Some problems just can’t be solved
December 6th, 2007 by Jim JustThe related crises of peak oil and global warming are not problems that can be isolated and solved. Rather, they are symptoms of an underlying disease, a disease that has infected our minds as well as our economic and political institutions. That disease is the ideology of unlimited growth. As noted by Ed Abbey and reiterated by our doctor governor John Kitzhaber, growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
John Michael Greer makes an important point: the crisis of industrial civilization is not a problem that can be solved, if a solution is defined as something that will make the problem go away.
“Nothing will make the limits to growth go away; the sole question is whether we as a species deal with them, or whether we wait until they deal with us.”
Greer ends up in the same place as Nassim Nichol Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It’s impossible to know the right response to our predicament in advance. Yet every politician must promise a solution and a plan.
We’re still in denial that the end of fossil-fueled affluence is upon us. There’s no point trying to fight it. Rather, we need to learn to live with it. We need to begin now to take the modest, piecemeal, unimpressive steps that will actually get us through the crises of the future.
I think Greer pretty neatly sums up the most promising approach. We need first to stop doing the things we know are not working, admit that things that seem to be working now may not work for much longer, and begin to put a variety of modest alternative plans together, just in case.
“What we do know is that certain things are not working just now, and need to be changed; and that certain other things that still work may not keep working for long, and having a Plan B in place would be sensible. It’s possible, of course, to come up with a grandiose plan to fix all of the current problems at once, along with the changes we expect to come later on, but this may not actually be the best option. Rather, it may well be more constructive to encourage as many different responses to our predicament as possible, in the hope that one or more of them will work well enough to become standard practice in the future. It may also work better to encourage piecemeal responses that focus on narrowly defined dimensions of our predicament, and can be implemented on a small scale before moving to a larger one, instead of trying to change everything all at once. That is to say, our best option may be to embrace an adaptive approach to the situation, and then simply try to adapt.”