The Great Disruption (2 page)

The Great Disruption will ultimately take human society to a higher evolutionary state, where we will address centuries-old challenges left over from our lower-order animal state—like poverty, consumerism, and conflict. We have the opportunity to build a society that represents our highest capacities, with extreme poverty eliminated; great technology that works
with
rather than against nature and provides us with abundant energy and resources; a closed-loop economy with no waste; communities that work and support one another; happiness, satisfaction, and service as the central organizing principles of our economy and society, rather than our current approach of “money = happier people.”

We will do all this not just because we can, but, more important, because we have to. The alternative is no longer an option. The ecological-system changes now under way present a significant risk of global economic and social collapse. So the choice we need to make is not a philosophical one.

The good news gets better. The global nature of the problem means only a global solution can fix it, and that means we are going to come together as a people like never before. Protecting national interest will have to be confined to the sporting field. Again, not just because we might choose to, but because it is the only way we can address the challenges we face.

Getting through to the good side of this crisis, however, is going to require us
all
to engage. That's why I'm writing this book. We are going to have to change our expectations about our material lifestyles, about the nature and focus of our work and career, about our expectations of government, and about how we all behave in our communities and our companies. The good news is that most of these changes are going to make us happier anyway.

This crisis presents what may be a “once in a civilization” opportunity for a step change in human evolution, but one driven consciously rather than biologically.

So this is your story. There is no one else. We are the people we've been waiting for. This is the time. This is our time.

Let's get to work.

CHAPTER 2

The Scream—We Are Their Children's Children

To understand where we are and where we are going, we first have to understand where we've come from. In 2005, when I first wrote about the impending ecological system crash, I called the paper “Scream Crash Boom.”
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In summary it argued that the Scream—the call to action that had been under way since the late 1950s—was coming to an end; the Crash—of the ecosystem and economy—was beginning; and the Boom—a response of extraordinary speed and scale—was not far behind.

The reason I called the first phase the Scream was that it conveyed both the practical notion of warning—seeking to draw attention to a problem—and a healthy dose of fear—evoking the classic image of Edvard Munch's painting. While many have accused environmentalists of “fearmongering” over the decades, when you see a threat, the right thing to do is to warn those around you. In hindsight, we now see clearly that the fears of the early environmentalists were well-founded indeed. Those who argued we would be okay were, to say the least, overly optimistic about society's capacity to deal with the threats involved in a timely fashion.

I want to tell the story of the Scream for three reasons. First, we need to understand the full depth and complexity of the issues we are facing. As I will explain, we face a fundamental systemwide challenge that needs fixing from the ground up. This challenge goes to philosophy, science, economics, and personal values. Knowing the history can inform our knowledge of the subtleties and complexities of that challenge, so we are more likely to get the solutions right.

Second, given that most people have seriously focused on this area only recently, we should remember that many in science, business, government, and the community have been focused on it for decades. They have developed a great deal of experience and understanding of what works and what doesn't. This knowledge can help us decide how to move forward and avoid duplicating effort.

Third, it's a great story of enormous significance to humanity's progress.

There are many views as to what signifies the “start” of the Scream or of the environmental movement. While I think this was around the late 1950s, there were certainly many people dedicated to the conservation of nature prior to this.

However, their views on the environment tended to position them as “conservationists,” focused on the protection of nature or wilderness as a separate place, an untouched place. They perceived that humans didn't live in nature—it was somewhere we went on the weekend if we were lucky. In contrast, the modern environmentalists, who made up the Scream, saw nature as a system of which humans were an intimate and inseparable part.

A notable early exception to this thinking was the American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). While perhaps best remembered for his retreat to the Walden Woods, Thoreau understood the relationship between humans and nature in a profound way. Thoreau famously recognized that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” Rather than seeing nature as something to be conserved and valued for its own sake or beauty, he recognized that human society was part of nature and dependent upon it. In Thoreau's words, “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves.” He sought “to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”
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So while such thinking has been around for a long time, it was in the realm of philosophy rather than mainstream opinion. For me, the start of the Scream is best symbolized by the controversy over pesticide use in America in the late 1950s. While I lay on my cot in Adelaide, Australia, just ten months old, a debate erupted in the United States that would start the slow, multidecade process of reshaping popular thinking. Just weeks before Thanksgiving in 1959, the U.S. government announced it had found dangerous levels of the chemical weed killer aminotriazole in cranberries from Washington and Oregon. The timing of the result could hardly have been more dramatic. Consumers across the country stopped buying cranberries, several areas banned their sale completely, and Thanksgiving meals were largely cranberry-free. Tapping into the popular mood, the group Robert Williams & the Groovers even released a pop song entitled “Cranberry Blues,” urging listeners that “if you want to be sure not to get sick, don't touch a cranberry with a ten-foot stick!”

This brought the issues around environmental protection into people's living rooms and kitchens, and so began our awakening to the interconnectedness of life. We began to realize the environment was not just a wild place we visited for spiritual nourishment and recreation, but the place we lived, the source of our food and our physical health, and the foundation of our economy and prosperity.

This controversy led in part to Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book,
Silent Spring
. A serious and well-qualified scientist as well as a bestselling writer, Carson had become an active environmental campaigner in response to the excessive use of pesticides.

Her book gave birth to a way of thinking that put humans
in
the environment as part of a single system. She also established that scientists could be strong advocates on these issues and that their scientific knowledge gave them credibility to do so.

