Category Archives: Systems Theory

Steering past the eco-crisis, one balanced judgement at a time

Books, Climate Change, Current Affairs, Politics, Systems Theory

A Review of ‘Regenesis’ by George Monbiot (Allan Lane, 2022)

A combination of groundedness, breadth of awareness, balance and a sense of urgency is required to address the highly complex, critical and contested issues around the multiple eco-crisis we are facing. I have been following George Monbiot’s writings for many years, and in 2019 had the privilege of taking part in a podcast interview with him about rewilding. During that time he has only grown into these qualities. His most evident quality as a journalist is his commitment to drawing public attention to the abuses of the rich and powerful, that not only trash the environment but also deny justice to the poor. However, many left-wing journalists are prone to over-simplifying complex issues and getting drawn into tribal one-dimensionality. Monbiot is not. His background in zoology has equipped him with a strong awareness of systems, and of the inter-relationships we all depend on. The fire is always there, but he also examines the science carefully, considers counter-arguments, and references everything assiduously, whilst also producing highly readable prose – no mean achievement. His new book, ‘Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet’ is an exceptional achievement, on a topic of vast importance, that I have been sufficiently impressed by to want to review immediately.

Monbiot’s book is an investigation into how we can address all the competing conditions around food production so as to feed the world without trashing it. That means that all sorts of holy cows (both figurative and literal) need to put firmly into retirement and strongly discouraged from reproducing themselves. The debate around this is full of all sorts of unquestioned absolutizations and entrenched oppositions that can only be addressed by reconsidering the framework in which they are thought about. Monbiot does this by rightly insisting on maintaining the broader question of how the poor of the world are going to be fed alongside that of how environmental destruction from farming can be reduced or eliminated. He does not accept partial answers as final, whether that means organic farming dependent on animal manure, rewilding on the Knepp model with very small numbers of animals culled for meat in a rewilded landscape, or no-till farming that still employs herbicides to clear the unploughed ground for a new crop. All of these models are respected as far as they go – but it is nowhere near far enough to address all the complex conditions we are facing. Monbiot has to constantly employ the Middle Way in practice to find his way through these complex arguments – even though he would probably not call it that, and even still uses the term ‘incremental’ pejoratively. He has to be balanced in a deeper sense of balance, avoiding absolutizations, to be radical in the ways the situation requires.

Monbiot leaves us in no doubt about the urgency and importance of food production as the most important source of our global problems of global heating and loss of biodiversity. 12% of the world’s land area is used to grow crops, and 28% for animal grazing – yet animals fed by grazing alone provide only 1% of the world’s protein, and 43% of those croplands are used to grow food for animals. This means that if everyone adopted a plant-based diet, we could not only eliminate use of land for pasture but also a large proportion of the cropland – freeing up three-quarters of the world’ agricultural land for rewilding (all these figures can be checked on Oxford University’s Our World in Data site). As Monbiot writes:

I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is available for other species… and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which our lives depend. (p.77)

One of the reasons that people often underestimate the importance of land use is that they read figures about the contribution of agriculture to global heating that show it to be just one of a number of contributing sources, not the biggest. Its impact on global heating is systematically underestimated, because these figures do not take into account what the land used for agriculture is not doing because it is being used by agriculture – the “opportunity costs” as Monbiot calls them. These opportunity costs are huge, because they mean that around 30% of the world’s land that could be absorbing carbon as forest, wetland etc, is not doing so. When this is pointed out, the farming lobby often responds with exaggerated claims about the levels of carbon absorption in the soil of pasture when optimally managed (including the work of Allan Savory, which Monbiot carefully debunks). According to Monbiot and his references, not only are these claims exaggerated, but the latest research might lead us to question whether carbon can be reliably stored in soil (other than very wet soil or peat) at all. Another reason why people underestimate it is that they consider global heating in isolation from the biodiversity crisis – which is just as pressing. Land use is indisputably the source of the biodiversity crisis: we are just not giving enough space to other life forms.

