Responding to an Archinect.com discussion:

Hi there! I haven’t read the whole thread, but gather the question is whether we can grow our way our of the impacts of growth, using crafty wind power investments to do it. I’ve been spending this week trying to find out why none of the media are aware of the vigorous discussions of why a financial meltdown happens naturally when finances need to multiply for their own stability in a world that doesn’t.

Even JM Keynes pointed out the problem. Now our whole blithering world of back scratchers seeing it happen acts as if it’s a total surprise.  I pegged the beginning of it 15 months ago, as beginning “the big crunch”, when the fuel/food price war showed the whole system’s resource steering choices running into conflict with each other and fishtailing.

There is a great deal of discussion of these sorts of overshoot and collapse subjects, but our professional media define the public conversation in the image of themselves, and so inadvertently shut out all the other conversations! I’d be very much for using wind for power on a local community scale, like to power low water use algae farms and their petrol stills, giving some local communities a readily stored and marketable energy product. If people see how to do that, that’s great.

As a source of power to replace fossil fuels and grow exponentially forever, I’m less sanguine…. I’m disturbed by the fact that I’ve never seen a power line in any photo of a windmill, for example. There would be power lines all over it seems to me. Then there’s the real jinx, that the whole premise is finding ways to grow out of our growth impacts, by adding new levels of multiplying impacts. Humans just don’t think straight!

I think it’s always been multiplying our solutions that’s been the main problem. Because each person sees what they’re creatively doing as ‘a solution’ it never crosses their minds to ask if it might be a problem too… Ultimately I think it’s that cognitive slip, not moral failings, that has us destroying the earth, exemplified by our glaring financial meltdown predicted for decades for obvious causes by numerous competent people who turned out to be right.

I’m not at all hopeful as everyone’s solution still seems to be to promote growth and keep multiplying the scale, complexity and momentum of the problem. The odd thing is that what we’re avoiding by not acknowledging the problem is the real choices we’d actually have. Go figga!

~ followed by a comment that Pickens funded the Swiftboat attacks on Kerry~

It’s real true that people, both thoughtful and thoughtless, try to multiply their ‘impacts’ on anything and everything, often dodging questions of their negative impacts. As much as I’d disagree with Pickens’ contributions to vindictive smear campaigns, if the Swiftboat smear was one he had anything to do with, it’s a perfect example of what happens with taking any one point of view too far.

That’s sort of inevitable with people multiplying money, but is also connected to a basic error in how people try to make sense of the world. My main study has been of how nature is full of differently organized things, each needing a different model of description to understand them.

Our culture teaches us to build one ‘deterministic’ world view, to “make sense” of everything in one self-consistent way. It’s useful to a point, but what seems to happen with it is the more you understand things from one view the less you understand them from every other…

It’s kind of pernicious. You get things like both sides in the ‘war on terror’ being driven by a desire to bring law to a lawless world, and behaving lawlessly to do it… Both sides make perfect sense! When you study the ‘lawless’ behaviors of nature instead, ways to understand everything seem to turn up, and you discover that the main lawlessness of nature is things alive.

Is this pointing to a basic spiritual problem underlying the energy crisis? Well I guess so, in that our spirit is demonstrably not engaged in being part of the living world but conquering it. I don’t know how to talk about it in those terms really, hoping people will be able to pick out the glaring cognitive mistakes they’re going along with, and reach down inside somewhere to find their own slip ups.

You just can’t do someone else’s thinking for them, and studying the lawless behaviors of nature makes it clear that nature’s way is more than everything tagging along after every other. The other way is for things to dart around on their own, having emerged on their own to learn about their world and take care of themselves.

Science would prefer to have a rule for that… but seem very disappointed with the ones I found that work. There are kinds of rules for asking the right questions, for discovering how things are organized differently than you’d expect. Anyone can do that, I think, come up with their own list of important questions to ask of things that don’t fit any model you know. I’d be curious what others would come up with.

pfh