“We have two choices: a Gaian future — or no future.” — Norman Myers
In a 2015 interview with Smithsonian magazine, the acclaimed Israeli historian and public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari summed up his key insight as follows:
The truly unique trait of Sapiens is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money. Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill. (Italics mine)
These shared fictions include not only money, but also nation-states, religions, corporations, and private property. They also include concepts like “nature” as something separate from, and outside of, and generally peripheral to human civilization — a concept that only arose with the Agricultural Revolution in the Near East some 10–15,000 years ago, when the distinction between the cultivated lands within the pale and the “wilderness” (another fiction) beyond it became important. The “wilderness” — that is, “Nature” — became a place of danger and opportunity — with no value at all until it was “subdued” and turned into yet more mined, clearcut, or cultivated land and cities, to provide commodities for “Man.”
Conversely, no indigenous, pre-agricultural tribe that I know of, anywhere on our planet, even if they had some form of money (usually, tokens of intrinsic or symbolic value with which to trade), has a word in their vocabulary corresponding to our words “nature” or “wilderness” as a realm apart from “humanity.”
All these fictions have had their utility, of course, in enabling humans to cooperate, even if they were strangers to one another. The invention of money, in particular, was essential in our ability to construct a vast network of trade, communication, and cooperation that enabled us to colonize the entire planet and share technological innovations worldwide — despite the endless wars provoked in the name of nation-states, religions, or property rights (all, likewise, convenient fictions). But there are two major problems with this shared fiction of money:
First, it is a Zero-Sum game. If I have a dollar, you don’t. And if I have a lot more dollars than you, I can buy up commodities that you need, and sell them to you at a profit, since you now need them more than I do. This is Economics 101. This means, in aggregate, that I have yet more money, and you have less. The net result of this simple Zero-Sum characteristic of money is that over time, wealth inevitably aggregates into fewer and fewer hands, and to keep the game going, those with wealth have no choice but extend loans at interest, enabling others to raid “nature” — the ever-shrinking “wilderness” outside the pale, so to speak — in order to manufacture more commodities, so that the rich can get even richer, while most others have, at least, a job to do and a chance to acquire more commodities than they have. We call this process “the economy” — turning “nature” into commodities at an ever-expanding rate to enrich the already rich, while providing goods and services to the “consumers” — those who work for them and buy their products. And “nature” then has no value at all, other than as a “resource” that we can mine or cut down, process, and transform into yet more and better commodities. Economists and politicians call this “progress.” I call it “cancer:” the rapid expansion of a subsystem — cancerous cells or “the economy” — at the expense of, and ultimate destruction of, its biological support system (the body, or “nature.”)
In short, the underlying predicament we face today, worldwide, is the fundamental incompatibility between an economy based on this fiction of money — which requires the endless “growth” of production and consumption of commodities, all of which come from “nature” — and a finite life-sustaining planet whose carrying capacity our exploding population (and per-capita consumption of commodities) has already exceeded.
The big problem here is that our discourse on “nature” or “the environment” is completely dissociated from our discourse on “the economy.” So the leaders of every (fictitious) nation on the planet relentlessly pursue “economic growth” to serve their population’s needs and the insatiable avarice of the moneyed elite, while they simultaneously give lip service, at best, to “protecting the environment.” And as the destruction of “nature” accelerates in the form of global heating from fossil fuels; pollution of land, air, and water; collapse of whole ecosystems and extinction of species; loss of topsoil and depletion of essential minerals; depletion of aquifers; and plastic-choked oceans with rising sea levels from melting polar ice caps, most of our public discourse is consumed by the endless drama of electoral politics, global trade and tariffs, the threat of war, or endless distraction via sports, celebrities, and social media.
What can we, as individuals, do about this web of interlocking fictions that created and sustains our civilization and our way of life, but is now destroying our global biological support system? The short answer is — nothing. That ship has sailed, and we are now on an irreversible path toward overshoot and collapse of our life support systems all over the planet, resulting in the progressive, increasingly chaotic, and horrific die-off of most of humanity and the other creatures we depend on, and who now depend on us. The outcome is most likely our (almost) certain extinction thereafter. And in that parenthetic “almost” lies our shred of hope.
