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Innovation in Hard Times?
Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
When thinking about what happens to society during a difficult time of some kind, one of the sharpest delineators between pessimists and optimists is their belief about the role of innovation. The optimists tend to assume that the can-do creative spirit of humanity will, always and everywhere, solve all problems, and thus the future will be ever brighter and brighter, with the possible exception of some brief and localized problems which will only serve to spur further innovation. The pessimists tend to assume that human innovation either a) doesn’t occur at all, or b) generally makes things worse if it does.
I’m not quite sure where I fall on this spectrum yet, but it seems to me that, one way or another, as a society we are about to have a hard time here. Between the housing credit implosion, declines in Saudi oil production, the unknown but great damage that the Bush administration has done to the always fragile political arrangements in the economically critical Middle East, and monster hurricanes stomping on our cities, it’s hard not to feel that the next decade is going to be one of the less fun ones in the historical record. I’m not going to commit myself on exactly how low the fun quotient is going to get – I really have no idea – but I’m sure not feeling good about the near to middle distance.
So it seems worth exploring further this question of the relationship between innovation and “hard times” of one kind and another.
(15 March 2007)
EB contributors James Kunstler and John Michael Greer are mentioned. Many thought-provoking comments at the original article. -BA
The Idols of Environmentalism
Do environmentalists conspire against their own interests?
Curtis White, Orion
…The problem for even the best-intentioned environmental activism is that it imagines that it can confront a problem external to itself. Confront the bulldozers. Confront the chainsaws. Confront Monsanto. Fight the power. What the environmental movement is not very good at is acknowledging that something in the very fabric of our daily life is deeply anti-nature as well as anti-human. It inhabits not just bad-guy CEOs at Monsanto and Weyerhaeuser but nearly every working American, environmentalists included.
…Besides, corporations are really powerless to be anything other than what they are. I suspect that, far from being perverse merchants of greed hellbent on destruction, these corporate entities are as bewildered as we are. Capitalism-especially in its corporate incarnation-has a logos, a way of reasoning. Capitalism is in the position of the notorious scorpion who persuades the fox to ferry him across a river, arguing that he won’t sting the fox because it wouldn’t be in his interest to do so, since he’d drown along with the fox. But when in spite of this logic he stings the fox anyway, all he can offer in explanation is “I did it because it is in my nature.” In the same way, it’s not as if businessmen perversely seek to destroy their own world. They have vacation homes in the Rockies or New England and enjoy walks in the forest, too. They simply have other priorities which are to them a duty.
…The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our primary dependence on the scientific language of “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the very kind of rationality that serves not only the Sierra Club but corporate capitalism as well.
(March/April 2007)
I think Curtis White is criticizing the assumptions and thought patterns of modern society, much as John Michael Greer does in his EB essay The failure of reason. It’s a difficult subject, since we see and talk about the world with the frames of reference that are under criticism. As Marshall McLuhan said, “I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.”
Discussed at Gristmill.-BA
On Market Failure
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Blog
Sir Nicholas Stern, the current greatest authority in the world on the economic consequences of global warming visited congress recently, and during his testimony reiterated his phrase that global warming is “the biggest market failure ever seen.” The economists on the panel didn’t much like the claim, of course, because they didn’t think that things like loss of species diversity and extinctions really could come under the definition of market failure. But Stern held his ground on this one.
But, of course, global warming is not an example of market failure in the classical sense: market failures happen when the market does not efficiently allocate goods and services, and when some kind of central organization would work better. But that would imply that the failure to address externalities (carbon and methane emissions included) is a market failure, an error in a functioning system, rather than an integral part of the markets themselves. No wonder the economists don’t like the idea that this is market failure – because the markets are failing because they are operating as intended.
Acknowledging this is an indictment of the system, and a recognition that the problem of global warming is fundamentally a problem of the way markets do business. The markets of growth capitalism operate efficiently because they are able to offload consequences on to the general public. Admitting that externalities are the origin of a big old, planet destroying market failure might make us reconsider whether we should be letting human beings with brains and ethics decide how our economy works rather than magic fairies with invisible hands.
(14 March 2007)
Lovelock: ‘We should be scared stiff’
Stuart Jeffries, Guardian
Renowned scientist James Lovelock thinks mainland Europe will soon be desert – and millions of people will start moving north to Britain.
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If you think Britain is intolerably crowded today, you might well want to brace yourself before reading the next sentence. Because this country is going to become much, much more densely populated over the course of this century as millions of people flee the uninhabitable desert that mainland Europe is doomed to turn into.
Such at least is James Lovelock’s fear. The esteemed – if controversial – environmentalist and futurologist (he prefers to be called a planetary physician) also believes that by the middle of this century, the America-sized chunk of floating ice that currently covers the Arctic will melt. As a result, the current habitat of polar bears will eventually be the place where we, or our probably very fed-up descendants, live out their pitiful existences. “Most life will move up to the Arctic basin because only it and a few islands will remain habitable,” says Lovelock, who is most famous for coming up with the so-called Gaia hypothesis – the idea that the Earth functions as some kind of living super-organism.
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Before we part, I ask Lovelock, who lives in Cornwall, if he is utterly gloomy about the future. “No! Humans have gone through seven major climactic changes in the million years we’ve been around. Even those changes – ice ages – were ones we adjusted to. Admittedly, those adjustments usually took place over thousands of years, and ours will involve an adjustment in little more than two centuries, but we are flexible as a species.” He draws a parallel with his wartime experiences in London: “I was here for much of the war and when it happened it wasn’t as bad as we had thought it would be. If people are honest, they rather enjoyed it. It could well be similar in the next few decades. Life will become a little more interesting than it was before.”
(15 March 2007)
Contributor SP writes: “Stimulating.”
