Not really, according to Prof Tom Murphy of the very excellent do the math blog.
I also second To recommendation about Nate Hagen’s channel. Some very good stuff there.
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Have to endorse your recommendation of Tom and Nate, P. Tom in particular is ace at using simple mathematics to reduce to absurdity so many of humankind’s more wild and unfounded claims. Nate always good on the uncomfortable realities around energy supply. One of the original wave of peak-oilers.
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Very good, thanks for sharing @PontiusPrimate. The Ronald Wright book has been on my shelf, unread, for some time, this has whetted my appetite.
I like the waterfall metaphor. Stephen Batchelor has likened our journey through life to a downstream boat trip. We have our backs to the direction of flow and can steer the craft, somewhat, but mostly we are looking at the part of the journey that we’ve voyaged through. Perhaps with some satisfaction, perhaps not so much. Somewhere behind us (ahead, in other words) is the waterfall. We might hear it as we approach but mainly we spend our time hoping it’s still a long long way away.
As Murphy implies this can engender a fatalism, and it’s definitely time to start finding ways to influence, not control, the journey.
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I guess the aim for non-denialist clear-seers has to be a blend of Taoist acceptance, just submitting serenely to wherever the ungovernable flow takes us, on the one hand; and otoh pragmatic preparation in whatever way proves possible.
I’m getting a lot of encouragement lately from watching the way that regenerative agriculture is gaining popularity. It is indeed a path to being less bumptiously control-freaky, and simply accepting that Mam Gaia is in charge, and we just must cooperate, to function at all.
But - strikingly - it becomes dazzlingly clear to those who switch to it that it’s also highly pragmatic: it CUTS farmers’ input costs; it cuts the amount of treadmill work that they have to do; it stops dead the constant chemical poisoning of the soil (and the water, and the air); it’s instantly and unmistakably loads better for the Earth’s health; and - cherry on the cake! - it’s instantly more net-profitable for any hard-nosed practical farmer; all of whom are business people running small to medium enterprises which simply must make an economically-realistic living, to survive.
It was considerations like this which made the Knepp people do what they’ve done so successfully with their estate; and it’s the same considerations which have made Gabe Brown such a convincing path-finder with committed no-till techniques.
Note in particular that Gabe insists repeatedly that the principles which he’s laying out about cultivating soil-ecosystem health apply equally to a window-box, a million-acre operation, and every scale in between. Since a lot of our children and their children will - perforce - be going back into the agricultural life in the near future, this stuff is important to know.
Tillage-ag, bulldozing into the Garden of Eden on the back of the Agrarian Revolution, which did indeed ignite spontaneously in several places, several thousand years ago, was one of the biggest mistakes that humankind ever made. Odd that it’s taken until now, through the pathfinding insights of such as Gabe, the Burrells, Emilia Hazelip, and her inspirer the great seer Masanobu Fukuoka, for us to begin to realise dimly just what a wrong turn it was. But then, it’s now become a case of ‘needs must when the Devil drives’. The ultimate crisis of this long white-water ride is now on us.
What we’re faced with now is - putting it in the same terms as the white-water-raft-ride metaphor - is survivors of the plunge over the waterfall struggling to the shore, there to get by through some version of life which blends hunter-gatherer methods, herd-follower methods, and no-till plant agriculture/horticulture; permaculture, in a word; a blend which the practical path-finders are uncovering right now (having plunged off the raft and struggled to the shore ahead of the waterfall…).
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All this talk of rivers etc makes me think of an idea from the late, great psychonaut, Terrence McKenna. He had a notion which he termed the Transcendental Object at the End of Time.
His view was a teleological one - that the future controls the past. He cast it the more modern language of chaos theory, where folks refer to chaotic, or strange attractors for the underlying dynamics. When such things exist in nonlinear systems, all trajectories inexorably get pulled to this final (set of) endpoint. Like the trajectory of a star falling into a black hole.
His view was that we are following a trajectory towards increasingly complex and varied expressions of consciousness, and there just aint much we can do about it. Some of what we’re now dealing south are a side effect of this process…
Ill have a poke around for some of his talks on this. It’s been a while since I’ve heard him talk about it, but he’s always worth a listen.
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That’s kind of what Batchelor was referring to: the flow. I’d be interested to explore it some more. I never quite grasped Strange Attractors. The publisher of the same name puts out some very esoteric stuff.
Batchelor, K? Who he? You don’t mean Ken Batcheldor, I take it?
Thanks K.