untangling the knot: first steps

In the last post we looked at various reasons why the modern humanity finds it so hard to halt environmental destruction of the earth.  We noted these reasons link together to form a tangled knot, making any progress difficult.

Lets gather up our courage, and look at this tangle in a little more detail.  Does it have some high-level structure?

The gnarliest knots can take a suprising amount of patience to untangle

The different categories of issues call for different approaches.  For example:

• Business issues: changes in regulation and taxation
• Political/Legal issues: political and legal reform 
• Technology: massive investment in sustainable energy

All of these are deeply interlinked, forming a very tight sub-knot which is very hard to influence from the outside, and some might say, hard to change from the inside.  Hence the phrase "military-industrial complex" referred to by Eisenhower, which also should include politics and the legal system (it has also been called the "military-industrial-congressional complex").  Other actors in this knot include multinational corporations, and the finance industry.  For now we will call it The Complex.

The Complex is predictably destroying the planet, and it doesn't want to change.
How can we improve this picture?

There may be a way to effectively untie that sub-knot, and there is always a lot of discussion on how exactly to do that.  Some people protest the Complex, some join it to influence it from the inside, some try to live without it as far as possible.  But the Complex is hard to influence on a personal level, unless you find yourself as one of the elite in terms of wealth or connections.  We will leave the internals of that sub-knot aside for now, we can discuss that more in a future post.

However there are a number of the issues mentioned in the last post, which are outside the scope of the Complex, which I will call Human Factors, including human nature and cultural causes:

• Inability to notice slow change, 
• Future discounting, 
• Discouragement, 
• Modern attention deficit, 
• Sheep syndrome, 
• Lifestyle inertia, 
• No precedent, 
• Ignorance, 
• Magical thinking

For details on each of these, see the last post.

These are things we cannot blame The Complex.  After all, our human nature is what produced this Complex and the problems it created.  That means we can address these without depending on the Complex changing first, which means we have a real chance of making progress.

Our current predicament is partly a natural result of human nature

One thing we have been reminded of recently with the Arab Spring in the middle east, the grassroots defeat of SOPA in the US, and the anti-rape movement in India, is that broad popular opinion is still an incredibly powerful force for change.

Popular support is needed to make the needed changes.

Understanding these quirks of human nature, is key to building popular support required for meaningful change.

These quirks of human nature can be, and must be, counteracted on a cultural level.  In fact we could consider a purpose of culture, to be a counterbalance to our instinct and human nature to allow us to live together, and now, survive together.

And this is the level we all have access to:  writers, artists, musicians, film makers, journalists, scientists, engineers, whether professional or amateur.

Only the tiny seed of understanding can produce a vast forest of wisdom 

We need to infuse culture with key wisdom and tools, as cultural antidotes to the plague of media:

1) Educating on the basic facts of environmental impact.  We don't want people thinking that if they just recycle their bottles and buy green detergent, they are pulling their weight.  There is broad misunderstanding about basic ecological facts, the current rates of destruction, and just how quickly and dramatically the earth will change if we don't change course.

2) Increasing people's capacity to imagine how things will end up if we don't change course.  This calls for artists to depict life in the future in an environmentally ravaged world, including books, visual art, and (most compelling) cinema.

3) Establishing counterbalances to tendencies like short attention span, future discounting, etc.  with appropriate tools and media.

4) Counter modern people's tendancy to passivity in politics.

5) Focus on psychology research to deeply understand people's ability or inability to handle long term problems and find applied solutions.

Cultural artefacts, values and assumptions, can influence each other

The goal here is to influence culture with compelling cultural artefacts, backed by science, that inspire specific change in attitudes and behaviour, to help foster a wiser populace, and aimed at the people who need it most.

That last point is critical.  Far too much progressive media is aimed squarely at "the choir", those who least need the message.

Instead, we need messages couched in the context most accessible to those furthest removed from awareness of these problems.

How would the greatest polymath minds of all time
approach the current environmental crisis?

So in summary:

• The many barriers to progress on environmental issues, form a tangle that has a simple high-level structure: Human Factors, and The Complex 
• Leaving aside for now the difficult restructuring of the current political, business, finance, military, and legal Complex, we can always make progress with Human Factors: people's attitudes and behaviour, which is the root of these issues in the first place 
• To be most effective, this work should be strongly supported by science, and couched in terms most accessible to those who most need to hear it.

What could be the anti-dote to years of propaganda, double-speak, advertising, and junk fiction that we are exposed to?