This post and the following two offer a summary of the way Radical Mind Shift has served its intent — or mission.
Radical Mind Shift considers seemingly contradictory information, even when, or especially when, the information and interpretations are inconsistent with our cherished ideas and beliefs. In the unimaginably complex world we inhabit, one that is perhaps beyond our ability to ever fully decipher, we do well to consider many viewpoints. It is unlikely that ours alone will suffice, especially when the subject of our exploration is as consequential as the human predicament. Our default custom is to simplify the great chaos of the outside stimuli and interior information by deciphering patterns, by connecting the dots, often creating images for ourselves that are as arbitrary as the constellations in the sky. Once created, we then have the facility for believing that what we believe is true.[i] A different set of eyes may see a completely different set of patterns, and so may elucidate an entirely different universe. In looking through as many lenses as possible, we have seen in these pages that reality belongs exclusively to neither the cornucopians nor to the apocalyptic, neither to the socialist nor to the capitalist, neither to the scientist nor to the mystic. Choices are rarely matters of either/or, but rather of and, and, and… until we can integrate them into a sensible whole. A billion people are living material lives of unprecedented comfort, and a similar number feel the constant gnawing pangs of hunger every day of their lives. Millions of people are working tirelessly to make reality a carbon-free economy, and we are pouring more carbon dioxide into the air than we ever have before. We are replanting forests and developing better farming methods, and the rainforests are still disappearing and our fertile lands are washing into the seas. We are living longer and we are committing ecological suicide. The glass is half empty and it is half full.
Looking through an evolutionary lens, we can conclude that our impact on the Earth has been neither sudden nor due to some specific historical moment. Being clever creatures, we have long changed the environment by conscious choice. Agriculture and industrialization were punctuated jumps in our already heady attempts to change conditions to our liking. Oil refineries and air conditioners and refrigerators and plastic water bottles are merely logical creations on that path. However, in the process, we have killed off most of the other creatures—beautiful, terrifying, and otherwise. The survivors have adapted to a human-centered planet, to a homogenized biosphere, to a complex web that has been simplified. We have discharged all sorts of radioactive, carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic substances into the air, water, soil, and therefore into our bodies. And we continue to do so at an accelerating rate.
The human population from 8000 BCE to 2000 CE.
Numbers help us to visualize the magnitude of our dilemma. And so, they serve as an important window into self-awareness. The J-curve serves as an icon for the exponential rise in all human affairs, from the human population and hominid intelligence to everything that tumbles out from those. Wealth made, material consumed, patents catalogued, cars produced, highways and cities erected, resources mined, pollution emitted, food grown, trees cut and burned, wild creatures destroyed, and so on. Numbers give us a sense of how rapidly and thoroughly we have turned forests and grasslands into farms and deserts. They illustrate how fast we have heated the skies and acidified the oceans. They enumerate the new and novel molecules that we have synthesized and dumped into the web of life. And they can give us some indication of the magnitude of the human suffering, much of it otherwise beyond our view. Although we farm nearly every available acre to feed ourselves and we work long exhausting hours, still billions of people are malnourished and drink polluted waters. Millions starve each year in what has become history’s longest perpetual famine. The future promises to be more difficult. Because we rely completely on the annual regeneration of plants for our sustenance, and we have appropriated most every available acre on the planet to this end, and we have relatively little food in storage for a rainy day, humanity finds itself walking on a high wire, with little margin for error, no net, and the wire stretched endlessly ahead.
Radical Mind Shift has, and will continue to demonstrate unambiguously that our numbers and our appetites have grown beyond the Earth’s capacity to support us. In killing off our competitors and landscaping all the fertile Earth into a giant food trough for our species, we essentially abolished nature’s checks and balances on our numbers. Within the short span of a few millennia, we have covered the face of the Earth with our kind. And being creatures with the unprecedented blend of brain and brawn, we took for ourselves the sun’s energy stored in forests and in underground hydrocarbons and the minerals held in mountains to synthesize a civilization never seen before on this planet. Where we had once slept in mud and thatched homes by the millions, we now rest in palaces by the billions. Our few ziggurats have turned into thousands of skyscrapers. Our forest trails have become highways, contrails, and shipping lanes. We have become Homo colossus. We singly move as much sediment, soil, nitrogen, and phosphorus as the rest of all the planetary forces, biotic and abiotic combined. We appropriate as much as forty percent of all the photosynthesis materialized by plants on the six continents. We are the architects of Earth’s sixth mass extinction of complex life. With accelerating force, we have become the dominant change agent on the planet.
Much of the change, however, will not serve our long-term interests. The numbers unequivocally show that as population and consumption rise, resources diminish and the biosphere degrades. We have long ago passed “peak” on most everything we depend—water, soil, climate, energy, forests, biodiversity. And so we have likely already overshot our planet’s carrying capacity for our species. If we are in overshoot, then our numbers must crash, either voluntarily or by the often-unkind correctives of the Earth. And yet—maddeningly when one considers the disconnect—demographers predict that we will add yet another three-and-half billion people by century’s end, and economists are expecting each of us to consume many times more than we already do.
ENDNOTE
[i] Shermer, M. (2012) The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce them as Truths. Times Books, New York.