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# 2021-11-11 - Ecological Grounding by William Rees
Excerpts from William Rees [1] interview hosted by Michael and
Connie Barlow
[Regarding deep connection to the Earth.] It's an experience that
urban people today cannot have. The whole process of urbanization
tends to disconnect people both spatially and psychologically, from
the natural system of which we are a part, which supports us.
Everything that goes through the economy, the whole food web as we
now call it, has a connection to the environment. I don't like the
word environment because it already separates us from everything
else. But it does connect us to nature.
I wanted to work on the human dimension of this problem... It was
the idea that if we could pull together all of the land needed to
support not only our body but the infrastructure, technologies, and
so forth, we would have a fairly good idea of the size of the
microplanet that would be necessary to support this city, or this
region, or this country, and then clearly the whole of the Earth.
Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring dramatically, because I happened to
study bird populations for my doctoral [about DDT?] understanding the
dynamics of their reproduction and how the DDT [affects it?], which
by the way was unknown to science until we had to find it by
hindsight. This is so common in our ecological complexity. The
phenomena that are emergent: I am referring here to the thin shell
syndrome, that the byproducts of DDT produced, by acting as a hormone
unit in birds, so that they were perfectly fertile, normal mating
behavior took place, but they would lay eggs that had such thin
shells that when their parents rolled them over to maintain the
oxygen, the shells would break and the eggs would never hatch. And
that thin shell syndrome was affected by a hormone replacement
affecting the laying down apparently of calcium carbonate in the egg
shell, and hence Bingo! To find that we had to work backwards. It
was an unknown physiological mechanism until it was interfered with
by these breakdown products... I thought that was brilliant both as
an illustration of the complexity of this and why we are going to be
hit repeatedly by phenomena about which we have no understanding
until we discover them by hindsight. The fact that she had warned us
of the likelihood of these kinds of phenomenon just was sheer [?].
I had a very naive understanding of political dynamics. But clearly
now what [science community harassment] Rachel Carson went through
has been experienced by many innovators since. Anyone who challenges
the mainstream is going to be in deep trouble. One of the great
readings that I think everyone should take a peek at is The Crowd: A
Study of the Popular Mind by Gustav Le Bon [3]. He was the first of
a long line of cognitive psychologists who studied the human mind
particularly of how people behave en masse. Here is a wonder quote
from it.
"The masses have never sought after truth. They prefer error, for
error seduces them. Whoever supplies them with error will be their
champion. Those who deny their error will be despised."
Something like that. His point was that once we have adopted a
particular worldview way of seeing, anyone who challenges this view
is going to be rejected. So Rachel Carson along with many others
have been rejected, denied, kicked out, because their views simply
went against the grain. They challenged what was already beginning
to emerge as the growth dynamic. We're stuck in this era of
assumption of unlimited economic growth propelled by continuous
technological progress. That idea only goes back to the 1950's.
So Rachel Carson's book emerged within a decade of the emergence of
this new idea that we could solve all of our problems through growth
of the economy. So to have someone who was a reasonably prominent
scientist stick her neck out and argue against the perceived wisdom
in that domain: pesticides are good, they are going to stimulate
agricultural production, and so forth, it takes one little bit of her
work, it was simply anathema to what was going on.
By 1972 I was already teaching in the school of community and
regional planning at the University of British Columbia. I was
charged there with developing the first ever courses on human
ecological planning in any university in North America. So limits to
growth came out as an absolute gift to just about everything that I
was trying to teach in that particular course. The degree to which it
was received with utter rejection and disbelief by my colleagues in
the months for up to a year or two following the publication of
Limits To Growth, it was sunk by as an effective idea by mostly
economists who had completely adopted the growth ethic. The primary
objection was that the model was A) primitive and B) didn't take into
account human ingenuity. At the time human ingenuity was regarded as
the greatest of resources, so with the advance of technology we could
overcome any resistance to the growth of the human enterprise,
population, or the scale of economic activity. This was the kind of
idea that people wanted to believe. It reinforced this confidence in
our technological capacity to move forward. Here again, like Rachel
Carson, here's a book that said:
"Wait minute, if we continue down this trail, sometime in the 21st
century population will peak out, production will peak out, pollution
will peak out, and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down."