Monbiot’s reminders of the widest pressing conditions through reliably-sourced statistics form an important backbone of the case in his book, but there is much more to it than that. The first chapter begins much more personally, in an orchard, where Monbiot sits down to look carefully at a small patch of soil, in the process bringing home its complexity. Most of the book consists of a series of encounters with key people who can give him evidence about potential ways forward in the land use crisis. There is Iain Tolhurst, who successfully produces organic fruit and veg on a commercial scale without using animal manure, through the use of wild flower strips to provide cover for pest predators and applications of wood chip to boost fertility. There is Tim Ashton, the no-till grain farmer, and finally Pasi Vainikka, a Finnish developer of revolutionary new food protein through the fermentation of bacteria in vats. It is this final, “farmfree” high-tech solution to meeting humanity’s protein needs that gets the most emphasis in Monbiot’s publicity video for the book (below), but the other figures were to my mind just as interesting and relevant.

The work of Iain Tolhurst (‘Tolly’) is remarkable because it demonstrates the falsity of the insistence often found in organic or permaculturist circles that animal use is always necessary for a sustainable food system. As Monbiot points out, many organic farms thus make themselves dependent on livestock farms as sources of manure, with little checking of how those animals have been treated or what antibiotic residues might be in their manure. More importantly, manure is also a very blunt instrument for fertilizing a crop, providing constant nutrients when the plant needs them more at some times than others: manure can thus contribute greatly to the washing out of excessive nutrients that is in the process of destroying the ecology of many British rivers. ‘Tolly’ by contrast, has not only found ways of limiting pest numbers by harbouring their predators in a biodiverse area of wild flowers near the crop, but also manages to fertilize it successfully through only limited applications of wood chippings. Monbiot’s case is that crops do not need manure – what they need is the gentler nourishment provided by limited plant material at the right time in their development.

As a functional vegan of about 30 years, who is now developing a forest garden for sustainable food production on former pasture land, this was eye-opening. I have often had doubts about the argument that animals are necessary, but have never had sufficient evident to support it, and thus have increasingly considered it a weakness in the vegan case. However, reading Monbiot’s book has made me much more confident in my belief that I can set up sustainable food production in a forest garden without needing animals or (in the long-term) their manure – although for the moment I have inherited a large heap of it with the land. That’s a great relief, as I particularly do not want the time-consuming responsibility of looking after animals, quite apart from the land use issues. In the short term, that means lots of mowing, but in the longer term that will decrease as the land I am working with becomes more effectively forested and covered with other perennials.

Monbiot also discusses the huge value of switching to perennial plants rather than annuals, so that we do not have to keep breaking up the soil with its valuable micro-organisms, earthworms and rhizosphere (zone around roots set up to sustain a plant). I was already very much aware of this from my reading of agroforestry literature – which oddly Monbiot does not mention at all. He starts to make use of a new perennial type of wheat called Kernza, which again was a fascinating discovery for me, but for some reason he does not discuss all the other ways that trees and perennial plants can help to fulfil our needs for not only fruit and nuts, but also potentially legumes and other vegetables, and the ways that agroforestry can create a very biodiverse space that nevertheless produces lots of food. His question may be ‘Can this feed the world?’ and this is a fair enough question, but one that I would have liked to see him address. My own guess for now is that agroforestry can at least make a significant contribution to feeding the world, because although it does not produce commercial quantities of any one foodstuff, it could offer a very sustainable (and low-labour) alternative means of food production for small communities that does not necessarily require large amounts of land (nor necessarily high-quality arable farmland).

Monbiot’s case, however, is that what we need most of all is a ‘new agronomy’, giving us a detailed enough understanding of fertility to be able to reproduce Tolly’s successful experiment in animal-free organic horticulture elsewhere. We also need the rapid development of perennial grain crops, and the development of ‘farmfree’ protein production. We need to stop worrying unnecessarily about ‘food miles’ which a an almost negligible overall effect compared to the impact of land use, but we do need more community ownership and fair trading to counteract the capture of food resources by massive corporate interests. Livestock farmers need to face up to the fact that their industry has no future, but be given help in adapting and diversifying. He thus avoids a series of absolutizing dogmas: the dogmas of those who reject new technology just because it is new, the dogmas of those who think animal farming must be good because it is traditional and enculturated, and the dogmas of those who focus parochially just on one aspect of the complex picture (such as localism) and assume that that is enough to make food production sustainable. Most of all he questions the dogmatism of those who are content to develop small localised sources of organic or permacultural food at a high price, but who dismiss the wider question of how the poor of the world will access the food they need. At no point does Monbiot belittle those who have made these major achievements in making food production more sustainable, but he still points out their limitations, and disagrees with any dogmatic assumption that they are the final solution.

