LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE --- a contribution to discussion

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Kenneth McLeod, June 2015

“It is important to understand … the magnitude of the change required in shaping a viable mode of human presence on planet Earth for the future. All our professions and institutions need to be reinvented in this new context. Eventually this implies rethinking … our role within the planetary process.”  
Thomas Berry, The Great Work, 1999

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
Raymond Williams, Sources of Hope, 1989

Thinking about the Anthropocene

For the first time in the evolution of life on planet Earth a single species has become so numerous, so widely distributed, so rapacious, and so unresponsive to ecosystem feedback as to seriously disrupt the biosphere’s critical life support systems.  We humans are now the dominant force for Earth System change.  We have become a force of nature.

This brief discussion paper:

• attempts a broad-brush overview of the existential challenges humankind faces as we move further into the Anthropocene;
• offers a conceptual framework to support our thinking about the transformation we must effect to ensure the continuing viability of our species on the planet.

A perfect storm brewing

We rightly hear much about human induced climate disruption. But climate change is just one symptom of a bigger planetary malaise that presents our species with unprecedented existential challenges. Other symptoms  include:

• Environmental stress from accelerating degradation of food producing land, water, forests, and fisheries, ocean warming and acidification, and dangerously increasing ecosystem fragility due to biodiversity loss.
• Energy stress as declining access to abundant cheap oil and increasing restrictions on coal burning are driving risky and invasive "non-conventional" fossil fuel exploitation which threatens local aquifers, water catchments and ecosystems, endangers fragile wilderness environments, and compounds the risk of severe climate disruption.
• Economic stress from our dependence on continuous growth in output and consumption to maintain economic, social and political stability while in the process widening income gaps between rich and poor, poisoning the biosphere with intractable waste, and generating endemic financial instability and market volatility.
• Demographic stress arising from marked differentials in population growth between rich and poor countries, a destabilising mismatch between population growth and viable livelihoods in the developing world, the runaway growth of crisis-prone megacities often vulnerable to climate change impacts and recurring epidemics, and large-scale population movements spurred by population pressures, conflict, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation.
• Species stress through industrial scale animal genocide for human consumption, trade and recreation, and the destruction of marine and terrestrial habitats.
• Political and social stress as competition for scarce resources intensifies, international power alignments shift, inter-communal and sectarian strife escalates, food and water insecurity spreads from poorer regions, and populations are displaced.

All these stresses represent dire threats to human wellbeing, but our impacts on the biosphere are already proving more calamitous for many other life forms. Through habitat destruction and competition for land and resources our species has provoked a mass extinction spasm on a scale that the planet has not seen for 65 million years. Now scientists warn we are approaching or have exceeded several critical planetary boundaries that could trigger a state change in the Earth System.

• Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity, says an international team of 18 researchers in the journal Science (16 January 2015). The four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
• Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call "core boundaries". Significantly altering either of these "core boundaries" would "drive the Earth System into a new state".
• "Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human wellbeing in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries," says Lead author, Professor Will Steffen, researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Australian National University, Canberra. "In this new analysis we have improved our quantification of where these risks lie."
• Other co-authors from the Centre are Johan Rockstr?m, Sarah Cornell, Ingo Fetzer, Oonsie Biggs, Carl Folke and Belinda Reyers.
• https://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/1-15-2015-planetary-boundaries-2.0---new-and-improved.html

By their nature these symptoms cannot be successfully dealt with singularly or sequentially.  They are deeply intertwined in complex ways. This means a crisis in any one area, even one triggered by a natural disaster, could rapidly propagate across the whole global system. The density and speed of communication, enmeshed financial markets, regional and global arms races, and the ability of extremist groups and rogue states to spark serious disruption amplify the danger of cascading systemic failure. This in turn creates an ever-present risk of escalating political crisis, conflict and organised and random violence. Knee-jerk or ideologically driven reactions by governments and corporations and ill-considered attempts at techno-fixes are likely to exacerbate these impacts. The attack by the United States on Iraq and its global war on terror in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington continue to send shock waves through the international system, amplifying long festering hostilities, sectarian conflicts, and historic grievances and sowing fear where trust is needed.

These deep fault lines in what is now a single global system will not play out evenly or predictably. But the big trends are clear and well advanced and their implications only too apparent.

There will be communities and even whole societies that respond with varying degrees of wisdom and compassion. Others will remained mired in self-defeating denial and confusion. Some will regress to destructive conflict, violence and extremism. These are indeed dangerous times.