Well, nobody wants to hear that. So just as Gustav Le Bon said, we
will reject, deny, forget any contrary positions to those that we
hold dear and receive with open arms those views and people who
support that which we already believe. The point is, Limits To
Growth was sunk from day one largely by the economics profession who
simply disregarded it as irrelevant, a sidebar, even dangerous
because it intended to halt the progress of the human enterprise.
I had always wanted to study something called human ecology. I
couldn't do it. I could not find a university in North America that
would teach human ecology as from a biological point of view. There
were departments of human ecology in say geography departments, but
it was all about human use of resources. The sociologists had a
little sub-branch of human ecology but it was based on allegories and
so on, borrowings of European plant physiology and ecology, but just
transposed to the human system. So they considered the succession of
vegetation in the field for example, to be comparable to the
succession of land usage as a city expands over the landscape. It
was a very limited perspective of ecology. Nobody studied human
beings as organisms, as components of, as essential parts of nature.
It simply wasn't done. The point of the matter is, to this day most
ecologists study non-human beings and if we're going to look at urban
ecology, it's "How does the city come up with a proper habitat for
bird species, or ants, or caterpillars, or the distribution of
earthworms along a pollution gradient downwind from Chicago might be
a typical example of urban ecology. That's all very well, but it's
really the ecology of earthworms with respect to cities rather than
what I took to be urban ecology, which really ought to be all about
human beings. It's amazing to me that we couldn't see that people,
humans, Homo Sapiens are not only the creators of the human ecosystem
but its principle architects.
The ecological footprint concept is really a tool in ecological
economics. The main frame of economics driving the world today is
something called neoliberal economics, and it's basically that form
of economics which regards the perfect market as the ultimate arbiter
of all social values; there's no need for government considerations
of moral or ethical questions outside the market. Just let the
economy work and things will be OK. Its primary goal is, of course,
continued growth. It assumes that continuous technological
development is the tool by which we can achieve that. Now its
starting premise is that the economy and humankind are separate
systems. By the way, this is identical to the idea from ecologists
that humans are separate from the rest of the world. So both
disciplines, economics and ecology separate humans from everything
else. So the economists have the human system over here and the
ecosphere over there. There's almost no important connection between
the two. They do recognize that the economy draws on the ecosystem
for resources and dumps wastes back into it, but technology can cope
with both of those. So we assume with technological advances that
scarcity is constantly being pushed off.
Initially we could drill for oil by poking a finger in the ground and
it would gush out. But when those easy to exploit oil wells dried
up, we learned how to drill much deeper. Now we drill for oil
several kilometers below the bottom of the sea, and that may be
several kilometers below the surface of the ocean. So we just keep
keep developing technologies. Fracking was another one, to get new
oil, excess resources that we thought were impossible a few years ago.
Again, something like copper. We used to need several percent copper
for an ore to be valuable. We used to think of an ore that had a
trace of copper as utterly worthless. Well, today we can exploit
that because we have developed the technology to do so.
So the economist's vision has some support, these advances that keep
relieving us of scarcity, so that growth seems to carry on. But the
upshot of this is that the economy is envisioned as a circular flow
of money values with no important connectivity to nature. Understand
this. Once you believe that the economy is a self-generating,
circular flow of money values, and it has no important connection to
nature, you have an intellectual concept that enables perpetual
growth with no consequence whatsoever from the natural environment.
Now ecological economics starts from a different view. Instead of
seeing the two as separate, the economy over here and the ecosphere
over there, we regard human beings and their economies and social
systems as subsystems of the much larger whole. Not only that, they
are completely dependent subsystems on that larger whole. So any
increase in the flow of materials to and from the economy and nature
necessarily degrades the natural component. So in effect, the
ecological perspective in ecological economics sees the human system
as potentially parasitic on the ecosphere.