This is a superb book that I think everyone should read, but it is not without its own limitations and mistakes. I have already mentioned the omission of agroforestry, and no doubt many others will have their own favoured solution that they will complain Monbiot either does not consider or does not do justice to. I don’t think he is aiming to be comprehensive, though, only to raise our awareness of some new solutions that we may not have considered very much before. Amongst these, I was not entirely convinced by Monbiot’s degree of enthusiasm for ‘farmfree’ bacterial cultivation. He is right to point out that the use of technology and the ‘yuck’ factor are not grown-up arguments against this. However, enthusiasm for this, as for any new technology whatsoever, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, until we see how well it works in practice when produced in volume and sold to consumers. There is also the question of how much the use of this technology is really necessary, given that we already have plenty of plant-based meat substitutes providing protein, and that these can be produced on massively less land, with massively less incidental suffering , than their animal equivalents. Time will tell.

On his account of the cultural entrenchment of animal farming, though, I felt there were some basic mistakes. He blames the idealization of animal farming on ‘poetry’ – that is, the strong pastoral tradition that presents the life of the shepherd as a bucolic ideal – and thinks we need more ‘numbers’ and less ‘poetry’. This makes the very basic mistake of confusing meaning and belief – that is, the value of the cultural symbols themselves with the negative effects of the dogmatic beliefs that have become associated with them. Pastoral poetry has inspired generations of readers in all sorts of ways: it is largely archetypal in its effects, meaning that it offers inspiration because of its meaning, independently of the beliefs that may have become associated with particular interpretations of it. Poetry as a whole is not to blame for the interpretation of that poetry as supporting dogmatic beliefs about the absolute value of animal agriculture, only for (at worst) limiting our awareness of its downsides by not making those downsides so meaningful to us. The same point applies in reverse to numbers, which are not in themselves significant at all, and thus not beneficial or otherwise. It is the way the numbers are used, to draw our attention to new conditions by more precisely making us aware of their extent, that is valuable. It is not maths that will save the world (plenty of people have been proficient in maths without doing so), but a broadening of awareness beyond one limited set of interdependent conditions to consider the wider systems in which they are embedded. Behind this error is a more basic, and common, mistake in our culture – the failure to distinguish meaning from belief, and thus credit the value of inspiring cultural symbols without reducing them simplistically to belief effects. Jeremy Lent, whom Monbiot admires as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age” is very much subject to the same limitation: one that I tried to broach with him to some extent in a podcast discussion in 2018.

If Monbiot unthinkingly reproduces a few of the dogmas of our age, however, this is a very minor matter compared to the large number of very important ones that he questions. However others may see him, he is not ideologically ‘left wing’ in any ways that restrict his critical skills, but only in ways that are carefully justified in relation to evidence brought into contact with a wide-ranging compassion. He is also quite literally grounded in a very human appreciation of the soil and of the wider environment – a factor that should not be underestimated. He can write wonderfully, and the message he offers here is extremely important. Whatever its minor defects, I urge you to read this book anyway.

Fractal adaptivity

Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Systems Theory,

Should the concept of adaptivity (or adaptiveness) not itself be adaptive? In my work on Middle Way Philosophy, I’ve often found myself arguing that a traditional way of thinking about a concept that may have worked in a past context is too restrictive for the present one. Moving on from the limitations of Buddhist ways of thinking of the Middle Way as lying between ‘eternalism’ and ‘nihilism’ is one example of this, and another (that I’m working on for my next book) is the need to move on from Jungian accounts of archetypes as innate features of the ‘collective unconscious’. In both cases, the alternative needs to be a more universal and thoroughly functional account of the concept, helpful to all people in all places rather than tied to a limiting paradigm. We owe a huge debt to the people who developed these concepts, but need to pass on the flame rather than worshipping the conceptual ashes. So it seems, also, with the concept of adaptivity itself, which for many people is strongly tied to a Darwinian paradigm.