While many were already debating these issues, Carson's literary skill helped to inspire many people to join the cause with her powerful metaphor of “the silent spring”:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.… Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.… There was a strange stillness.… The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

While Carson's book and writing were focused primarily on the environmental impacts of pesticide use, the reason for her historical importance was her ability to draw in the deeper implications of this behavior for human society. As she argued in
Silent Spring
:

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

The industry reaction to Carson's
Silent Spring
was immediate and fierce, led by Monsanto and other chemical giants and backed up by the Department of Agriculture. When threats of lawsuits to prevent publication failed, industry resorted to a public smear campaign in an attempt to counteract Carson.
3

These attacks were personal, with clear sexist overtones. Carson was labeled a “hysterical woman” rather than the calm and careful scientist she really was, and her argument was called “emotional” rather than scientific.

There are clear parallels with those who today criticize climate scientists for being “political,” for overstepping their role. In fact, what these contemporary scientists and Carson have in common is that they saw the clear message of science and felt a moral and professional obligation to use their knowledge to passionately advocate for this science to be heard and acted on.

Another parallel to today's debate is that critics took Carson's moderate and careful argument to the point of absurdity. An example found in a chemistry industry newsletter argued that Carson's vision meant “the end of all human progress, reversion to a passive social state devoid of technology, scientific medicine, agriculture, sanitation, or education. It means disease, epidemics, starvation, misery, and suffering incomparable and intolerable to modern man.”
4
Of course, it meant nothing of the sort. A common rejoinder to Carson's work in 1963 and 1964 was to assert that there seemed to be plenty of birds that year, a deliberate manipulation of Carson's metaphor of the silent spring.
5
Again, the parallels to the reception of climate science are clear.

Monsanto even published in its company magazine a widely distributed article called “The Desolate Year,” which parodied
Silent Spring
by describing a world overrun by insects and pests in the absence of pesticides.
6

The industry tactics backfired, however, and public opinion quickly swung firmly behind Carson. Their attacks served only to give more attention to Carson and her bestselling book. Caught in the public storm, President Kennedy ordered his Science Advisory Committee to investigate the claims made by Carson. Within the year, they had returned a report that substantially accepted and agreed with Carson's findings. Shortly after this, Carson was called to testify before Congress on the issue and was well received.
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Carson continued her work, giving us an analysis that maintains relevance to this day. For example, in a CBS documentary in April 1963 she said:

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude towards nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to destroy nature. But man is part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

While she died of cancer in 1964, just two years after publishing
Silent Spring,
Carson was subsequently widely recognized as one of the main inspirations for the modern environmental movement. Her work helped to establish the idea that we needed to control and regulate human behavior and led to crucial developments, including the 1970 establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which soon acted to ban the pesticide DDT and enforce other controls on the market.

Actions like this enshrined the idea that protection of the environment was an essential part of the regulatory framework
within which
the market had to operate. Time has further vindicated Carson's work, and she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

The 1960s ended with a powerful signal of the risks of inadequate regulation. On June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire when a potent mix of oil and chemicals that had been discharged in the river spontaneously and spectacularly burst into flame. While it wasn't the first time this had happened, this event received widespread public attention, with
Time
magazine referring to it as the river where a person “does not drown but decays.”
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From 1970 on, the action started to come thick and fast. Around the world, other countries were tracking similar paths to that of the United States, with many governments acting at the national level. It was already clear to many, however, that these issues couldn't be addressed just nationally and that a global focus would be needed.

In 1972, two important events occurred. The first was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm. This meeting was chaired by Canadian Maurice Strong, who went on to become a powerful and positive force in corporate sustainability, particularly with the establishment of the Business Council for Sustainable Development (now known as the WBCSD).

While no decisions of great practical significance were made, the conference was a clear indicator of the rapidly increasing political importance of environmental issues in the international community. It laid the foundations for the decades to come, inspiring a series of international government-to-government meetings. These gatherings have become key milestones measuring society's progress on sustainability, or the lack of it, with a recent example being the Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

The 1972 Stockholm Conference also established various global and regional scientific monitoring processes that helped provide the data scientists now use to measure the changing state of the global ecosystem. And in case you thought climate change was a recent issue, it was addressed at this meeting nearly forty years ago!

The second key event of 1972 was the publication of
The Limits to Growth
. While commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international group of intellectuals and industrialists, the report was produced by MIT experts who were focused on system dynamics—taking the behavior of systems, rather than environmental issues, as their starting point. What they modeled was the interaction between exponential growth and a world with finite resources.

What
The Limits to Growth
argued is now obvious to most rational people, but nearly forty years ago it completely challenged the then dominant worldview. It modeled, in twelve possible futures, the consequences of ongoing growth in population and the economy in the context of limited resources, including the limited capacity of the earth to “absorb pollution.” In doing so, it spelled out our true relationship with the world around us.

The computer model World3, at the heart of the report, recognized that human activity interacts with and affects the natural world. Not only are we completely dependent upon this natural world for our survival and prosperity, but in the language of
Limits to Growth
we are capable of “inducing its collapse.” The report concluded that such a physical collapse was inevitable if observed trends in humanity's growing ecological footprint continued, and with it would come a dramatic decline in our wealth.
Limits to Growth
argued that while forward-looking policy could avoid humanity “overshooting” the earth's limits, delays in political and economic decision making meant this would be challenging. Once the earth was in overshoot, the only options would be to initiate a “managed decline” of our footprint or accept the coming collapse.

The
Limits to Growth
report quickly obtained notoriety because when it was released, attacks on the work were fast and furious and came from many quarters. Famously, Yale economist Henry C. Wallich called it “irresponsible nonsense.”
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Why such a strong response? The book was a fundamental challenge to those who believed the market was a self-correcting system that could continue to grow indefinitely. The ideas in it threatened the global assumption that the consumer capitalism model of the time would inevitably and indefinitely continue its march across the world. It was like a grenade thrown into a glasshouse.