At this crucial turning point in human affairs it seems urgent to collaborate in developing a shared conceptual framework to focus and support our thinking about the challenges of living in the Anthropocene. The remainder of this discussion paper offers a first attempt at such a framework and invites the contribution of others in its development and refinement.

Four domains of creative praxis to reshape our human presence on Earth

This diagram offers an integrated framework for thinking about the diversity of possible human responses to the existential challenges of life in the Anthropocene.  It is not meant to suggest a Grand Strategy.  Rather, it is intended to focus thinking on possible forms of transformative action at all levels within each of the four domains and to locate them within a larger dynamic context. 

On the following pages there are some thoughts about the scope and priorities in each domain.

PSYCHE ? EXISTENTIAL
New ways of being together
The domain of Earth consciousness, collective learning, and deep democracy

As we ponder how to deal with the existential crises we have brought upon ourselves, a radical shift in our collective ways of being may be our best and last chance. Radical, that is, in the literal sense: a return to our roots in Earth's matrix of life — a reframing of our culture around the participatory values of eco-mutuality. We have reached the point where the survival of our species requires that we abandon the underpinning assumption of industrial growth societies — that humans have first claim on environmental resources — and move to compatibility with the life support systems of the planet as the core organising principle of all our social formations and institutions.

This transformation of our core cultural values will require deep remembering, radical creativity, and new modes of adaptive social learning. To prepare for this age of transition we will need to: remember what surviving indigenous cultures demonstrate humans have long known about the interdependence of all life; creatively embrace the new holism emerging at the frontiers of science; and greatly enhance our capacity to make sense of shared experience and so rapidly modify our collective responses to a changing environment.

Ultimately our ability to survive and thrive as an integral part of the community of life will depend on our capacity for wise collective action reflecting this new Earth System consciousness. This in turn requires a greatly enhanced capacity for adaptive social learning — groups of people sharing their experiences in action, experimenting with different ways of dealing with common challenges, reflecting together on the meaning of their experiences, and deciding on new forms of co-operative action.

Transition times require innovation in the way we govern ourselves at all levels. The outmoded institutions of industrial consumer society and their moribund ways of encountering the world must give way to more dynamic social forms with permeable boundaries that can readily experiment with new approaches and speedily adapt to emerging needs and opportunities. The plasticity of the human brain is a model for the organisational forms we need to invent. As neurologist Elkhonon Goldberg (2009) has observed: "The evolution of the brain teaches us the lesson that a high degree of complexity cannot be handled by rigidly organised systems. It requires distributed responsibilities and local autonomy.”  We must move away from the rigidities of  centralised bureaucratic power and the hollowed out political theatre of representative democracy to invent new forms of deep democracy.

There are good reasons to believe that such social innovation is most likely to flourish in local communities, small workplaces, and networks of practice. In these settings institutional inertia is weakest, resistance by vested interests less, the risks of failure manageable, and the bonds of human solidarity strongest.

We will ever remain biological creatures, but we are also cultural beings who co-create our own virtual habitat and through it share an emerging collective intelligence, potentially far greater than the simple sum of its parts. Finding ways to more fully realise this collective creativity in the service of the continuing viability of our species within the limits of the Earth's biosphere is the key challenge before us.

MYTHOS ? SYMBOLIC
New ways of making shared meanings
The domain of story, the creative arts, and new cultural syntheses

At the very core of every civilisation one invariably finds a theory of human nature and a cosmology — the foundation stories of who we are and where we came from. These stories are explicitly or implicitly manifest in the cultural practices of the society; its public ceremonies, its performing and visual arts, its literature, its music, its popular culture.

In today’s globalised world these stories typically reflect the values of a colonising, commercial monoculture — unending growth, competition, heroic individualism, and limitless consumption — that has swept away so many alternative ways of being. Upending centuries of cultural orthodoxy in the industrial world will involve a shift from the crippling conceit that we are the exception, standing outside and above nature, to a story of eco-mutuality – a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship that restores our place as a co-creative partner within the planet's community of life.

Contemporary science has slowly unfolded for us an origin story of breath-taking magnificence. From the first moments as the building blocks of the universe came hurtling into existence across the threshold of the knowable, to the flowering of life on our blue-green jewel of a planet, it tells a story of the emergence of increasing complexity and coherence from a simpler undifferentiated potentiality. This story shows us that our human journey on planet Earth has seen the emergence of a uniquely reflexive consciousness, embedded in our many cultures, and complementing the great diversity of non-human adaptive intelligences with which it has co-evolved. Now, the Earth calls us to mobilise this consciousness to creatively refashion the medium of its own evolution — our shared human culture — by restoring values of eco-mutuality at its core. This is the story for our times. And, as North American performance poet Drew Dellinger reminds us, “the future belongs to the most compelling story”.

