On Failing to Think Long Term
Stewart Brand gave me permission to post his email summary of Jared Diamond's talk last night. Over to Stewart...
To an overflow house (our apologies to those who couldn't make it in!), Jared Diamond articulately spelled out how his best-selling book, COLLAPSE, took shape.
At first it was going to be a book of 18 chapters chronicling 18 collapses of once-powerful societies--- the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. But he wanted to contrast those with success stories like Tokugawa-era Japan, which wholly reversed its lethal deforestation, and Iceland, which learned to finesse a highly fragile and subtle environment.
Diamond also wanted to study modern situations with clear connections to the ancient collapses. Rwanda losing millions in warfare caused by ecological overpressure. China--- "because of its size, China's problems are the world's problems." Australia, with its ambitions to overcome a horrible environmental history. And Diamond's beloved Montana, so seemingly pristine, so self-endangered on multiple fronts.
He elaborated a bit on his book's account of the Easter Island collapse, where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!" The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.
Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes: "Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem." "This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it." "Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research." "Just have faith. God will provide."
The question everyone asks, Diamond said, is, How can people be so dumb? It's a crucial question, with a complex answer. He said that sometimes it's a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it's a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests--- warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past.
Overall, it's a failure to think long term. That itself has many causes. One common one is that elites become insulated from the consequences of their actions. Thus the Mayan kings could ignore the soil erosion that was destroying their crops. Thus the American wealthy these days can enjoy private security, private education, and private retirement money. Thus America itself can act like a gated community in relation to the rest of the world, imagining that events in remote Somalia or Afghanistan have nothing to do with us. Isolation, Diamond declared, is never a solution to long-term problems.
I'll add two items to what Diamond said in his talk. One good sharp question came from Mark Hertzgaard, who asked the speaker if he agreed "with Stewart Brand's view that the threat of climate change justifies adopting more nuclear power." To my surprise, Diamond said that he was persuaded by last year's "Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges" to treat nuclear as one important way to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. (In the commission's report, the environmentalist co-chair John Holdren wrote: ""Given the risks from climate change and the challenges that face all of the low-carbon and no-carbon supply options, it would be imprudent in the extreme not to try to keep the nuclear option open.")
While I was driving Jared Diamond back to the El Drisco hotel, we got talking about how to separate the good actors from the bad actors among corporations. He said that third-party validation was absolutely essential. For instance, he studied the exemplary environmental behavior of Chevron in Papua New Guinea and reported on it in "Discover" magazine. As a result of that favorable report, validated by the World Wildlife Fund (where Diamond is a director), Chevron was able to land an immensely valuable contract with Norway, who was demanding environmentally responsible behavior from any oil company it would deal with.
The new term taken seriously in oil and mining corporations, Diamond said, is "social license to operate." A company must earn that from the public in order to stay in business.
And we the public must do our vigilant part so that "social license" means something.
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Tim O'Reilly writes: O'Reilly Radar > On Failing to Think Long Term: Stewart Brand gave me permission to post his email summary of Jared Diamond's talk last night. Over to Stewart... To an overflow house (our apologies to those who couldn't make it in!... Read More
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Adam,
I'm with you about Kunstler. It seems to me that he also takes joy in his claims that we are screwed, and he seems sort of annoyed at people who are attempting to make things better, throwing out pissy comments to demean their efforts.
Rich,
Here are subsequent items in Salon (subscription or watch an ad, you know the drill):
They're worth reading.
While we're on the subject, here's what Heather Green at Business Week has this to say:
I really wish that Salon had tried something new, like using blogs, instead of email for the dustup they published between alternative energy guru Amory Lovins and author James Howard Kunstler.
I agree with her that'd've been worth trying, as the exchange got fairly heated as it was. Whether it'd've been more informative, or at least more civil, in the form of a weblog is a good question.
Some of this reminds me of the stuff that came out of the "Club of Rome" in the early 1970s. Their "Limits of Growth" report effectively claimed we would have long run out of basic resources by now driven by overpopulation - global society would be on the verge of collapse. There have been several follow-up publications such the books "Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World" (1974) and "Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future" (1993) by D. Meadows et al. all of which tried to use systems analysis and computer modeling to demonstrate impending environmental disaster. Unfortunately, the result was more of a "chicken little" syndrome around their work along with grave doubts about the meaningfulness of such computer models.
