This is an article I prepared for the newsletter of the World Innovation Foundation
and it is addressed to the Foundation's members, who are substantially
Nobel-winning scientists. Regular readers of HtStW will find the first
half covers familiar territory, and may want to skip to the part
following the second diagram.
Throughout
history, the scientific community has often been in the vanguard of
introducing and championing new ideas and new understandings, while
leaving it to others to contend with the political, social and economic
consequences and necessary actions that stem from them. Most recently,
this has been true in the scientific community's consciousness-raising
about global warming: Scientists have provided the data about our
species' responsibility for this unprecedented occurrence, and raised
the alarm about its ramifications and our imperative for addressing
them. Indeed, many scientists speak both passionately and
dispassionately about the Sixth Great Extinction being already upon us,
and of this extinction being the first attributable to the actions of a
single species.
But the scientists have been much slower in
bringing to collective consciousness the fact that global warming is
just one of a complex series of phenomena that, taken together,
threaten to accelerate that extinction a thousand-fold and bring our
current civilization to an abrupt end. This reluctance is perhaps
understandable when most of these other phenomena are not principally
scientific: The End of Oil is an economic phenomenon as much as a
geological one. The availability of knowledge that allows small
stateless extremist groups to manufacture and unleash devastating
chemical, biological, genetic and nuclear weapons is a sociological
phenomenon as much as it is a technological one. The threat of a second
Great Depression due to reckless and unprecedented debt and trade
deficit accumulation is a political and economic phenomenon.
The
threat of epidemic diseases caused by the enormous concentration and
global movement of human and animal bodies is a phenomenon that, if our
response to SARS is any indication, is a phenomenon that no one is
capable of grasping or addressing, since it is at once scientific,
social, economic and political. The threat of massive famine due to
grotesque exhaustion of our ecosystems, staggering overpopulation,
fragile and unsustainable agricultural processes, and lack of diversity
of agricultural ‘products’ is similarly multi-faceted.
We are
so preoccupied with coping with impending oil shortages that we have
not even begun grappling with the huge water and other resource
shortages that our world faces in the coming decades, and the political
and economic (and probably military) fallout they will probably
produce. And meanwhile civil and regional wars of a more familiar sort
grow ever larger and more dangerous as inequality of wealth, income,
power and opportunity spiral ever higher and as technology gives us
ever more effective ways to wreak havoc and enduring damage on each
other and our environments.
The term coined to describe the
confluence of these crises is ‘the perfect storm’. But that term
suggests a million-to-one-shot, and fails to recognize that human and
ecological systems are inherently complex, adaptive systems. As a
result, these systems are largely unknowable – to the delight and
consternation of scientists and other students of such systems they
have more variables than can ever be quantified, analyzed or projected.
All we can do is influence them in hopeful ways, try to understand them
a little better, and marvel at the fact that they work in ways we can
never fully grasp or control.
Recent 'cultural studies' of such
systems, and of the lessons of history, have suggested to those who
attempt to look at them holistically that the problem we face today is
not the freakish ‘perfect storm’ but rather the cascading effect
of crises as one system after another peaks and crashes, as such
systems always and naturally do. At the dawn of this brave new century
we are stretched to the limit in our ability to deal with all of the
phenomena described above. These phenomena exert 'tectonic stresses'
upon our social and ecological systems, and as these interconnected
systems begin to peak, rupture and crash in this century, the result
will be a series of cascading catastrophes, the combination of which
will cause our culture to crumble. The award-winning University of
Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his new book The Upside of Down,
based on the work of Buzz Holling and Joe Tainter, calls this
phenomenon of cascading catastrophes ‘panarchy’. The consequence for
any civilization of panarchy is collapse, and for ours this collapse
could occur quite conceivably in the latter part of this century.
A
decade ago, such a view would have been considered extreme, even
Malthusian. But hardly a week goes by now without the release of yet
another book describing, in increasingly compelling terms, the
fragility of our social and ecological systems, their lack of
resilience, and, most importantly, the complex interrelationship
between all of these systems, such that a breakdown of one can easily
produce a breakdown of the others.
In his book Straw Dogs,
philosopher John Gray says that we have long passed the point of being
able to ‘save the world’ and prevent our civilization from collapse:
Humanism
can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress. To
believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given
to us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from
the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of
nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless. Humanists insist that
by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as
never before -- a secular version of Christianity's most dubious
promise that salvation is open to all.
James
Lovelock has written: Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a
pathological organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. We
have grown in numbers and disturbance to Gaia, to the point where our
presence is perceptively disturbing...the human species is now so
numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady. Gaia is suffering
from disseminated primatemaia, a plague of people.
A
human population of approaching 8 billion can be maintained only by
desolating the Earth. If wild habitat is given over to human
cultivation and habitation, if rainforests can be turned into green
deserts, if genetic engineering enables ever-higher yields to be
extorted from the thinning soils -- then humans will have created for
themselves a new geological era, the Eremozoic, the Era of Solitude, in
which little remains on the Earth but themselves and the prosthetic
environment that keeps them 'alive'.