The virtual habitat of human culture as the primary vehicle of our continuing evolution has made us both the subject and the author of our part in the bigger evolutionary story. But our species has become a threat to the integrity of the biosphere. Only by a conscious act of cultural transformation can we avoid evolution's verdict on the human experiment. We will consciously rejoin the mainstream of life's co-creative unfolding on Earth, or become an evolutionary dead-end.

Creative expressions of Earth consciousness are limitless, as can be seen in the great diversity of its manifestations around the world involving the full spectrum of artistic forms — music, performance, dance, visual arts, ritual, digital and screen-based media. In some cultures the emphasis is on artistic expression and celebration while in others more overtly spiritual forms are seen. All have a part to play in weaving the fabric of a renewed culture.

The border zones where cultures, ideologies, and religions clash, where communities and nations compete for advantage or survival, so often become the killing fields. But they can also be spaces of creative engagement, of renewal, where surprising new cultural syntheses emerge and evolutionary breakthroughs occur.

Creation is not a singular event, but an on-going universal process within which each one of us has a part to play. As the ancient stories tell us, we issued from a creative universe and can continue only as participants in its inexorable creativity.
We have no blueprint to guide us in this task of co-creation. It will be a learning journey along a path we must invent as we go. By its very nature, it is a collaborative undertaking. Discovering new forms of creative collaboration will be the necessary first step.

EPISTEME ? RATIONAL
New ways of common knowing
The domain of holism, complexity, co-evolution, and adaptive intelligence

When we speak of a transition driven by our species' disruption of the life support systems of the planet, we must be very clear this is not a process to which we can frame effective responses within the categories of conventional politics, economics, or scientific reductionism. Einstein's oft cited warning about the futility of attempting to solve complex problems using the same mode of thinking that created them has become a cliche. Yet that is precisely what we are doing on virtually every front in our responses to the big systemic issues of our age.

Since the 18th century Western science has given humanity extraordinary abilities to manipulate the natural world by delving into the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. With this power came the conceit that there was nothing we could not ultimately know and manage to our own advantage. But the success of this mode of knowing has created an awful blind-spot in our collective way of seeing the world. Preoccupation with the minutiae of matter and the instrumental power it gave us left our culture with a diminished respect for the complex and interdependent systems — both biophysical and social — within which we exist. Such systems exhibit qualities and behaviours as a whole that a knowledge of their constituent parts can neither predict nor explain. The seemingly miraculous emergence of reflexive consciousness from the human brain, for example. These complex systems, with the higher order patterns to which they give rise, constitute much of the world we seek to know.

Our inability to adequately understand many of the processes of life became increasingly obvious as the effects of our micro level know-how, scaled up to macro interventions, started to rebound on the environment, and thus ultimately on ourselves, in alarming ways. The difficulties of managing both the immediate and long-term consequences of unleashing the ancient energy of fossil fuels and, more recently, the atom are cases in point. Then, early in the second half of the 20th century, several new fields of scientific inquiry started to emerge — like cybernetics, systems theory, ecology, and artificial intelligence. Their focus was on emergent order and evolutionary change in whole systems. By the final years of the century separate developments across numerous disciplines had begun to flow into the new holistic field of complexity science. Concepts such as self-organisation, adaptation, resilience, emergence, and network dynamics offer new ways of thinking about the dynamics of change in whole systems that transcend the simple linear causality underpinning much of our conventional social, political, and economic thinking.

Science and history teach us that complex dynamic systems like ecosystems and civilisations tend to cycle from rapid growth, to increasingly rigid maturity, systemic breakdown, and then renewal. Indeed, there are circumstances in which it might be said that breakdown is a condition for renewal. All complex systems exist on multiple scales, so shorter adaptive cycles are usually nested within longer ones. Understanding the dependencies between different scales is important to understanding the dynamics of the whole system.

These concepts are informing much new thinking across diverse fields of inquiry including the social sciences. Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon (2006) has applied them to the complex dynamics of our increasingly unstable world system. He coined the term ‘catagenesis’ to describe “the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions, and societies in the aftermath of breakdown.” This invites us to think in new ways about what a transition from gross overdevelopment to environmentally sustainable societies might entail. It challenges us to consider how we might engage creatively with change processes that are beyond our control.

