What to do… to steer our unmanageable world

How we can reduce our negative impacts on the world is by finding the right question to ask.

Choosing the right things to spend on doesn’t really do that, for two very good reasons.

Most money you spend will have about average impacts per dollar anyway. If you think where money goes and how each product takes so many kinds of inputs, every dollar really uses the whole economy, and on average, now produces about 1.0 lb of CO2!

Because it generates profits it also stimulates economic growth at around 3% a year, made possible by a similar increase in what we are trying to take control of in nature, per dollar. So buying expensive “green” products does more harm than cheap products by having nearly the same average impacts throughout the world, per dollar. You could buy cheaper products, but because you’d then buy more there’s no escape… either way.

Continue reading What to do… to steer our unmanageable world

The trouble with understanding natural cause & effect…

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…

the human theory of effects isn’t the way nature accumulates effects Continue reading The trouble with understanding natural cause & effect…