Now a parasite is any organism that gains its vitality at the expense
of the vitality of the host. Once you adopt the view that the human
subsystem is growing by extracting resources, and in fact what it
does is convert the ecosphere into human bodies and the artifacts of
culture. This is a system in which there is a clear potential for
parasitism, where the vitality of the host system is destroyed even
as the parasite grows and becomes more splendid in all of its
ramifications. I think that's exactly the situation we are in today.
The human enterprise continues to grow and expand. Once you
understand that it is a subsystem, the growth of the human enterprise
is necessarily at the expense of the rest of the system.
So today, if we look at mammals for example, and go back ten thousand
years, human beings were less than 1% of the mass of mammals on
planet Earth. Today humans are about 32% of the mammalian biomass.
The [total] biomass has actually increased because people have
increased the productivity of nature, but humans are 32% of that
biomass. Our domestic animals: sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, and so
on account for another 64%. So somewhere between 95% and 98.5% of
all mammalian biomass on Earth is human beings and their domestic
animals. So that wild nature has been reduced from over 99% of
mammalian biomass down to just about 1.5% to 4%. That's an
astonishing example of how the expansion of the human enterprise is
necessarily at the expense of the rest of nature.
When I go to political meetings and I see a politician stand up and
say "There's no contradiction between the growth of the economy and
the maintenance of the ecosphere," I am tempted to stand up and
scream "Bullshit!"
We have to understand that human beings don't act out of reality.
Human beings act out of social constructs. We socially construct the
realities from which we operate. The current social construct is
this one of unimpeded economic growth mediated through perpetually
increasing technological prowess. As long as we adhere to that, the
reality being human beings contained within nature, the reality is
then that we are consuming nature from the inside out. We are the
maggot in the planetary apple.
If you think of human beings as any other species, I think there are
three qualities that we really have to keep in mind. The first is
that we have exactly the same potential for exponential growth as any
other species. Exponential growth is simply a growth process where
the doubling time is constant. If you think about a bacterium being
dropped on a petri dish of nutrient [broth?], one cell, bingo!, under
ideal conditions with perfect nutrients, temperature, and so on, can
be two cells within 20 minutes to half an hour, but a half an hour
later it's four, and then eight, and then sixteen, and thirty-two, so
the population is doubling in constant increments. As long as the
environment is capable of providing the nutrients and ideal
conditions for that growth. So that is simply exponential growth of
the population. Human beings are capable, as all species are, of
exponential growth. Normally, however, in nature, populations are
held in check in their local environments by negative feedback. If a
population inches up toward the carrying capacity of the environment,
it gets slammed back by the spread of disease because of higher
density, or because of a shortage of food, or because the increase in
species of that population has resulted in an increased predator
population so they slam it back. So normally, populations tend to
fluctuate in nature in the vicinity of their carrying capacity. The
point is, humans then, normally have been kept in check.
The only real, substantial growth in human populations in the last
fifty thousand years has been the expansion of people over the entire
surface of the Earth. In any particular place we fluctuated over
time. What happened about two hundred years ago is an extremely
important event in our history. It ties with two other aspects that
humans share with other species.
The first I have already alluded to, and that is that all species
will tend, this is a biological predisposition or compulsion as it
were, will expand to fill all the available habitat. All the
accessible habitat.
Again, people go "not necessarily." I simply said "Suppose we
discovered a new island the size of Australia that was pristine in
all ways." Do you think governments will get together and say "Well,
you know, we've screwed up everywhere else. Let's just leave this
one alone?" Not a chance! We'd be in there with national flags on
every peak and so on as the area is cut up and carved up and
basically colonized by the human parasite. So we have the same
predisposition to expand and fill all available habitat.
But the other thing we have is the predisposition to consume all
available resources. Every species does this. There is no
difference between humans and other species. We know of cases where,
for example, there are monkeys who feed on clams oddly enough, and
who discovered they could crack these clams with rocks, quickly wipe
out the entire clam population locally because they have learned to
use tools. Well people learn to use tools. Our technology is just a
word for a collection of tools. It has enabled us to expand, expand,
and expand where others could not go, so to speak, because they do
not have our technological prowess. So look at now what we have
done. We have a finite planet inhabited by a very clever species
called Homo Sapiens, with a predisposition to expand indefinitely, it
has a population predisposition to do so exponentially, and the
technological capacity to continue to provide the resources to
produce that expansion AND to defeat the negative feedback that would
have otherwise held us in check.