Guiding principles for new modes of knowing the world in all its glorious diversity can be found in the dynamic co-evolution of Earth's community of life, our deepening understanding of change in complex systems, and a profound respect for emergent adaptive intelligence in its manifold forms.

TECHNE ? INSTRUMENTAL
New ways of social doing
The domain of closed-loop economics, holistic technologies, and eco-social sustainability

Culture is the prevailing social consensus about what is real, what is knowable, and what has value. It conditions our ways of being, seeing and doing.  It determines what we consider appropriate action in and on the world.  It defines the taken-for-granted limits of the possible and the acceptable.

Changing our shared culture — “the way we do things around here” — involves more than new sustainable business models, closed loop economics, and appropriate technologies. All these are vitally important areas of innovation in this age of transition, but they are not sufficient. A new ethos of doing, based on the principles of eco-mutuality, must be our goal.

Living in the Anthropocene requires us to find a new symbiosis between human societies and the community of life on the planet. To do this we must make a shift from the mindset of industrial consumer capitalism to a holistic approach to technology and economics that focuses on the complex relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Our goal must be to devise “technologies [and economies] that create conditions conducive to life”. Our commitment must be to the integrity and resilience of the whole and to wholeness.

Replacing environmentally destructive technologies with “greener” alternatives — like heavily polluting coal-fired power stations with low carbon wind farms — may deliver valuable incremental gains, but will prove incapable of achieving the long-term goal of sustainable and healthy ecosystems. Many of the technologies born of the scientific and industrial revolutions are a perfect manifestation of human hubris, designed to enhance our ability to dominate, manipulate and exploit the natural environment. Their logic is that of mass production: standardisation, centralisation, and economies of scale. Thus, when so-called alternative technologies are applied on the scale required to conform to existing infrastructure and business models, they too dominate and alienate both humans and nature.

Our only way through this conundrum is to turn to nature for inspiration and instruction. As the Biomimicry Institute observes, nature provides us with an inventory of “brilliant solutions” drawn from 3.8 billion years of trial and error. While the concept of biomimicry has inspired some important breakthroughs and encouraged a fundamentally new approach to systems design, many biomimicry designers have themselves pursued a substitutionist approach, using models from nature to deliver enhanced products and materials into the mass consumption marketplace. Biomimicry pioneer, Janine Benyus (2008), reminds us that “a full emulation of nature engages at least three levels of mimicry: form, process and ecosystem”.

Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb and utilise disturbances. A resilient ecosystem, human community, or economy can withstand unexpected upheavals by reorganising itself to preserve its basic structure and functions. In times of environmental, social and economic disruption and uncertainty, the resilience of local communities and the critical bio-regional systems on which they depend will be of paramount importance, particularly the reliability of local energy, water and food sources, and communications and trading systems. Just as important is building robust social capital and more responsive and adaptable systems of local governance. Thus local resilience is closely related to social innovation and adaptive social learning.

We need a better understanding of the conditions for such resilience at every scale of human activity from local to global. Much can be learnt from natural ecosystems, long enduring traditional cultures, and from the experience of contemporary relocalisation movements. We also need to consider how to strengthen local autonomy and confidence and protect them from encroachment by reactive institutions, predatory corporations and criminal networks.

Resilience is a key to sustainability. It is significantly a product of a community's deep relationship to a unique place. Sharing historical, cultural and ecological knowledge of the local environment and valuing this as the basis for social partnerships and stakeholder alliances can build strong bonds of respect and mutual responsibility. This is an area in which settler societies have much to learn from the responsible custodianship traditions of indigenous cultures — what the first Australians call “caring for country”. When a community shares a strong sense of responsibility for its environment, respects the limits it mandates, and develops inclusive cultural expressions of this consciousness, it will exhibit a corresponding depth of sustainability.


TRANSFORMATIVE ACTION ? PRACTICES, MODELS & TOOLS

So what are the capabilities our communities, organisations and networks will need in the age of transition? What are the principles and models that can guide our cultural, social, political, systems design, and management praxis through times of profound uncertainty and danger?

Very soon a website will be launched to provide a space for cultural animateurs to share their stories of transformative action, their change models and tools, and their proposals for new initiatives.

For up-dates and discussion stay in touch at: 

https://www.dhirubhai.net/grp/home?gid=6973569

Animateurs, animation, learning and change. Animation means, literally, to breathe life into something. A transformation is involved, what was still now moves.

https://infed.org/mobi/animateurs-animation-learning-and-change/

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