Jarad Diamond's approach of telling stories is perhaps a better approach to informing the public about such issues than scientists waving their data and models around as the former are easier to relate to.
There's an MP3 available of what sounds like a similar speech he gave for the Festival of Ideas in Brisbane earlier this year: http://www.griffith.edu.au/er/diamond/mp3/lecture.mp3
The danger of skimming--flipping through my RSS, just one sentence of your post stood out to me: "Overall, it's a failure to think long-term."
I was surprised...so now it's long-term thinking that dooms us. If we live in the moment, all will be well. The concept seemed absurd enough that I figured I should read the whole post...and then I realized my mistake.
Fun times.
Sounds like classic prisoner's dilemma, where there is a clear rational incentive to choose the short term personal reward over the long term collective (and potentially greater) reward.
BTW, in Diamond's book, the phrase "it's a failure to think long term" he clearly uses to mean "part of the problem is a failure to think long term". He DEFINITELY advocates taking a very long term view of things.
I don't think it's so much that people are environmental or (as has been claimed in other spots) "climate change skeptics" but that they are nettled by the fact that the entire global warming debate/movement has polarized to such an extent that one has the uneasy feeling that information is supplied only the mouthpieces of heavily vested interests.
I am reminded of our local recycling programs, many of which have turned out to be rather less than they represent themselves to be...ie. taxpayers find that after implementing an expensive recycling program, many of the collected products are not recyled at all, but wind up in the local landfill.
This has rendered many citizens understandably skeptical about any green debate; they tune out not only the shouting matches, but are mystified by the often obtuse language and intellectual one-upmanship that too often colours the public debate between scientists.
I think the general public longs for a sober, clearly worded explanation of why debate exists, what that uncertainty means, and how we should approach the evaluation of competing claims, with a view to changing the ways we impact our world.
Diamond does a good job of that.
You might be interested to know that Stewart Brand has recently endorsed a techno-thriller novel about the American nuclear power industry, written by a longtime nuclear engineer (me).
This book provides an entertaining and accurate portrait of the nuclear industry today and how a nuclear accident would be handled. It is called “Rad Decision”, and is currently running as a serial at RadDecision.blogspot.com. There is no cost to readers.
“I'd like to see RAD DECISION widely read.” - - Stewart Brand.
Those interested in future energy issues will benefit by taking a look at Rad Decision - - and they will be entertained as well.
I’d like to get more readers for this non-profit, independent project, so if you like what you see, please pass the word along.
All sides of the nuclear power debate will find items to like, and dislike, within “Rad Decision”. I’m not sure myself what the future of nuclear energy should be. What I am sure of is that we will make better decisions if we understand what nuclear energy is right now.
I invite you again to read Rad Decision, at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com.
Regards,
James Aach
20+ years in the nuclear industry.
(Stewart Brand quote used with permission)
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adamsj [07.17.05 06:04 AM]
I have an alternative quote for the guy in 1680:
In the mid-seventies, there was a slick SF magazine called Vertex. I'm not sure if it ever made it to issue two, but issue one contains Harlan Ellison's Bleeding Stones and (I think) William Rotsler's Patron of the Arts. Now, Bleeding Stones gave me a sleepless night when I first read it, but there's another story in it that creeps me out still.
I'm not sure who wrote it, but I'd guess Harry Harrison, because it had that insousiance in the face of high stakes that alternately makes him so fun and so annoying to read. In this story, someone researching environmental destruction is kidnapped and dropped from a helicopter into the ocean, his ankles wired to the engine block from a Chevelle.
When he pleads with the people who are killing him to stop, that he has important knowledge about environmental destruction, they reply that they know all about it, that the earth is doomed in the very near future, and that they don't plan to tell people because, after all, they still have a few years, maybe, decades to live on top, comfortably, and don't need riots in the meantime.
That's as scary as any image of Harlan Ellison's.
And here we find what made me so angry at Kunstler. His message is, at heart, "We're screwed and you can't do anything--get used to it." Scratch a Green, find a Libertarian.