So about two hundred years ago as modern medicine got a better grip
on technology and so on, we discovered germ theory, and could
suppress disease, and modern medicine helped us increase our survival
rate without much affecting the birth rate. In fact, the use of
fossil fuel, we're going to get into more depth on the extent to
which our civilization is a product of fossil fuel. Fossil fuel is
the means by which we have acquired all the other resources necessary
to build the human enterprise. So look, here's the species with the
potential for exponential growth, with the capacity to modify the
environment so that it ensures a constant flow of resources, and the
ability to suppress any negative resistance with that disease,
scarcity, and so on. So just two hundred years ago, for the first
time in the history of our species, we began a truly exponential
explosion, realizing our full biological potential. Just two hundred
years ago.
So put this in context. If you think of anatomically modern humans
going back at least two hundred thousand years. It took two hundred
thousand years to reach one billion people. Then [it took] two
hundred years, just 1/1000th of that time to blow up to almost eight
billion people today. That's an astonishing event in history. Not
only that, it's completely anomalous. Yet we take growth to be the
norm. Maybe ten generations of people at most have experienced the
growth of technological change in their lifetime even to notice it.
This is profoundly important to get a grip on our current situation.
So this period, this last two hundred years that we take to be The
Norm, and which defines how we define ourselves, is really the single
most anomalous period in the history of our species.
So it would be an absolute error to suggest that we can go back to
the norm after, for example, the COVID virus pandemic has resolved.
All people can think about is "How soon can we get back to normal?"
And what I'm arguing is that "Normal" generated the problem in the
first place. Normalcy being humans packed together in cities where
disease can be rampant and we've freed ourselves of the conditions
for the negative feedback to start coming on full time. So, climate
change, biodiversity laws, land degradation, soil degradation, the
breakdown in ocean chemistry, COVID-19, all of these are examples of
incipient negative feedback ready to come in and correct this anomaly
that has occurred in the last two hundred years.
Now in theory, we have the intelligence to recognize that this is
what's going on. In theory we could bring it under control. But so
far there is very little evidence that we've realized that at the
level that counts. You may understand it. I may understand it.
Every morning we're being treated in Canada now to an hour long
lecture by the Prime Minister on how we're doing everything possible
to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and I think
that's a little bit short-sighted.
There's a wonderful little book by Bruce Wexler titled Brain and
Culture [4]. The bottom line is this, that in the course of the
development of the human brain, repeated experiences, repeated ideas,
the constant repetition of anything, forms synaptic circuits in the
brain, it shapes the development of our thought patterns. So that
over a period of time, one can acquire a set way of thinking, you can
call it an ideology, it could be a political ideology, it could be a
doctrine, it could be an academic paradigm, even a scientific theory,
it becomes imprinted in the brain in its own synaptic circuitry. So
once a concept associated with that whole idea comes up, the whole
circuit fires. So if I am a neoliberal economist with a profound
belief in globalization, as soon as I hear "trade theory" that whole
circuit begins to ignite and reinforce itself and so on. But once
we've acquired through this experience a particular way of thinking,
human beings tend to seek out other people who think the same way,
and to seek out experiences that reinforce our habitual way of
thinking.
So a particular ideological framing of events becomes embedded in the
brain. We tend to deny, reject, or forget any contrary information.
This is profoundly important in terms of trying to move beyond the
current situation. It requires an enormous shock to get people to
think outside the box. This is thinking outside the box quite
literally. The brain box, with its predesigned synaptic circuitry
has to be shattered before we can really latch on to the idea that
there's a different way of doing things. I think we're at one of
those critical points in our existence right now. So it is
conceivable, if there were sufficient shock to the global system,
that we could sit down and rethink how to restructure more in
conformance to the nature of reality than the current system has been
structured.
Again I have to emphasize that we socially construct our reality that
becomes embedded in synaptic circuitry in the brain. We then act out
of that synaptic circuitry far more than we do out of the reality.