In the basic Darwinian view, adaptivity is a matter of the continuing survival and reproduction of an organism in changing conditions. The organism passes on its genes to its descendants with minor mutations, some of which are better adapted to new conditions and others of which are not. ‘Natural selection’ then ensures that the better adapted organisms survive and reproduce, whilst the less well adapted die out. This kind of adaptivity , however, is a relatively crude. It takes a very long time for significant adaptation to occur, only operates at the level of entire species or sub-species, and requires the maladapted to perish in the process. Nevertheless, many thinkers still seem to think of this as the only acceptable understanding of adaptivity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for instance, expresses a valuable perspective on the long-term value of our ability to adapt to extreme and unpredictable events, or ‘fat tails’ as he calls them. If our perspective is too short-term, and we fail to take these events into account, even if we appear to be well-adapted to a more limited immediate range of conditions, we lose. However, the kind of adaptiveness he has in mind appears to be only that of survival (even if not strictly only of a species). In this he seems to follow a strand of thinking in evolutionary biology that reduces all other forms of adaptation to that one.

However, adaptation is clearly a much more complex concept than that. It is a feature of a system, and systems may operate at different levels where their goals may not be just the survival of the system (practically necessary though that remains), but rather the fulfilment of a variety of needs. As systems evolve greater complexity, their goals also become more complex. Whilst survival is always the grounding condition on which the development of other goals depends, a hierarchy of ‘higher’ goals can develop in dependence on them. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs expresses those adaptive goals for humans, working up from the social adaptations of belonging and esteem to the individual one of what Maslow called ‘self-actualisation’.But how can we understand Maslow’s insights in the context of adaptation? After all, a reductive evolutionary biologist would probably say that all of these needs boil down to survival in the end, and that even self-actualisation is only adaptive because it helps us solve problems or get on with others in ways that help us survive. I don’t agree that that’s the whole story, though, and it has recently occurred to me that talking in terms of a fractal structure may help to explain the relationships between different types of adaptivity. In a fractal structure, the features of a larger system are reproduced (potentially infinitely) at smaller and smaller scales, the Mandelbrot Set (pictured) being an example of these relationships mathematically turned into an image.

To think of adaptivity in a fractal way, we’ll need to think of a hierarchy of successively smaller systems (smaller both in time and space) dependent on the larger one, but in which the same basic pattern of conditions operates. Exactly how you divide up levels of adaptivity may be a matter of debate, but I think we can distinguish at least four levels: biological, cultural, individual and imaginative. In each case there is a means of transmission of certain features that operates only at that level, a specific selective force that depends on the fulfilment of needs in different conditions, and both reinforcing and balancing types of feedback. I’ve suggested what the features of these four levels might be in the table below, though I’m sure this sketch can be refined.

When we get to the ‘higher’, or more distinctively human, forms of adaptivity, it is our use of symbols to create meaning that seems to be the basis of adaptivity, but operating in three different ways. At a cultural or social level, shared symbols and beliefs help societies to adapt, although rigidity in those symbols and beliefs can also become maladaptive. At this level, safety, belonging and respect start to become important in addition to survival. At an individual level, the development of an individual capacity for meaning and belief through neural links allows that individual to meet all their needs, including self-actualisation. Again, however, rigidity of belief can be maladaptive – this time for the individual. Within the individual, and within a shorter time-frame rather than a whole life, there is finally an imaginative level of adaptivity that is created by our ability to use symbols hypothetically and thus simulate possibilities in our minds. This imaginative process boosts our adaptivity as individuals, helping us to adapt far more quickly than we could do by merely waiting for our previous habits to fail us in new conditions. However, once again, maladaptivity for the individual occurs through the reinforcing feedback of imaginative reconstruction in loops of anxiety or obsession.

I think that these ways of understanding adaptivity help us to distinguish the Middle Way clearly from other kinds of adaptivity to a context. The practice of the Middle Way does not consist in just any kind of balancing feedback loop, but rather the development of awareness required for provisionality. If we can examine alternatives hypothetically, we can not only be freed from reinforcing feedback at the imaginative level, but also start to make an impression on the more basic levels. Provisionality applied consistently and courageously can change both long-term individual development and social beliefs, slow and frustrating though that process may seem when we see our societies going through damaging reinforcing feedback loops. Whether we can successfully influence the biological level is much more debatable.

