[FRIAM] the Big (Bright) Green Lie
Marcus Daniels
marcus at snoutfarm.com
Sat Apr 24 12:20:18 EDT 2021
Technology is a path to power, and those with power end up making the rules. What would be good for people or the planet in general is perhaps interesting to talk about, but in the end irrelevant. Trying to create governments that resist globalization is also futile, because it just means power moves elsewhere.
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of cody dooderson
Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2021 9:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the Big (Bright) Green Lie
"the hover crafts are cool, but the air is so putrid" -Murder Mike from Run the Jewels.
As the saying goes "with great power comes great responsibility". I don't think anyone could argue that our technologies don't have a dark destructive side. I find it hard to think of any technology that doesn't cause some harmful side effect when it becomes "commercially viable". For instance antibiotics are amazing, until you inadvertantly make multi resistant staph. Nuclear power can power all of the cities, and also destroy them. Etc...
I mostly agree with technophobics about using just enough of the right technology, but no more.
On Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 1:06 AM Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za<mailto:pieters at randcontrols.co.za>> wrote:
I understand the concerns of the supporters of Brightgreenlies but I don't necessarily agree with their solutions.
Humanity has causes and is still causing huge destruction to other life on Mother Earth. It is good to have activists for a Greener future. I support seeking a win-win solution for all of us, from microbes to all multicellular species, including humans.
On a personal level it's not always easy. For example, I'm morally against eating meat. I just consider it wrong to raise animals in factories where they don't seem to enjoy any happiness and then to kill them to eat them. But when I was young I didn't think about it and became a good carnivore. I was raised on a farm where we had meat on the table for three meals every day. It's very difficult for me now in my old age to be a vegetarian without cheating. My friends call me an undercover vegetarian.
For me the solutions are based on seeking ways to achieve both emotional and material abundance and restoring natural eco systems. The first place in this case is not to compromise. IMO there are plenty reasons for optimism that:
a) With microble gene editing we can feed the world from relative very small ponds,
b) have can have abundant cheap, clean and safe nuclear energy,
c) use this desalinate water to have abundant fresh water,
d) develop carbon based materials to make exotic stuff from extracting carbon from the atmosphere and
e) restore the natural eco systems on earth
and so on and so on. My argument is to embrace technology for solutions.
My optimism could prove false, I'm not predicting the future, but I really don't think there is a viable option to keep 7 billion humans from starvation and saving the environment without turning to technology. We have grown to 7 billion in non sustainable and harmful to the ecology ways. Turning to non-technological sustainable ways will just not support 7 billion people on earth. But, I might be wrong, so my view is that provided that it can support the current world population, I will be very happy to live in a perma-culture based sustainable world. I can see that the quality of life could be much higher on average for all than what it is now.
If we are doomed we are doomed, but I'd like to be part of the movement that actively seeks and supports solutions for a better future for all Life on Mother Earth.
On Fri, 23 Apr 2021 at 22:14, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com<mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
As far as meat eating goes, three solutions come to mind 1) make it too expensive, 2) find treatments that reprogram the appetite, and 3) come up with substitutes, e.g. impossible burger. Catastrophes would help with #1. They will surely come. The general issue with hedonism can probably be addressed by #2 (e.g. pharmaceuticals).
Gosh, people didn’t like masks, wait until you take their potato chips and porn away. It just isn’t going to happen that people decide to stop going to work and tend to their organic garden instead. I don’t at any level want to be a luddite. No, anything else. Let’s shoot for underground cities on Mars, reprogram the genes of children to be able to endure heat, etc.
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2021 12:53 PM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the Big (Bright) Green Lie
Merle -
Thanks for commenting on the film-maker: A good background on Julia and the documentary:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/adv/article-how-canadian-filmmaker-and-environmentalist-julia-barnes-decided-to/
I didn't realize it just premiered on yesterEarthDay.
The point of my anecdote about Jensen is that I don't think *he* carries the baggage, but it *does* follow him around! Which is always the problem with popular movements, they are, well... Popular! in the best and worse sense of the term.
I feel blessed to have found Jensen's works early (by some measure), it has helped keep me from falling into the TechnoUtopian basin of attraction entirely. The complex (precessing figure-eights for the most part) orbits I *do* follow in this topic can be very unnerving (one day looking to Elon Musk or Bill Gates or the latest advancement in Solid State Battery Tech or the Stock Market's euphoria around Green Tech, etc. and the next day noticing the unintended (and un-tended-to) side effects of the last round of "technical fixes to non-technical problems").
- Steve
On 4/23/21 1:38 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
Thanks Steve. I'm still processing and appreciate knowledgeable and thoughtful feedback. I'm very interested in Julia and her efforts (I think she's 25), which seems to me to add authenticity to the quest for what the hell to do next. And I agree that Derrick has a lot of baggage and is a drawback. Julia decided to make the movie after she read the book.