If there's a mismatch between the way we think about things and the
way things really are, [then] we are headed for trouble. That's the
trouble we are in as a global civilization now. The economic
paradigms, the political paradigms from which we operate have no
useful information whatsoever about the nature of the biophysical
reality within which we are parasitically embedded. So as long as we
operate from that way of thinking, we have no choice [and] there are
no options available to us to change the nature of this destructive
relationship. So the first thing, and the reason I keep battering
away at this, is hoping we can create enough glimmers of light,
cracks in the system, that at some point it bursts open and people
get that A-Ha! moment where they realize [?] in some way that we can
do this differently. What if we developed an economy based on the
idea that we are utterly dependent on this other system that we are
currently draining. How could we devise a way of allocation and
distribution of the goods and services of nature so that a much
reduced population might live sustainably within the means of the
biosphere that supports it. All of this is possible. It's another
human construct. It would be a construct based on the nature of the
reality in which we find ourselves.
Again I emphasize, we are currently operating from an economic system
that has no form of internalization of the structural, the temporal,
or the physical properties of the ecosphere that the economy is
parasitizing. Hence, it cannot be anything but pathological. We
have to break from pathology or we go nowhere. All of my work has
been simply to understand, to open eyes to a different reality, or in
fact THE reality as I see it and enable us to crack open the current
system in ways that enable human beings to live more equitably within
the biophysical means of the ecosphere. That's the whole mission [?].
Complexity is the biggest problem. Human brains evolved in small
group contexts. We are capable of coping reasonably well with a few
dozen other people at most in relatively confined habitats over which
we could do no significant damage, short term perhaps, as we rove
around over our home range, but the point of the matter is that human
beings evolved to cope within the lifetime of a person with an
unchanging environmental context dealing with relatively few other
people. Now in those circumstances it became adaptive, if in the
course of individual development one came to very quickly assume the
beliefs, values, and assumptions: the cultural norms of one's tribe,
because once one acquired that set of beliefs, values, and
assumptions; the mythology of the tribe, so to speak; it normally
added to tribal coherence, a sense of social coherence. But it gave
one a sense of personal identity because one could identify with that
group psychologically very healthy and [?]. It also, by the way,
created a barrier: the in-group, out-group concept. In human nature,
every culture that has been studied has some in-group, out-group
concept. We are over here, they are over there. Again, [this is]
highly adaptive ten thousand, fifty thousand, two hundred thousand
years ago. Thus the beginning of the problem that we are in here.
Another natural quality of humans is what economists call spatial,
social, and temporal discounting. People naturally tend to favor the
here and the now, close relatives and friends, and so on, over
distant places, future times, and people they don't know. That's the
in-group, out-group thing again. So it's perfectly natural to be
myopic. We are short-sighted by nature. Again, there is good reason
for doing so. If you don't have refrigeration, you had better eat
all that food right now because it will go bad and if you didn't get
it then somebody else would. It would be a typical way of reacting
to that circumstance ten thousand years ago. Today, of course, we
could in theory abandon that short-sighted way of looking at things,
but we don't because it's part of our nature to be social
discounters, temporal discounters, and spatial discounters. So
people naturally prefer the here, the now, close relatives over
someplace else, some distant future that may not effect them in any
case as people. So this tends to cause us to have a very limited
view and capacity for imagining the future.
But there's another thing that comes out of all of this, and that is
that we've come from a place of very simple systems that were at
least understandable if not controllable, to a place where we have
created a degree of complexity that is far beyond the capacity of any
human mind to wrap itself around. We look now on a world of
overlapping complex systems, not just the spatial systems, but the
Internet. Who REALLY understands how the Internet works? Nobody.
Who really understands money, let alone the entire economy? We've
got international mechanisms of global trade, massively complex
systems that nobody is capable of understanding in and of themselves
and yet they all integrate in some way that is beyond the capacity of
the human imagination.
