Two things concern me deeply : 1) That the persistent introspective wisdom and wonderment that the Great Simplification always attempts to provide SEEMS to be conspicuously absent from the focus our global leaders, the movers and shakers, our "deciders". 2) Human Exceptionalism. Our collective failure to recognize and respect the symbiotic interconnectivity of all living things; or to see those other living things as merely convenient adjuncts to us humans. It SEEMS as though ancient wisdom has been replaced, to large extent, by a form of juvenile hubris and denialism. I am old and will be gone soon. Ironically, there is some comfort in that inescapable reality. Earth is an absolute miracle. We, as a species, are not as great as we like to think.
@@madameblatvatsky He humbly acknowledges those conundrums (and his own human short-comings) But at least his addressing the problems of contemporary human civilization! Unlike our politicians and plutocrats.
It's simple. The channel is called the great simplification and, thus, the answer is rhetorical. Those leaders and politicians only exist because of a highly complex system. Simplification, as Nate points out in all his videos, is something that is happening to us, with when and where the only uncertainty (depending on your location in the world). It stands to reason, then, that the answers can't possibly come from our current leaders, our current politicians and our existing system structures (democracy, and other stupid, unnatural, man made ideas). There is no overriding, top down, system that can work (work, as in lasting success without collapse) without cause to complexity. There never has been, and never will be. As soon as we see ourselves as a part of nature, in cooperation with nature, then it becomes fairly obvious. As soon as you take the position: "I can't do X without destroying Y, so I won't do X" (as opposed to "I'm doing X without consideration"), the answer is always simplification, and less is more.
你的中文太好了！(your chinese is really good!). Having spent quite some time in China, I really appreciate your idea of featuring a Chinese guest. I'd like to volunteer some thoughts. When discussing China, there is often a significant confirmation bias in Western countries. People tend to seek information confirming their beliefs and disregard anything contradicting them. Most people lack a proper understanding of what China is like, and a few days in a hotel in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Beijing doesn't change that. Understanding Chinese culture is an ongoing process that requires an open mind. Judging it prematurely can lead to misconceptions. From my experience, many people stop at a surface-level understanding and form judgments based on initial, often ill-informed responses. One key point is that people in China are more concerned with societal changes, such as family structure and success than with their government or the social credit system. To grasp this, one must appreciate China's 3000 years of history. This isn't to say everything in China is perfect. While Shanghai is becoming quieter, with over 60% electric vehicles and blue skies with white puffy clouds, the COVID-19 situation was challenging, and I could go on for hours on both sides... to no avail. Ultimately, the goal is not to balance the discourse but to recognize and address our biases. Thank you again for your immense contribution.
Always grateful for your work. Whenever I check in with you and Daniel S, I am always grateful. You have truly come to warm my heart with your intelligently informed and compassionate response to what we may choose to call the “meta crisis.” And today I heard you say again the “great simplification.” I’m listening. I’m inspired. You bring hope to me. Thank you. I’m a ridiculous and devoted artist, just one creative response to a “great annhiliation” of Self-Respect. And I am honored now to observe these solutions emerging in the communities I love. And your voice is connected to what I see. Thank you again. Your work is a good place to rest, brother. That’s a helpful work to me today. Thank you, Nate
Nate, you, a past me and many others are dreamers, we are, were dreamers living in a world designed to advance the sociopaths and penalize the dreamers. I’m old and tired and I have learned this, the sociopaths will ultimately win. Our only win is, to live your best life within your given circumstances.
"Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of." Julian Jaynes "Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds. What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world." Terence McKenna “If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.” Abraham Maslow
Do look after yourself. Thinking about these issues can be exhausting. Live your best life, but don't despair. Get some rest and come back at it. The world needs your imagination now more than ever. And remember, you're not alone.
Yes and no. It is so wonderful that our predicament is physical - and will not be beaten by the poltical or the emotional. But I agree, the harsh reality is totally new for Humans - hard to accept. It seems wise to pay attention.