On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 1:28 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com<mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>> wrote:
Merle -
I don't know how much traction you will get amongst this group of radical technophiles (self sometimes included). Unfortunately I think that is one of the most effective modes of those promoting the Big (Green) Lie (appealing to technophilic/technoutopic sentiments for "full speed ahead"). Another is (also unfortunately) to recruit the conspiracy nut types to (ab)use this line of thinking to fuel their own anti-human agendas. In the moment it looks like a narrow ridge to walk down. Maybe "the Donald" has done us a service with *his* Big Lie, to attune us to our susceptibility to "Big Lies"?
I have followed Derrick Jensen from early on (when he published Language Older than Words<https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf>) and have a strong sympathy for what he is oft accused of as "Anarcho-Primitivism". This movie (and the book) Bright Green Lies is, in my estimation "not wrong" in most if not all of it's positions. But that is not enough.
I used to be part of a regular community centered around Jensen but I had to drop out, not because of Jensen's ideas or actions, but because the radical fringe that was drawn there couldn't hold two impossible thoughts in their heads/hearts at the same time. There was (in my opinion) a strong draw to a sort of "revenge aesthetic" among the more radical who were indulging in the most extreme form of your own (you introduced us to it most of a year ago) Cassandrafreude. They elevated Jensen to the prophet of a Cult of Personality, somewhat against his will... I haven't tracked this lately but the centroids of these movements implied by the likes of Jensen, Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben have entered mainstream and may ultimately represent the current phase of the evolution of the *first world's* post-capitalist/climate-change aesthetic.
So I believe that an important aspect of YOUR work is evolving to include not just exposing the Big (Green) Lies we tell ourselves, but healing the implicit rifts growing within the diverse coalition of progressive/humanist/environmentalists/pan-somethingists or helping them/us to build a healthy ecosystem of somewhat diverse and often competing *strategies* for achieving a common *stated* goal.
The most critical aspect of BrightGreenLies' story for me is that it is self-contradictory to recruit (or rebuild) a hyper-capitalistic profit-centric mega-industrial framework to "rescue us" from the trajectory that is fundamentally part of their model of their mere existence. That is not to say that I have a "better plan" really (nor do I endorse many of those implied by BrightGreenLies), but I definitely accept that if the likes of Elon Musk or (even) Bill Gates ends up "rescuing" us from the slow-moving disaster (aka "Jackpot<https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/02/william-gibson-apocalypse-it-s-been-happening-least-100-years>" in Bill Gibson's vernacular) we are in, it will only be a delay or divergence from the most obvious, most imminent of disasters we are bearing down on. I believe (but cannot begin to prove) that we are at the beginning of a cascade of birfurcations and that whatever is on the "other side" of that is going to look *radically* different from what we live with now (from first to third world, inclusive). I highly doubt *all* of the Utopian (and most of the Dystopian) visions we tend to dwell on with Gibson's particular version being only one zany example juxtaposed maybe with that of Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz>".
I believe it is critically hard to simultaneously optimize one's local/personal/individualistic circumstance while also trying to optimize a global measure as well. I don't think we are particularly well wired for this... but it IS our ability to abstract and language and cognize which *might* allow us to evolve our *sociopoliticaleconomic* (nod to DaveW) selves off of the family of trajectories we have set ourselves upon (and double down with movements *like* the Big Green LIe). There are folks with the intellectual/abstractional/synthetic capability here to participate in that IMO, but finding the right perspective and a place to obtain traction to do so remains an unsolved problem.
For better or worse, I believe movements like McKibben's<https://350.org/> and Hawkins' <https://www.drawdown.org/> and Gates<https://www.gatesfoundation.org/>' and Sanders'/AOC<https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf> are perhaps necessary excursions from what to the "enlightened" might feel is a "shortest path". I want to invoke another thread here with Stephen's "Least Action Path" conception, but in this arbitrarily high dimensional space of "human endeavor" convolved with the "biocryoatmogeospherical" space with which we are co-evolving (again nod to DaveW) sociopolitcaleconomicspiritually.
I hope your attempt here (and elsewhere) to harness "the likes of us" or more importantly to get us to "harness ourselves" (there's an image,a corrolary to "hoisting oneself on one's own petard"?)
Carry On (while I Rattle On)!
-Steve
I'd like to start a new stream for those interested, but first you have to watch this film:
https://www.brightgreenlies.com
--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org<http://emergentdiplomacy.org>
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
mobile: (303) 859-5609
skype: merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @merle110
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--
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org<http://emergentdiplomacy.org>
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
mobile: (303) 859-5609
skype: merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @merle110
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