Global warming

As far as I can see there is overwhelming evidence that global warming is real, rapid and at the very least partly driven by human activities. Everything from plant hardiness zones moving north, melting sea ice, collapse of ice shelves, extremely rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets, ecosystems moving towards the poles or to higher altitudes, and so on. In the past the speed of warming seems to have been underestimated – Read more

Us vs the environment

We humans and our technology always have been hard on the environment. Back about 13,000 years ago, in America, the Clovis people developed a way of making very effective spears for hunting mammoths. In a span of at most 450 years these huge mammoths became extinct.  Whether Clovis hunting was the prime cause can be debated – but it certainly made at least a contribution to the demise of the mammoth – and a number of other species Read more

The world in transformation I

What we do today – as an individual, as the church, as our society, as our species – will have an effect on tomorrows world.  We leave our footprints; some will fade with time, others won’t.  It can take hundreds of years to replenish an over pumped ancient aquifer, thousands to restore a heavily damaged ecosystem – if it can be restored at all.  The crude oil converted to the gasoline that we’ll convert to carbon dioxide and water vapor is gone forever.  Every species that becomes extinct will diminish creation forever.  Therefore, though it’s difficult, we are obligated to think about the future and how our present lives will influence it.

Of course in the vast majority of cases our footprints will merge with millions of others and whatever we can do will have a negligible influence on the larger future.  However, there are those rare and unpredictable cases where some tiny step leads to another and another and in the end a major change occurs.  Chaos theory (also see) provides some very necessary insights into any consideration of the future.

God works through chaos.  Most real world dynamic systems (weather, the stock market, where we live, how a tree branches, the shape of a coastline, etc, etc) are chaotic.  Chaotic systems, though they may look random, are not.  They are fully determined, but their path is extremely dependent on initial conditions.  As a result of this dependence, our ability to predict the details of the future is very limited – no matter how powerful our computers get!  It’s the very often  misinterpreted butterfly effect: “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”  Basically, very small actions can trigger changes that over time result result in major – but totally unpredictable -  changes and a dramatically different outcome.  Do you set off the tornado or stop it?

Though the future is not predictable, sometimes, for long time periods, it can be reasonably safe to assume that the future will be defined by an extension of the present or the recent past.  Obviously, this is not always the case.  Civilizations eventually collapse and sometimes populations crash.  However, there are lots of known forces at work, and though they can’t tell us the future, they can tell us a lot about limitations and possible directions.

I can envision little pieces of a future that is just and sustainable – and a lot different from today’s world.  I’ve also experienced little bits of that possible future.  The visions I’ve had or seen are not and cannot be universal – they are limited to particular regions, situations, and population density.  However, the biggest stumbling block I see is not where we’re going but how can we get there in the least painful and most loving and just way!

The world in transformation II

The world is at a unique point in history. For the first time a single species – us – dominates the entire earth and has developed the power to make drastic changes in the environment. This dominance has been achieved in an extraordinarily short time frame when considered in evolutionary or geologic time scales. Furthermore, the forces of globalization have ensured that no place is isolated from what happens in the rest of the world – there’s no place to hide. At the same time, a number of interrelated problems have reached a critical stage.

Some problems that come to mind:

• Hunger – by UN estimates one billion undernourished people before the year is out
• Energy limitations (peak oil, natural gas not too far behind) -
• Rapid climate change
• All kinds of water related issues
• Major irreversible degradation of the environment
• It takes a lot of time and money to build large energy, infrastructure, etc, projects
• Without force it takes a lot of time to change people’s habits
• Conflict with deep rooted causes
• A fundamentally unsustainable greed based global economic system

The first thing to keep in mind is a fact usually ignored: everything is related. There are no independent variables in the real world – you can’t separate consideration of oil from energy, from transportation, from food, from climate, from environmental degradation, from geopolitics, etc, etc, etc. – they’re all related, they all affect each other. Similarly, all life is related, and no living thing can exist except through a huge number of cooperative relationships with other lifeforms.

Looking at the problem list makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that there are just too many people on earth. Certainly that problem list gets much easier to deal with if there were a lot less of us around. However, it really looks to be much worse than just a few too many people, it looks like population overshoot.  Overshoot happens when a population grows larger than the long term carrying capacity of its environment. In our case this was enabled by using up stores of oil, natural gas, water in ancient aquifers, deep, fertile old soils, etc, etc.

Populations that go into overshoot eventually crash – a very painful process. Their attempts to survive cause them to do maximum damage to their environment thereby lowering its carrying capacity well below what it originally was. As a result, they usually end up at population levels very much lower than they were at their peak.

The earth now is supporting almost 7 billion people – but how many of us can it support in the long run? Lots of estimates out there – an interesting one, the Earth Manifesto, makes a good case for one billion or less. But how would we get there?  To be continued….

Torture

After reading some of the recent commentary on torture it hit me that there really are two quite different objectives for those using this technique.  The first – and the only one that anyone ever will admit to – is to obtain important and accurate information;  the second is to break someone so that they’ll confess to something, implicate someone, or just get them to tell you what you want to hear.  Note that in this second case truth is completely irrelevant.  Read more