🦉Wise counsel "If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete." Jack Kornfield "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." attributed to the Talmud, but it's more accurately a loose translation of a commentary on a part of the Pirke Avot. The Pirke Avot is a commentary on Micah 6:8.
"Wicked problem" is better terminology for the issues we face than "predicament" because "wicked problem" captures the contradictory nature of requirements of a "solution," the social complexity of the problem, and the fact that there is no single "solution" (Rittel and Webber, 1973). "Wicked problem" is the terminology used in social planning. There's an additional nuance that the term "wicked problem" captures: The moral imperative to enter discussion the aspects of the problem that any proposed "solution" (e.g., electrification) fails to tame (Churchman, 1967). That "bright green" proponents of electrification do not bring out aspects of the problem (e.g., species loss) that electrification would accelerate is something that must be called out.
I’m heartened to start seeing thinkers present multi-dimensional models instead of the model of two John Henry’s at two different points, beating on a rail with their nine-pound hammers, as a mechanical, two-dimensional proposition. A lot of people probably still don’t get what I mean by that. Take a leap - further than you think you can. Don’t worry, it’s just thinking, so you’re in no danger by doing so. Perfectly safe thing to do.
Of course you dismiss the "learning while doing" strategy. As a side note, it is too bad Einstein didn't put more thinking into the nuclear weapons program before endorsing it. When he realized his mistake it was too late.
i am old enough now to see the change over decades, and it is troubling. each new generation are born into and perpetuate the system/culture, and builds on it haphazardly. and that how we got this deep into destruction :( no reasonable size of effective change can happen to prevent the collapse of almost everything. we still need to just do stop the bad things abruptly, and start living in a way that is sustainable. spending your life trying to figure out a soft way to deal with the future is wasting the future.
Nate, all your communication is well considered, honest and uniquely realistic. You and Dan are leaders in articulating the uncomfortable tensions in our predicament.
The best podcast yet from Nate. Thank you, Nate, from the bottom of my heart. If only we can see the picture you paint of the potential future and how we can prepare for it.
Nate, I just happened upon your youtube station a few years back and have learned so much. Your description of what you are now doing (educating) is a necessary ingredient for people to think more deeply. I have been in healthcare for 50 years and I saw much of this coming in that field many years ago. I could name it, see the interconnections between several industres and capitalism and how the system is so interdependent and complex. As more and more people get out of their silos, I believe some light will begin to shine through. Thanks for all you do.
I just read the entirety of the responses to Frankly 67. The effulgent complexity of the ensuing commentary was brilliant! You are helping people to think. To think deeply and broadly. No one can thank you enough for generating this discourse. If there is such a thing as HELL I will miss you because you most certainly won't be there!
A most important episode thanks Nate. The potential for folks to waste time, energy and resources on non-solutions is massive. We are doing what we can to provide the awareness and education required to navigate at the specific local level.
The most important take -away from 9-11, was the unveiling of the tactic used, and the adaptation of air travelers to the threat it posed. Over the span of about 2 hours, during the opening actions of the the attacks on the US, that war started, and ended. The rest of bloodshed of that decade was based on the mistaken belief that there was an on-going war for survival. That war ended in the field at Shanksville. Adaptation happened so fast, it was missed entirely. Nate IS correct in positing that any attempt to "Solve" the metacrisis will kick off any number of unexpected adaptations. Any "Solution" which does not consider the broader implications will be pointless. The adaptations that will start appearing as individuals attempt to cope with their local situations will be surprising to most. Some will cause other issues. Some may not. Every contributor to the metacrisis was somebodies' adaptation to some perceived crisis in their own lives. This will be a constant.
Ty Nate! Fav podcast! Maybe this is a bit of hope, My 3 20 something children are aware of this and try to make some decisions based on this. Such as not going into big college debt so.that they can do these things such as working at National Grassland seed collection.
Hi Nate. I am French. In French, we don't have a word that can translate the English word "predicament". We are facing a very big predicament. You are right, We must understand the nature of the situation before thinking in building new paths. Thank you for helping us to understand better the predicament.
