I wish I could get the next level of thinking to spread as easily as the old thinking keeps spreading… How we are all “buying better products” is making waves in nature that are indeed simply too big.  But we are regularly taking the wrong message from that and not aware of how we’re making them bigger.

Is there is something wrong with making waves in nature?

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.