However refined our thinking as individuals, however, we are still subject to the more basic conditioning of the biological level. As we are increasingly discovering through the climate crisis, the very existence of the more complex and refined systems, both social and individual, is under threat if we cannot maintain the basic conditions for our survival as a species.

Pictures: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by factoryjoe (Wikimedia Commons). Mandelbrot Set picture of unknown origin. Table of levels of adaptivity by the author.

The ‘3.5% rule’, stubborn minorities and tipping points

Activism, Books, Business, Climate Change, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics, Systems Theory, ,

The recent protests in the UK by Extinction Rebellion have stimulated discussion of the so called ‘3.5% rule’, that 3.5% of population need to join a protest movement for it to succeed. This is based on research by Erica Chernoweth, which is discussed in this BBC article. Chernoweth looked at a variety of protest movements, and found they tended to succeed if they reached that threshold, as we see for instance in the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960’s and quite recently in the overthrow of  Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

How can a whole society be changed by such a relatively small proportion of people? It all depends how determined they are – but if they have taken to the streets, even willing to face arrest or potential violence, they are obviously resolved. This research seems to offer an example of a much wider property of systems, whereby it only takes a relatively small but unyielding element of a system to force a modification in the way the whole system operates. I have come across this same point discussed from different standpoints in two other places: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Skin in the Game (2018) and Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (2000).

Taleb talks about the power of stubborn minorities, giving the example of orthodox Jews who want food labelled kosher obliging US food manufacturers to include it on their label. The proportion of orthodox Jews in the US is, according to Taleb, only 0.3%, but nevertheless, because this 0.3% were very definite and uncompromising about what they wanted, and because it did not require any great sacrifice on a food manufacturer’s part to label kosher food as such, they did so. So you may not need anything like as much as 3.5% if not too much is demanded of everyone else.

Taleb’s other example is the gradual replacement of Muslims for Coptic Christians in the population of Egypt. The Copts are now a minority of about 10% of the Egyptian population, but after the Muslim takeover in the eighth century they were the great majority. The Muslims were tolerant and did not force anyone to convert. What made the difference, however, is that Muslims refused to contract marriage with anyone who did not convert to Islam. All it took was that degree of unyieldingness, over many centuries of just a trickle of mixed marriages, for the Coptic majority to become a minority.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point approaches the same phenomenon from the standpoint, not of minority resistance, but of minority enthusiasm. He offers story after story of new products or ideas that suddenly ‘took off’: hush puppies, Blue’s Clues, The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The apparent causes of them doing so are not consistent, but in every case a kind of group epidemic occurred: the product suddenly ‘went viral’ after passing a ‘tipping point’. The sales chart started rising, not arithmetically, but exponentially. It’s clear that there are lots of reinforcing (or closed) feedback loops going on that are leading more and more people to adopt the product, because it has become a mark of acceptance by the group to do so.

What does all this have to do with the Middle Way? Well, it seems likely to me that what is often, though not always, going on, when people reach a tipping point of this kind, is absolutisation. People get into feedback loops in which the desire for the new thing (or rejection of the old thing) is driven by obsessive desire for social acceptance (or fear of losing it), and such feedback loops have the effect of producing sudden exponential change. That change is easy for even a very small group to achieve when the sacrifices demanded are small and the resistance is low (as in labelling kosher food), and require the magic 3.5% when there is some resistance, but the majority resistors are still much less strongly motivated than the minority.

But do minorities always only get what they want through absolutisation? I suggested that absolutisation may often be the source of the unyieldingness, but not always. Instead, it must be possible to be unyielding for far more justifiable and considered reasons – that one is confident of one’s cause, that it is supported by good evidence, and that it is far better justified than any alternative view. This, I hope, is what we are seeing with the campaigns of Extinction Rebellion. All the evidence I have seen so far suggests that they are very careful to try to combine a sense of urgency with calm. We need to ‘panic’ in the sense of acting urgently in response to the climate emergency, but not to ‘panic’ in the sense of locking ourselves into closed feedback loops of obsession or anxiety. This suggests that a tipping point can be reached, on a genuinely important issue, by following the Middle Way rather than any absolutized belief.