In German predicament would translate best into „Zwickmühle“. This is a vernacular way of saying that there are no good moves, a quandary. The word is taken from an old traditional game called „Mühle“ ( English: Nine men Morris) that has been played for generations, since Roman times. The way to get out of a „Zwickmühle“ situation - if there is any - is to do a costly sacrifice to destroy the enemy formation.
No they don't. They like to virtue signal. Threaten their morning latte, their car, their a/c, then it is a different story. The fluffy animals will have to fend for themselves.
I agree understanding is step one, and you are doing a great favor in this respect, Nate. You intellect is matched with your humility. There are trade offs, but in a complex dynamic system there are no solutions.
The concept of triage comes to mind when you acknowledge that energy use may (must) decline. It seems that generally people strongly prefer to not lose what they have i.e. have their living standard reduced. They start talking about rights to resources such as ample clean water, food, health care, shelter, safety and security. Once a person has a switch for power or a connection to water, sewer or garbage removal why would they opt out? Same for the apparent independence of individual powered travel. This compulsion to maintain or even grow ones available personal power use ain't going to be altered by any utterances of an imagined a policy maker. There will always someone willing to tell us what we want to hear. When the mordor moment occurs (has it already?) the chaos set lose will consume most if not all of applications of the concepts you have outlined. Cowering in the dark in the husks of cities may be the final scene. What about the deliberate conscious process of reducing the totality of the human footprint? It is a taboo to acknowledge the need to immediately cut the actual human face on the planet down to what might be a "sustainable" number (less than one billion?). The thing is that it must happen eventually. It is the nature of overshoot. If one takes overshoot as truth there is no other way. Sooner would be "better" for the planet but not for individuals alive at this moment. Being willing to sacrifice, to stop being a selfish consumer, by choosing instead to become the compost which is our ultimate destiny may be the only rational "solution."
For a long time, I have been coming to these concepts and ideas in a parallel way to you, and agree that it starts with learning and understanding, listening and imagining the broad possibilities. I also see a need for a philosophical and spiritual paradigm shift, and a more pressing need to get to the root of power and start to change what we can and what is acceptable in the immediate future. There s low hanging fruit just waiting to be picked, but our current politicians won't do it... that we like minded humans, for whatever our own reasons and approaches might be are wanting to change, we cannot let the current systems and destructive behaviours continue to do more damage... Your examples of finding another wetlands to replace the one destroyed by Walmart is not a solution what is lost is unique, irreplaceable... and soon, there will be no further wetlands to use as offsets... the better solution is to not allow Walmart to develop that place... not when there is already human habits that are idle or can be repurposed... that is where having some power (enough power) to implement such a simple policy solution would be agreeable to many, at least the majority that would be required in a political sense. Corporations don't care, and should be reined in... of course, we need a multifaceted approach, but there are starting points, and we need to start, whilst we look further into the future and deeper into the options to find the longer term changes required. If you ever come to Australia, We need to talk, face to face... time is running out for the unrepresented - every non-human life form on this planet that humans have co-opted for themselves...
The understanding of multidimensionality is crucial to make our concepts of issues more adequate. For example all the hype about many categories being "on a spectrum" falls short and is just another state of misconception as long as a oversimplified model of two dimensional, linear spectra is proposed, while a 4--dimensinal "solar system" of fixpoints in most cases would probably closer describe the kind of spectrum that composes an entity or issue when this allegory is used
Im having huge problems getting my wife on board. We have 2 young kids and a big mortgage in the city. Im a parttime farmer too (weekends) in Ireland and i want to get out of the mortgage, quit my job in the city, and do regenerative agriculture and tourism on the farm (ive converted one cow shed to a very successful airbnb and am converting another). I want to get out of debt now, but she thinks this is crazy talk. Im worried first and foremost about a financial collapse, i think it will be very very soon. But she doesn't buy it. There must be others in this scenario....