Let’s start with words, which define the concepts (and fictions) by which we live. What would happen if we replaced “the economy” with a new word (which I coined): “Glomart” (shorthand for the money-based Global Market Economy), and “nature” with a new-old word already in circulation, albeit largely beneath the radar of mass media: “Gaia” — the living Earth. Unlike our shared fictions — money, nation-states, religions, or the economy, both “Glomart” and “Gaia” refer to something demonstrably real: complex adaptive systems that process both matter/energy and information.
A complex adaptive system is a self-organizing, interactive web of relations that feeds on energy — mostly solar, but occasionally either geothermal, chemical, or nuclear as well. And both these systems, Glomart and Gaia, ultimately feed on solar energy, whether direct (like photosynthesis) indirect (like wind and waves), or stored (like fossil fuels). They use this energy to propagate and preserve themselves, by building semi-permeable membranes (cells or buildings or electronic networks) that both protect them from their surroundings, and also enable interaction with others like them. Both also evolve by processing and sharing information — whether genetic, hormonal, gestural, linguistic, numeric, or symbolic — with one another.
But above all, Glomart is a part of Gaia, not vice versa. Without Gaia — our biological support system, consisting of topsoil, predictable seasons, ocean currents, polar ice caps, fresh water, and biota (including agriculture and livestock, as well as wildlife and forests) — Glomart could never have evolved, and now will perish — despite the fantasies of some technophiles in the AI crowd that somehow we will be replaced by intelligent, self-directed and self-propagating robotic systems which will dispense with us. Don’t think so. Where would they get their energy, once energy-dense fossil fuel reserves are depleted? And why bother?
The big difference between teleogenic systems like ourselves (and the complex adaptive systems we depend on or have built to sustain us) and teleonomic systems, ranging from simple thermostats to the most complex AI systems imaginable, is that we, unlike them, have an inbuilt purpose or set point: to eat, survive, and reproduce. And particularly because of the latter, we care — that is, we are capable of empathy, and this gives us something no machine will ever have: a conscience, a sense of self. Machines have no such internal set point. They will do what we design them to do, what we program them to do, whether that is to design and program other machines, or to destroy our perceived enemies — and themselves in the process. A good example of artificial intelligence is a “smart bomb” which is programmed to seek out a precise military target and destroy it, but which will never be smart enough to question its own self-destructive mission to destroy things and people. Unlike us, they don’t give a damn about anything, so everything they do will necessarily be in service to our needs and desires, neither of which they have, despite all the hype.
So again, let’s imagine that small coteries of resilient and dedicated people — let’s call them Gaians — start convening regularly and collaborating to establish and reinforce a new, post-Glomart ethos and curriculum for educating their children and others. At the core of this ethos would be Gaian theory and praxis.
Gaian theory begins by categorically rejecting the false dichotomies — “man vs. nature” and “economy vs. ecology” — upon which the money-based logic of Glomart is predicated. The major premises of Gaian theory are as follows:
· That humanity is a part of, not apart from, “nature” (or Gaia).
· That Gaia is a complex adaptive system essential to our own and every other organism’s survival, not simply a set of “resources” to destroy by turning them into commodities.
· That Glomart, the complex adaptive system that our modern civilization has built, based on money and fossil fuel reserves, is a cancer on Gaia.
· Therefore, the task of surviving humans is to reduce and finally eliminate our dependence on Glomart, while creating or restoring human habitats and cultures that are symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, Gaia.
From this last premise, we can derive and develop a Gaian praxis — Permaculture or regenerative systems design — aimed at creating a collaborative culture based on learning, teaching, healing, and creating, and gradually displacing the (infinitely expanding) money economy with a steady-state economy based on the Eight Forms of Capital: not only financial capital (insofar as it is needed to enable strangers to trade with one another) but also material, biological, experiential, social, intellectual, spiritual, and cultural capital.
This is my dream, my agenda, in these dying days of the cancerous Glomart empire. It may never come to pass if the ongoing destruction of Gaia results in our own extinction, and it certainly will not come to fruition within my brief remaining years, but as an old Chinese proverb held, “a journey of a thousand miles begins under one’s feet.” May it be so.