So these systems all tend to evolve. What we have to get at here is
that we've now created a world that is vastly beyond our capacity
fully to understand. Systems seem to go through a cycle. They are
fairly simple to start with. They grow rapidly. They are easy to
understand. They reach a point of maturing. They become a little
less complex in the sense that they share redundant systems. They
become more and more brittle, but they get bigger and bigger. At the
same time, if we are talking about a human system, we see an increase
in corruption at the top, we see increase in income disparity, we see
increase in inability to look ahead, a greater tendency to protect
the way things are and so on. So eventually, the system... the human
system is a problem solving system. Its growth through this
trajectory is one that gets increasingly complex. Every time a
problem comes up, we solve it. So we get really efficient with our
new metal hunting and gathering gear, but we deplete our ecosystems,
so we have to invent agriculture, and that's wonderful, but then we
deplete the local soil, so we have to invent irrigation, and that's
wonderful, but then we have to expand, and now we have dams, oh by
the way with such a big land base we now have to get an army to
defend it against all these invading tribes. So the system gets
bigger and bigger and bigger and more expansive until some problem
comes along that we simply can't cope with. Because by this time
there's the division of labor, the priesthood, the governing class,
peasant classes, they become disenchanted because they're being
overtaxed by those who collect taxes at the top, and so on. Then a
big issue comes along and the whole thing can come tumbling down. It
might be climate change, it might be a bigger pandemic than this one,
it could be biodiversity loss, who knows? But that's the trajectory
that every civilization has ever followed. We seem to be on that
trajectory one more time.
There are some problems that may simply not be solvable. We've
created a system of such overwhelming complexity, there's no
precedent. Rome was complex. Mesopotamia was complex. Perhaps even
Easter Island civilization was complex. But they pale to
insignificance compared to the complexity of the global, integrated
systems that we have created. We not only created globally
integrated systems, but we have purposefully, because of the mental
models on which we operate, have simplified it by creating, for
example, just-in-time delivery. So if I manufacture medical
equipment here in Chicago, or Toronto, or wherever, but all the parts
are made in Japan and China, and they arrive exactly the day I need
to put them together, except when the pandemic shuts down the global
transportation system. So we've created this enormously complex
[and] at the same time simple system that is absolutely fragile.
There is one thing that is sometimes difficult for scientists to talk
about. That's the need for love and compassion. Human beings do
not, will not, protect that which they do not love. One of the great
regrets that I have, and I acquired this from years and years of
planning school, is the complete dissociation that most urban
planners have from the landscape, from the ecosystem. There's no
cognitive sense that we are literally a part of nature, that we are
made of star-stuff if you want to use that old [saying?]. So we have
no love for nature. When I say "we," I am talking about the majority
of society, the governing systems and all that. Some individuals do,
obviously, but for the most part we are an alien on our own planet
until and unless humans acquire some sense of compassion for other
species, some sense of compassion for other human beings in other
places. So please, let us have some compassion for other humans, for
the rest of nature, and for this planet upon which we live.
* * *
[Ben's notes follow]
Later i ran across information about Gregory Bateson's views [5] and
they reminded me of this interview.
> Gregory Bateson saw the world as a series of systems containing those
> of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Each of these systems has
> adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control balance
> by changing multiple variables. He saw the natural ecological system
> as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis,
> and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and
> its environment.
>
> Bateson, in this subject, presents western epistemology as a method
> of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic
> rule over all cybernetic systems and in doing so he unbalances the
> natural cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual
> dependency. Bateson claims that humanity will never be able to
> control the whole system because it does not operate in a linear
> fashion, and if humanity creates his own rules for the system, he
> opens himself up to becoming a slave to the self-made system due to
> the non-linear nature of cybernetics. Lastly, man's technological
> prowess combined with his scientific hubris gives him the potential
> to irrevocably damage and destroy the "supreme cybernetic system"
> (i.e. the biosphere), instead of just disrupting the system
> temporally until the system can self-correct. ... In Earth system
> science. Geocybernetics aims to study and control the complex
> co-evolution of ecosphere and anthroposphere,
See also Planetary Boundaries [6]
* * *
[1]
Interview with William Rees
[3]
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustav Le Bon
[4]
Brain and Culture by Bruce Wexler
[5]
Cybernetics in Philosophy
[6]
Planetary Boundaries
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