Remember to put your children first. I agree with getting out of debt, but don't rush yourself into poverty. I grew up off grid, it is tough. Just move to a smaller house in the suburbs if you need to. Don't rush into farming etc if you have no background in it. Your first priority must be your children. She will be thinking of them
I got my husband on board with peak oil and all that, but it took years. Just having interesting conversations and doing what we could together. I hope that helps
The parts about policies and humans who drive them behind the scene is so inspiring! Unfortunately, it is very difficult to imagine such processes in some significant countries like Russia.
Great episode! I’m a huge fan of efforts to reforest man-made deserts on an epic scale like they’re doing in China, Africa and India. I recently came across that practice being used in a way that was less than honest and not in the spirit of healing the Earth. It was a gut punch and I find a genuine ray of hope and optimism knowing there are little elves working in the dark of night fixing things without us knowing about it 👏👀
Wonderful podcast and couldn't agree more. What is illuminating is that this theme is based on my next book, Dukun, the art of healing which is about the management consulting industry. My first book Hammerhead, A collection of short stories has received great reviews where awareness of our predicament is woven into individual perspectives and transformation and not solutions. Cheers and can't wait for the next one.
OMG. The opening got me. I have been listening to your podcast since two months ago. Absolutely agree with your analysis on the super organism and I thought "I wish I could discuss with you about what I have observed from living. studying, and working in both U.S. and China. Plus, what I have observed from animal tracking in South Africa the past year. I started my bilingual podcast in fall 2021 when I moved from Boston to Shanghai to establish the field of music therapy in healthcare. I'd be interested as I feel often frustrated with how most solutions are not targeting the root causes of the massive challenges we face today. I would be AMAZING to connect and explore this possibility!
Collapse the existing economic system - by detaching, down sizing, down scaling, defunding, divesting and gifting. Not socially acceptable but adaptive in a time of the metacrises. I agree focus on the social system not the superstructure.
That’s precisely the argument that David Holmgren made in his paper, “Collapse on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future,” as well as his most recent book Retrosuburbia.
Along with energy-blind, we are also blind to speciesism. We virtue signal about dogs or dolphins while we enthusiastically fund the creation, subjugation, and murder of 80 billion+ similarly sentient land animals per year. 2 trillion sentient sea animals per year, a growing proportion also factory farmed. The notion of caring for a species should be redirected as caring for the individuals of that species- rather than perpetuating some odd collector mentality. The distinction between species is also arbitrary when we separate from our egotistical view as the curators of life on earth. The life of that chicken, pig, or cow matters just as much to them as the life of a dolphin matters to the dolphin.
my money's on collapse, maybe some kind of Foundation could speed the recovery. No idea of the timeframe though. Not less than 10 years, not more than 100, maybe?
Bio-complexity is currently in "collapse". All civilizations have and will collapse. We are currently in mid stage collapse and it is being masked. There is no "recovery". Humans are being given a choice: Work together to preserve enough natural complexity for the sake of all other species, which may in turn save some humans, or cease to exist. Currently ocean expansion will indeed end this civilization assuming it lasts another ~50 years.
Not less than 10 years?? The fragility of our systems means the collapse could be any time.. and not more than 20 for this to hold together, just my thoughts
Some selected quotes from the last page of From AT WORK IN THE RUINS, by Dougald Hind: "... we stand near the beginning of a process that will take a thousand years, because that is how long it will be before the old growth forests have returned, how long it takes for the mother trees to grow back...Modernity has gone around the world making no end of scars. Under its spell, we think the world is trying to kill us, because we have forgotten that dying is part of what we're here for and have come to treat it as an error in need of correction... And we think that we are here to kill the world, that this is how our species shows up, as a destroyer. But this spell is wearing off....We will never know how all of this turns out."