However, we also need to beware of the same phenomenon being utilised by absolutists, whether it is to advertise a product, spread a conspiracy theory through social media, or get people to accept a simple idea (like Brexit) that is grasped at as a false solution to complex problems. It takes a lot of effort and difficulty to reach a tipping point without absolutisation – but to do it with absolutisation seems so much easier! Fast thinking and easy solutions are always appealing, but there is no alternative to the harder road to the tipping point if you want to make the world a better place.

 

Picture by Michal Parzuchowski (Unsplash)

Announcing our new webinar programme

Buddhism, Critical Thinking, Ethics, gender, Judaism, Jung, Meditation, Middle Way Philosophy, Middle Way Society, Politics, Religion, Science, Society events, Systems Theory, The Arts

We’ve got a new monthly webinar programme now open for booking, running for 13 months from Dec 2018 to Dec 2019. There will be a variety of topics, all of which involve the relationship between an area of practice or interest and the Middle Way – for example, the Middle Way and Meditation, the Middle Way and Science, the Middle Way and Judaism. This is your opportunity to find out more about a Middle Way perspective in relation to a topic that already interests you, interacting with members of the society in real time online.

For more information, including the full programme and how to book, please see this page.

Fiddling while the planet burns

Climate Change, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics, Systems Theory,

The world is burning, burning, burning…. Yes, with greed, hatred and ignorance, as the Buddha pointed out about 2500 years ago in his ‘Fire Sermon’ (also found in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’). But it is not just burning ‘metaphorically’. The world is burning quite literally. There are, or recently have been, wildfires in Greece, the US, Canada, Sweden, even Northern England… In 1997, massive fires in Indonesia added 40% to the world’s CO2 emissions. Such fires should add to anyone’s sense of urgency as regards climate change.

What the two kinds of fire have in common is that they are both part of closed feedback loops. The literal fires create more CO2, which adds to the Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming, desiccating the forests and creating more fires. The ‘metaphorical’ fires, on the other hand, burn in our reptilian brains: our striatum (craving) and amygdala (anxiety) create stress responses that interfere with our ability to understand and respond to the complex systemic problems known as ‘global warming’. The more stressed we feel, the more we reach desperately for shortcut absolutisations to contain it or dismiss it, the less adequate our response becomes, and the more we continue to behave in ways that exacerbate the situation – in turn increasing our stress. Runaway climate change could very easily happen inside people’s brains as well as in the world at large.

It is a feature of closed feedback loops that they tend to become ‘runaway’. The self-feeding causal loops create more and more of the same effect, taking us further and further away from any degree of equilibrium or stability. The ways in which the ecosystemic phenomena of the planet are getting caught up in these runaway loops is increasingly understood by those who pay any attention to climate change. We know that the melting ice caps reduce reflectivity of the sun’s radiation back into space, thus accelerating global warming. We also know that melting permafrost releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that also accelerates the process. Both of these runaway loops are already well under way. We also know that higher CO2 levels acidify the oceans, which in turn reduces their ability to absorb carbon. Those are just the headlines of these complex ecosystemic loop effects. Many of them are well described in this excellent article by David Wallace-Wells.

But the runaway feedback loops are not limited to ecosystemic phenomena. They are also found in our psychological responses to them. Runaway feedback loops are particularly found in the mentally ill, the ideologically possessed, the addicted, the traumatised and the desperate. They are created by responses that our forebears probably developed to deal with short-term crisis situations that can only be resolved by rapid action, like fleeing a predator. But when the ‘predator’ keeps coming again and again without being decisively escaped, we replay the crisis response again and again in our heads. Our behaviour then turns to extremes, because we can only then act in shortcut, desperate ways. We may fight someone other than the source of danger because of a false association. We may deny that there is any danger present, or we may keep fleeing in the wrong direction. We will do anything as long as we feel we are doing something – anything but assessing and responding to the situation adequately. To do that we would have to understand more of its complexity and take long-term action. That would require a more balanced, stable, aware state of mind.