[Quoting
Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene] If the human plague is really as
normal as it looks, then the collapse curve should mirror the growth
curve. This means the bulk of the collapse will not take much longer
than 100 years, and by 2150 the biosphere should be safely back to its
preplague population of Homo Sapiens -- somewhere between a half and
one billion.
Climate
change may be a mechanism through which the planet eases its human
burden...[or] new patterns of disease could trim the human
population...War could have a major impact...weapons of mass
destruction -- notably biological and (soon) genetic weapons, more
fearsome than before...It is not the number of states that makes this
technology ungovernable. It is technology itself. The ability to design
new viruses for use in genocidal weapons does not require enormous
resources of money, plant or equipment...In part, governments have
created this situation. By ceding so much control over new technology
to the marketplace, they have colluded in their own powerlessness.
If
anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power
conferred on 'humanity' by new technologies will be used to commit
atrocious crimes against it. If it becomes possible to clone human
beings, soldiers will be bred in whom normal human emotions are stunted
or absent. Genetic engineering may enable centuries-old diseases to be
eradicated. At the same time, it is likely to be the technology of
choice in future genocides. Those who ignore the destructive potential
of new technologies can only do so because they ignore history. Pogroms
are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and
poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been
tyrannies, but without modern means of transport and communication,
Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity's worst
crimes were made possible only by modern technology.
The
mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations,
still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems
fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth -- and thereby to be the
agent of its own destruction… Humans use what they know to meet their
most urgent needs -- even if the result is ruin. When times are
desperate they act to protect their offspring, to revenge themselves on
enemies, or simply to give vent to their feelings. These are not flaws
that can be remedied. Science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a
more rational mold. The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans
cannot be other than irrational.
[Referring
to the ancient Chinese ritual of creating, worshiping and then
discarding straw dogs] If humans disturb the balance of Earth they will
be trampled on and tossed aside. Critics of Gaia theory say they reject
it because it is 'unscientific'. The truth is that they fear and hate
it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.
This
is indeed a grim picture, but Gray insists he is a realist, not a
pessimist. He urges us to do nothing other than becoming more our
animal selves -- reconnecting with the rest of life on Earth and with
our primeval senses and instincts, getting outside our heads, coping
with contingencies, relearning to play, living in the moment, turning
back to real, mortal things, and simply seeing what is.
I think
Gray’s diagnosis is probably as accurate as any diagnosis of a complex
adaptive system can be. I would argue, however, that it is just not in
our nature to accept the inevitability of the collapse of
civilizations. More than that, I think it is our nature as human beings
to accept and act on our responsibility
to do what we can to rectify the harm we have done and to make life
better for those who will survive the collapse of civilization and who
will have to build the society that follows it. That sense of
responsibility is, I believe, a universal human trait: Oren Lyons, the
Onondaga Faithkeeper, whose culture predates the predominant one of
today by centuries, says in a recent interview by Barry Lopez for Orion
Magazine: “Of, by, and for the people. You choose your own leaders. You
put 'em up, and you take 'em down. But you, the people, are
responsible. You're responsible for your life; you're responsible for
everything.”
For most of my adult life, I have been a student of
innovation, and innovation is the means by which I, and I think most
scientists and entrepreneurs and technologists, seek to exercise that
responsibility and make this world, now and for the future, a better
place. This is why we’re here, and the task at hand has never been more
challenging or more urgent.
So what do we do? In a world in
which innovation is hemmed in by risk aversion, by intellectual
property law, and by the human disinclination to change until there is
no other choice, what can we do to bring innovation to bear to make the
crash of civilization as soft as possible and to prepare those who will
outlive it to start again with the best tools and models and knowledge
our ingenuity can give them?
Back in 1999, Credit Suisse First
Boston ran a New Economy Forum which produced a model of the innovation
process in business, diagrammed above:
In a paper
I wrote a few years ago I applied this model to the way in which
innovation has addressed basic human needs in past ages of our
civilization, and is in the process of doing so to address the pressing
human issues of today: chronic and epidemic disease, crime and
terrorism, waste and pollution (including global warming), urban decay,
famine, overpopulation, biodegradation and ecosystem exhaustion,
unemployment, inequity, scarcity of critical resources, loss of
biodiversity, economic overextension and unsustainability, chronic
violence and war:
In
each age of our civilization, however, the scale, complexity and
interconnectedness of these issues have grown exponentially.
Innovations and interventions that address one of these issues are
increasingly inadequate as each new focused solution ignores or even
exacerbates (by introducing new threats, vulnerabilities, wastes and
opportunities for misuse) other and new problems.