Solutions are out there. It’s time to get moving. The circular economy concept doesn’t clash with existing systems, it can integrate seamlessly and solve the nitrogen cycle, CO2, toxic chemicals, global supply chain fragility, food nutrient density, soil health, and more issues all in one. We can start reversing things right now. If we put a war time effort into switching over in this way we could be 80% to 90% switched over without collapsing our economies within 10 to 15 years. And we can continue to shift our way of thinking about how to improve and refine how we eliminate waste. In a 100% circular economy it doesn’t matter how much we consume because there is no such thing as waste. Everything we consume (weather it is as part of industry or as a consumer) becomes a product in some form. The current concept of waste and rubbish needs to be eliminated and the best way to do that is most likely by heavily promoting and incentivising circular economies. Attached is a community wide (all levels of the community) complex integrated system of the establishment of a circular economy in a first world democratic, capitalist and high consumption materialist society. If Australia can America can. It is possible Not sure if UA-cam content ever gets geofenced so maybe use a VPN for Australia to access this content if necessary) ua-cam.com/video/9MbjjIuy1wQ/v-deo.htmlsi=NQnCLVeWOzVT15mR
Do you need a "solution" to respond to a problem? It's a semantic issue of whether calling something "a problem" implies the existence of "a solution". It doesn' have to. OK, so we often look at something we dislike, and say, "That's a problem." And we want to make that problem go away. Ideally, at minimal cost. But life is choosing between imperfect options. I think the point is that we have options, so we have to choose between them. But we can also spend some time thinking about whether there are other options. Different people will decide that different options qualify as "solutions", even if they aren't honest about the actual compromises and costs, and who they effect. In a sense, the whole "problem" is that not everybody gets what they want. But they mostly believe they can get what they want, individually, as long as someone else doesn't get what they want. And that's good enough for many people. Even if it means that they are leaving everyone's fate up to a gamble. But they believe that they are special, lucky, or chosen, and so it's fine. Hubris and arrogance are innate. The only "solution" to them is a sufficiently large culling, by way of natural evolution. However, evolutionary pressure seems to select for arrogance, not humility, both individually and collectively. At least, in the short and medium term. So, if all the humble and wise peoples get obliterated by the psychopath societies, who will be left after the psychopaths obliterate themselves? It would take a very powerful cultural selection mechanism to prevent such a self-destructive process. That might not be a "solution", but it might be an effective strategy, if we can conceive and execute it, to at least mitigate harms, if not completely prevent them. Less consumption, especially by the insatiable ownership class. Less private property, more public stewardship. By whatever means necessary.
Hey Nate, I didn't know you taught a reality 101 class even though I have watched your podcasts for a while. I read your reality 101 book with DJ, and it has really been a life changing read that I wish I had read 10 years ago. I will have to read it again, because my first read was quick, and it has helped give me some insight on where to focus my time and energy. I don't think I have the resources to become a carrot farmer or an alpaca farmer, but your book doesn't suggest that anyways. I could probably ask a million questions on the book, but I will go through that on my own time. Really wish I could've attended your lectures when I was 18, but this channel for the most part is the same.
Yes, please, could you invite guests from China? I worked in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong for twenty years. Unfortunately, Americans do not want to know what people think and do in other countries, and that's dangerous. The project of persisting (good news for ten-year-olds) is a cross-cultural, global project. (OMG! What could that be, some other form of governance?) What do Russia and China think sustainable growth means? People put their faith in leaders appointed by Players of The Great Game 2.0 and have yet to learn what organized groups of committed, self-educated people can accomplish. The USA has had many Tiananmen Square events over the past twenty years, and all of them have been absorbed and domesticated by the Profits/Growth First Empire and its pernicious belief systems. Why is this? Let's talk about it for another twenty years and come what may. "What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be oubiosphere's’s handmaiden an" - Howard T. Odum, Energy, Ecology, & Economics, 1973.
No answers, just asuming thousands of questions; no prepp-mode just an essay to understand, admiting and embrasing uncertity. No big succesfull publications, but underground movements creating themselves underneath, while noisy systems around decay and fall. Best Lullaby to go to sleep here in the South. Dreaming with a better world is still possible. Thank you Nate. You're great.