To understand global warming at all requires systemic thinking, in which we don’t restrict ourselves to one type of phenomenon or one way of studying it, but rather try to see all the processes in relation to each other (as far as we can). Nevertheless, many discussions of global warming seem to pay insufficient attention to the ways that the same feedback loops occur in our psychological responses to it. So, I have tried to combine the ecosystems with the psychosystems in this diagram. Like any attempt to represent a complex system, it is bound to leave a lot out. Even the phenomena mentioned will be related to each other in ways that aren’t represented by arrows, and then there will be lots of other phenomena involved that aren’t mentioned. But hopefully it is complex enough to show a variety of important closed feedback loop relationships (and related one-way causal effects), thus raising awareness, without being too complex to understand.

Whilst creating this diagram, I was reflecting on the ways that simply making this range of connections may be sufficient to understand the most important elements of the issue, without the necessity for detailed knowledge of exactly how strong any of these causal relationships are at any one point, or of the detailed evidence for that strength. Of course, that kind of knowledge is desirable, but perhaps the importance of acquiring it is often over-rated. If you focus too much on the evidence for one of these links (say, the causes and extent of the melting ice caps), you may end up building your entire response to global warming on that evidence (which may offer various potentials for disputed interpretation) and losing sight of the larger web of systemic connections that it is part of. However, even if you were to cut out the melting ice caps there are still plenty of other closed feedback loops at work, carrying the potential for serious runaway effects.

Simply understanding the systemic connections, and the ways in which these causal processes may operate to varying degrees, is enough to raise our awareness, when we realise how much many of them are mutually reinforcing. Many people, however, make the mistake of only thinking about some aspects of these mutually reinforcing loops whilst assuming that everything else will hold steady. This is particularly the case for the psychological (and thus political) effects. When we imagine humans responding to increasing climate change threats in the future, we tend to imagine humans living in the relatively stable, liberal world of Western democracy, where the more highly educated still have a fair amount of influence and there is still a fair degree of consensus between the educated and the powerful. What we need to take into account is that in all probability, the massive instability, widespread trauma, economic collapse and conflict that will be created by global warming will also massively degrade the capacity of human societies to make effective decisions in relation to it.

Central to recognising this is the relationship between absolutisation, bias, polarisation and stress responses that have been closely related to my interests in developing Middle Way Philosophy. The development of the mindfulness movement has made society increasingly aware of the negative effects of stress and the ways it can be counteracted, but not yet sufficiently of the ways that stress interacts with bias and polarisation, and there is very little awareness indeed that absolutisation can be recognised as a factor in all this. However, the more stressed we are, the more we are likely to rely on prefabricated mental shortcuts (absolutisations), rather than slowing down either for more careful conceptual thinking, or to take in more information, or to consider new models or ways of interpreting that information. Our current represented conceptual formulations are likely to be assumed to be enough, however limited the awareness on which they are based. Thus, at the very point when we face a crisis of unparalleled complexity, for which we need the maximum of awareness and reflectiveness, we are likely to start losing it. David Wallace-Wells points out that even the rise of CO2 levels itself directly degrades human cognitive capacity. Even those individuals who retain higher levels of awareness are likely to lose influence, when ever greater numbers of people in society as a whole are going into absolutising mode.

The most frightening thing is that this is no longer just a debatable prediction for the future – it’s happening already. That Brexit and Trump have occurred at the very point in human history when something resembling a halfway adequate worldwide political response to climate change had developed (in the shape of the Paris Agreement), can hardly be a coincidence. Brexit and Trump mark popular revolts against liberalism and the loss of identity and communal security it is perceived as bringing with it. These popular revolts, compared to the establishment consensus liberalism that they have usurped, are more strongly marked by heavy confirmation bias, single cause fallacies, straw men, ad hominem attacks and other such shortcuts. Whilst Brexit is wielded by neo-liberal ideologues who are prepared to use nationalism as a tool of influence, Trump is an endlessly manipulable pawn in the hands of similar ideologues in the US. The nuanced thinking of expert civil servants is being sidelined both in Washington and in London. This revolt is not yet primarily about climate change, but it is certainly directed against the liberal culture that was capable of doing something about climate change, and maintains the short-term interests of those with most to lose from its recognition – the rich. As such, it offers a foretaste of what is likely to follow when climate change strengthens, and when a collapse in food supply and the economy, coupled with increasingly extreme events, create greater panic.