Increasingly,
too, the economic system that was designed to introduce and scale
innovations has become antithetical to innovation: It is cheaper and
less risky for a corporation to buy (or buy out and suppress) an
innovation than to develop one itself. Many ‘innovative’ startups are
conceived purely for an early sellout to a large corporation often
disinclined to introduce it when it threatens its existing brand.
Intellectual property laws in many countries allow and encourage the
patenting of entire processes and the intimidation, by armies of
lawyers, of entrepreneurs who encroach on any aspect of those
processes. And corporations are rewarded for schemes that enable them
to circumvent social and environmental laws to ‘competitive advantage’,
and now arguably spend more energy trying to defeat regulations that
were designed for the public good than they spend on initiatives that
serve the public good.
So it seems to me that the innovation
model that worked in the industrial era is no longer serving us in this
new and more complex era, and a new model is needed. What might this
new model look like? I believe it must have the following attributes:
- It needs to start with achieving as deep an understanding of the current problems as is humanly possible.
Things are the way they are for a reason, and many organizations put
too little effort into understanding those reasons because it is easier
and cheaper to use marketing to ‘manufacture’ the need and consent for
a new product. We need to appreciate that uninformed, myopic attempts
to grapple with complex problems cannot work. Before we can make it
right, we need to understand what’s wrong. This isn’t completely
possible in any complex system, but it’s essential to grapple with
appreciating how things got to where they are, to optimize the
probability that the innovations we come up with will help rather than
making things worse. This is where scientists come in: We need a lot
more of you, we need to give you more resources to do research, we need
to help you collaborate across geographies and disciplines more
effectively, and we need to enable you to focus on issues that are
critical to our species’ survival, not issues that offer the greatest
short-term ROI to some self-serving and indifferent corporation.
- It needs to be holistic and multi-disciplinary.
You can’t solve a complex problem with a merely complicated solution.
We need to look at the implications of our ideas and innovations across
all areas of our society and our world. Cross-disciplinary teams that
share a sense of urgency and purpose are the best means to achieve this
broader understanding and skill-set.
- It needs to be substantially voluntary.
That means it must be freed from the for-short-term-profit constraints
of the current economic system. The economy in which such efforts
naturally belong is the Gift Economy, an economy that is already
healthy and flourishing, as exemplified by open source and peer
production, by scientific exchanges, libraries, weblogs, wikis, file
sharing and other free exchanges of information, by philanthropy
without strings attached, and by mentoring done by parents and other
volunteers. Innovators must have the time, energy, and passion to
pursue ideas regardless of their profitability. To do this we need to
recruit the right people. I believe Open Space methodology, and
specifically its process of invitation,
offers the best mechanism for attracting precisely the people needed to
appreciate and address all of the different aspects of complex
problems. I also suspect that our greatest opportunity in this regard
is to tap those who are retired or close to retirement or working only
part-time, who can afford to volunteer their time and who bring a
lifetime of valuable experience to the task.
- It needs to be self-organized, non-hierarchical and collaborative.
Hierarchical systems are inherently bureaucratic and frequently
dysfunctional. As nature teaches us, self-organized systems are more
adaptable, more flexible, more resilient. We are mostly inexperienced
at working in such social structures, so we need to (re-)learn to do
so. We have much to learn from indigenous cultures who have been doing
this for millennia.
- It needs to be experimental and evolutionary.
We learn from our mistakes, and the modern corporation has reached the
point where promotion and production costs so much that failure is
intolerable. Our new innovation model has to not only tolerate, but encourage
mistakes. It must try a lot of different things, in parallel (for there
is no time to waste) through experimentation and fast learning and then
trying something a little different based on that learning, the way
nature does. Our main product must be ‘working models’ – solutions that
appear to work to solve some of our pressing global problems without
exacerbating others. Then we must let them go, push them out of the
nest. Some of these innovations may help us live better in the years
before civilization’s collapse. Others may only be of use after that
collapse, by the survivors who will know what didn’t work and will be
urgently looking for alternative models that might, models that will
make sense given the terrible knowledge they will then possess.
- It needs to involve new ways of thinking.
Einstein famously said “We can't solve problems by using the same kind
of thinking we used when we created them.” We need some radical, even
crazy thinking. Innovation is not incremental change and it is not
arrived at analytically. And we need not only radical innovations; we
need radical ways of innovating,
more holistic, more intuitive, more collaborative, more discontinuous,
more imaginative, and more connected to the wisdom and understanding of
all life on Earth.
So that is my challenge to you,
representatives of the world’s brightest scientists and most
accomplished and creative thinkers. Let us start now, with a sense of
urgency and shared purpose, to invent the future, one that will reach
beyond and outlive the collapse of our civilization. Ronald Wright, in
his book A Short History of Progress,
summarizes our human destiny by saying “It's entirely up to us. If we
fail -- if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer
sustain us -- nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes
run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.”
Let’s show Mr. Wright and Mr. Gray that the apes still have a trick or
two up their sleeves.
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MADE IN CANADA
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