HOW NATURE WORKS AND WHY CIVILIZATION DOESN’T: A SYSTEMS VIEW OF GAIA

When I first published this paper on my blog, the charts that accompanied it generated more buzz than the paper itself. You can find them here and here. Since then, I’ve come to realize that these variables are less cause-and-effect than components of a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system. In Systems Thinking terminology, the ‘virtuous circle’ of life that existed in nature until about 30,000 years ago was ‘disrupted’ by events that upset the equilibrium and rippled through the system, producing a new self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system that we call ‘civilization’.

Based on the research I’ve since done on population, violence, and on our political, economic and social systems, I’ve now updated the charts to show the circular nature and greater interrelationship of the 19 elements. The first chart shows how nature works as a self-managed, self-balancing planetary organism — a map perhaps of what is called the Gaia Theory:

Chart 1

And the second chart shows the equivalent man-made systems that have come into play with the dawn of civilization 30,000 years ago. This replacement system, alas, is not self-balancing — it is utterly unsustainable, though our awareness of that fact is only a century old:

Chart 2

How did this unfortunate transformation occur? We don’t know for sure, but the most compelling theory I have seen is that, as a consequence of the last ice age, and/or the invention of efficient hunting tools (like the spear, and the bow and arrow), there was a sudden and massive shortage of the big, lumbering game that man had hunted so easily since his emergence on the planet. So the element to the right of the red box changed from “Abundant Resources and Energy” (chart 1) to “Scarcity of Resources and Energy” (chart 2). Usually when this happens (except when it is a result of a major extinction event like that caused by the meteorite impact 65 million years ago that wiped out most of life on Earth), nature is able to fix the imbalance. It does so by causing the species suffering the shortage to reduce its fertility rate, temporarily increasing its mortality rate (more of them are eaten by predators, and epidemics arise to reduce over-crowding), and the result is a reduction in their consumption of the scarce resources (food, land etc.), until the scarce resources have had time to replenish themselves (illustrated in chart 3, below, which is based on the work of Darwin, Lovelock, and Edward T. Hall). In this sense, our planetary organism Earth behaves analogously to a human organism — when there’s a shortage of food, it goes into hibernation, lowers metabolism, and draws on internal reserves (fat) to compensate until a new external food supply is found.

Chart 3

But the situation 30,000 years ago was different. Man had developed enough intellect to institute some man-made solutions to scarcity instead of relying on the ones nature had always used. These human inventions included agriculture, animal domestication, and then, to make those work, a whole series of social, political and economic systems. We created man-made ‘stores’ of resources to offset the natural shortages, and tools to protect ourselves and our food supplies from, and even eradicate, natural predators and diseases. Our intellect tipped the balance of power, at least temporarily, from nature to man. Once that ‘tipping point’ had been reached, the rest of the 19 elements on Chart 1 were transformed into the corresponding elements on Chart 2. By enormous strength of ingenuity and will, we have entrenched this New World Order for 30,000 years, and exported it to every corner of the globe.

The problem is that it’s unsustainable, and the kind of tinkering with it espoused by optimists and those that deny we are in crisis, just won’t fix it — both nature and civilization are immensely complex systems, and civilization is also immensely fragile. We need to simultaneously work on many of these 19 elements to create a new ‘tipping point’ to restore the natural system that worked for millions of years before civilization. That doesn’t mean going back to a pre-civilization lifestyle — that would be foolish and impossible. It means moving forward on many fronts — political, social, economic, ecological, technological and in the way we make a living. Let’s take a look at some of the weakest points in Chart 2 to see how we might, with coordinated or ingenious small-group effort, flip some of them over to their corresponding Chart 1 states:

1. Innovation: We need to develop:
• Simpler, cheaper, more reliable birth control technologies (and ban technologies that increase human fertility)
• More efficient clean energy technologies (and encourage their development by banning technologies that create massive environmental damage like coal-burning plants, dams, nuclear plants and internal combustion engines)
• Technologies that prevent rather than treat diseases (we could learn much from nature in this area, but we had better do so before we destroy her medicine cabinet, the tropical rainforests), because families that live long, healthy lives are smaller
• Technologies that reduce the amount of poisons we release into the air and the water
• Production technologies that produce no waste, and whose products are 100% biodegradable — If it can’t be completely, inexpensively, easily and quickly recycled, it should not be produced
• Technologies that eliminate expensive, polluting, dependence-creating transportation of goods, and allow local self-sufficiency and bioregionalism to work (Local wind and solar energy co-ops, and new greenhouse technologies that expand the range of foods that can be locally produced, for example) — Nothing should have to be imported unless it cannot be reasonably produced locally
• Technologies that allow us to do more with less, that replace hardware with software and molecules with bits — and where there is no alternative to durable goods, they should be lightweight, recyclable, and unconditionally guaranteed to work for many lifetimes, so there is no need for landfills
• Nutritious, delicious foods that use no animal products, to render obsolete current technologies that cause massive suffering, like factory farms and pharmaceutical and chemical products using laboratory testing
• Technologies that produce more edible plant mass per acre, without using pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or genetic engineering
• Networking technologies that allow people working on solutions to global problems to self-organize and collaborate more effectively
• Information technologies that allow citizen and consumer groups to organize and to identify, prosecute and defeat socially and environmentally irresponsible corporations, governments and organizations
• Technologies that allow us to learn better from nature — the languages of other animals, the mechanisms of self-regulation, self-organization, conflict resolution, and other important lessons
• Technologies that will prevent and treat mental illness, that can be inexpensively and easily provided to all, including those on the streets and in our criminal institutions
2. Social Activism: We need to:
• Completely revamp our education systems and wrench them away from corporatist control — they should be community-run, autonomous, mobile, virtual, and dedicated to teaching responsible citizenship, how to learn, how to think creatively and critically, how to get along with others, and how to make a living with those one cares about (everything else they can learn by themselves — they don’t need to be force-fed anyone’s biased viewpoint)
• Persuade people of the need and advantage of limiting their families to one child
• Persuade people of the need and advantage of a ‘radically simple’ lifestyle
• Demonstrate by example the superiority of self-selected, self-managed communities over both the nuclear family and larger political units (cities, states) for effective, efficient, self-sufficient social, political and economic organization
• Think critically and creatively, never stop challenging, never stop thinking of ideas to make the world even better
• Learn to live a healthy vegan lifestyle, and make more of our own foods instead of relying on prepackaged foods
• Learn to compromise, cooperate, collaborate, resolve conflicts amicably, build consensus and negotiate better
• Organize to use our very real power as citizens and consumers to end corporatism, devolve power to communities and individuals, create a more open, fair, socially and environmentally responsible and egalitarian society, and support local enterprise
• Learn to listen, be more respectful and pay attention better — to nature, to each other (especially those with different views), to women, to children, and to our own instincts
• Pace ourselves — saving the world is going to take enormous energy, passion, faith and courage
3. Community-Based Enterprise Formation: We need to:
• Encourage and facilitate the formation of innovative, locally-owned, community-based businesses
• Pledge to buy local, so that we have more say in our economic lives, so that business is incented to invest in and take seriously its responsibility to the local community, and so that unnecessary, polluting, traffic-creating transportation of imported goods is minimized
• Encourage and enable community-based businesses to take an active role in the education system, showing our young people how to run their own successful local business enterprise
• Create community-based financial institutions that will exclusively fund community-based businesses and hence enable people in the community to invest locally
4. Political Activism: We need to:
• Revamp corporate law to make corporations once again the servants of man, not our masters — rewrite corporate charters to make them more restrictive and more responsible, and make corporations once again mere ‘economic shells’  with no political power, no place for corrupt individuals to hide, no separate ‘rights’, democratic voting, open information access and a strict size and salary cap
• End agricultural and other business subsidies
• End the tax subsidies to religious organizations, and treat them legally as political organizations
• Reform election laws to introduce proportionate representation and instant-runoff voting, eliminate gerrymandering, prohibit corporate and group campaign financing, cap personal campaign financing, and have all elections supervised by international observers
• Shift taxes away from income and employment and towards pollution, waste, resource consumption, speculation and wealth accumulation — and use these taxes to radically even out wealth and power disparity
• Change our measures of economic ‘success’ — scrap GDP and similar measures in favour of Genuine Progress Indicators and similar measures of well-being and equality
• Revamp and reduce property rights to cap ownership by any one individual, require public access to land with special social attributes (e.g. ocean-front), increase ownership responsibilities, prohibit property ownership by corporations and organizations (they could still lease appropriately zoned lands from the public), prohibit property ownership by non-residents, and solve the Tragedy of the Commons
• Set aside a significant amount of the Earth’s area, across all bioregions, as wilderness land, where no development, economic activity or pollution would be allowed, and human access would be heavily limited
• Strengthen, hone and globalize charters of human rights and freedoms to include absolute rights to free health care and education, and give them legal status ahead of domestic law
• Scrap ‘free’ trade agreements that undermine local and national social and environmental laws and traditions
• Set global standards for government spending — a maximum % of government revenues that can be spent on military activities and a minimum % that must be spent on international humanitarian aid, and expel from the UN countries that violate these standards
• Write off all current third-world international indebtedness, prohibit creation of new international debt, and ban extraterritoriality (political and economic activities that compromise local or national sovereignty)
• Reinstate usury laws (limit interest rates on consumer debts to no more than 3% above inflation rate)
• Introduce currency reform to allow LETS systems
• Extend anti-cruelty laws to all animals, and for the purpose of such laws define them as living beings, not as property

I have deliberately put political activism as the final category of this list, because the more I learn about change, the more I am coming to believe that politics and law are much less effective levers for change than innovation, social activism or community-based enterprise formation. Political activism is an uphill battle against the status quo and against entrenched wealth and power. Social activism and community-based enterprises, by contrast, work peer-to-peer, citizen-to-citizen and consumer-to-consumer and, thanks to the power of modern communications, can spread virally very quickly, undermining the political and economic establishment by working beneath their radar, until, starved of its grass-roots citizen and consumer support, this establishment simply crumbles, no longer needed. Most of the bullets on the Political Activism list above are, in fact, more about undoing things that are contributing to ecological collapse, than about doing something else. And innovation, which respects no political or economic authority, can help immensely.

Many of my readers have told me “that’s fine, but I’m not rich, powerful, expert, entrepreneurial or innovative, so what can I do now to help, to make a difference?” That’s a fair question, and I’m developing the answer to it as the final section of the revised paper (and also as a more practical replacement for the Roadmap). I should have it finished next week, and I’ll publish it here first.