As to when this will happen, it’s crucial to recall the properties of complex systems. Complex systems appear robust up to the point when they suddenly collapse, because their complexity gives them lots of adaptive options for new conditions. But each of these new adaptations adds more complexity and thus more vulnerability to any threat to the basic conditions that keep that whole system going. Thus, we can expect that when food scarcities arise from drought, flooding and other extreme weather events, the complex worldwide trading system will keep compensating by bringing food in from anywhere in the world, as well as finding new sources of food and more economical ways of producing it. However, that system can also suddenly collapse when there is no longer enough food to immediately support the people who maintain the trading systems. At that point, the inventiveness ceases and is replaced by desperate conflict over the remaining resources. When the system goes, it will go quite suddenly, along with all its inter-connecting dependent elements: food, economy, government, social support, security, basic trust and confidence. We may still have faith in that system until the moment it collapses.

The danger in writing in this vein is that this, also, may contribute to the very same closed feedback loops that the Middle Way is concerned with trying to avoid. When confronted by climate change, the most common response is denial of one kind or another – either theoretical denial or mere denial of practical responsibility. Much publicity about climate change often seems to accentuate this effect. On the other hand, it can also produce extreme positive responses. A friend of mine going back to childhood, Roger Hallam, has recently been involved in hunger striking against the third runway at Heathrow, and is now leading an ‘Extinction Rebellion’. Desperate times, we may feel, justify desperate measures. The trouble is that desperate measures are another form of shortcut – they simply do not work, because of the mental states they have to be pursued in. I greatly agree with everything Roger says about climate change, and even his assessment of the urgency of the situation, but I won’t be joining his rebellion.

By contrast, the Middle Way is not likely to work quickly enough, even if it was much more widely adopted. But the practice of the Middle Way depends on a more or less liberal political context, a tolerant society, and a weight of population that is both well-educated and secure. When we lose these, the chances of practising the Middle Way will become very slim indeed. Yet, despite this, as far as I can see, the Middle Way is our only hope. Extreme lunges tend to be based on rigid ideological assessments of the situation, or alternatively on a single-minded pursuit of the interests of a limited class. Their effect is to create more conflict and add further to our difficulties. Only the capacity to re-assess, adapt and persuade as we go along can possibly help us address this situation, and that depends on awareness, not rebellion. If the conditions for the practice of the Middle Way decay, all we can do is try to build them back up again.

Our sanity in the difficult times to come seems to me to be sustainable only by a feature of human brains that in other times has often served us ill: the shallow optimism of the left hemisphere. Even when Western civilisation is collapsing, we may still keep looking for the next opportunity round the corner. There is always hope, because, unless we are predisposed towards depression, hope is our default setting. It is not based on there being reasons enough for hope. At times, too, that hope may become more integrated, and we may reconnect with a basic contentment arising from our bodies. If we can slow or stop the closed feedback loop in our own brains, perhaps we will be able to live out our lives doing our best, however hopelessly, to maintain the earth.

Sources

There are many sources of information about climate change. David Wallace-Wells’ article, which was one of the catalysts for this one, has a fully referenced version. I’d suggest that his references offer a good place to start when checking on the factuality of any of the (widely accepted) factual assumptions about global warming in this article.

Many of the psychological elements here arise from my own work in Middle Way Philosophy. The relationship between absolutisation, biases and polarisation is particularly explored in Middle Way Philosophy 4: The Integration of Belief. This work synthesizes various other influences that are reviewed on this site, such as Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Master and his Emissary’ and Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’. Paul Gilbert’s ‘The Compassionate Mind’ is a good source on the disruptive effects of the Reptilian brain and how they can be soothed.

On systems theory, I have also recently reviewed an excellent new introduction by Capra and Luisi. This includes some good material on ecosystems, but also puts these in the context of systems theory as a whole.

The diagram was created by me, and may be freely used by others for any educational purpose.