its environment, and so physically steer our path toward or away from sustainability.

The actual meaning of the word “fiduciary” then implies acting in the whole interest of stockholders and the public. That would mean that their public speech would need to meet unusually high standards of balance, clarity, truthfulness and realistic assessment of the possibilities.

How would that sound? ….just fabulous, just simply fabulous!

It seems it could be the law today simply by someone using it, as it already is the law today.