I have come to the impression that „solutions“ will not primarily originate from politics or science or economy. The first step is of course understanding the complexity of the predicament. But after that quite quickly comes the openness to AND practice of great simplification in our personal lifes. That might comprise no more flying, no individual cars (EV sharing is sufficient), basic clothing only, reduced living space by e.g. 50%, basically vegan lifestyle, more care work. There is a famous line by German poet Erich Kaestner „there is no good unless you do it“. So, fellows in the Global North: let‘s do it. 🍀
A wee challenge to the solutions will not be televised: if the solutions are spiritual/ relational maybe they can be. When I hear the ''solutions won't be televised'' I hear the solutions will be decided for the influential class in the interests of their class. As a working class person I think this is a creepy concept with alot of class baggage.
You mis-hear it. To say it won't be televised does not mean a solution will be created as a deliberate action by self interested actors. It means we return to a biologically sustainable self nature and value system. Aka the Way. Not as actions we are aware of or chose but more as sustainability forcing itself onto us because there is no sustainable non sustainable option. It's in the word. You won't know this change has happened. Your kids won't know. Neither will theirs. Experienced reality and our genetic natures will simply rejoin after a relatively short separation. Nate is a type A kind of guy who tries to learn the words and say them but doesn't understand how the Tao aka Way works. Hint: -those who know don't speak, those who speak don't know".
Might we please discuss the physical literacy education over sight please? Why is it, and how is it that we teach or fail to teach transport sports? Recreation that becomes transportation.
I'm worried we seem to caught in a loop of trying to frame the problems. I agree that a wider generalist perspective is needed, but also it needs to be married to something quantitiative. A good reference would be Sir David Mackay's Sustainability without the Hot Air which is free online. Here, he not only frames the problem, but quantifies it to the best of his abilities also, and it is the combination of both together (as Nate does with his discussion on oil usage), that makes the argument powerful.
the problem is civilization it's self is NOT at all "sustainable". One dimension of this is bio-complexity. Any activity outside of Nature, such as harnessed fire; mono & agriculture; pointy sticks always degrades bio-complexity. This in turn affects the natural carbon cycles and the natural extremely efficient energy consumption of life processes. The more layers of bio-complexity the more each calorie of solar and geo sourced energy is used (an overall cooling effect). Climate models virtually ignore increasing pressure and 200 thousand years of anthropogenic thermal-mass (including heat & CO2) in the oceans. The models largely ignore Earth's spin and Gravity as well as mass movement to the tune of ~100Billion tons of material per year from deep underground to the surface. The ocean water rising will be radioactive as the ~1000 nuclear reactors around the world go supercritical (they can not cool as atmospheric and ocean temps increase) do to increasing thermal mass and pressure. It takes some 80 years to "shut down". There simply is no choice. ~90% of ALL anthropogenic thermal-mass since slash & burn and pointy sticks is in the oceans. Ocean Temperatures for Last 700000 Years ua-cam.com/video/5YKeSI2g3z4/v-deo.html
I think we've reached the point where ecological catastrophe is inevitable and in fact is already beginning. We need to think more about how communities can react to this sort of disaster. Of course, it will affect different communities differently, but aren't there some effects which will be worldwide, for example, breakdown in supply chains. Instead of talking about solutions we should be talking about coping strategies, and how to keep societies from descending into chaos while facing a lot of hardship.
Nate, completely agree, and I share your love of nature as you will find when you finally come to visit the Seeger institute in Hawaii. There are no solutions, but there are steps in the right direction and they can be taken by very very wealthy people through the establishment of what I’m calling private Commonwealth Are institutions to create the intellectual property, train the leaders of the future and love and empathy and stewardship through the creation of natural capital form of genetic material both Kona flora and microbial that can be spread in an effort to transition to a more local lower energy future. We have to be the Arcadians assignment. Michele says we have to have a 250 year viewpoint of the world and understand that spirit of self interestbehoove us to do the work to lay the foundation for generations we in the future. Keep up the good work coming to visit and play with the animals.
Well Nate, you sounded as if you had fallen into the problem/predicament false dicothomy. But then you deftly sidestepped it. The most notable presenter of this false dicothomy is probably Chris Martenson in his The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment (2011), who said that a solution is a response to a problem that returns the conditions back to the original. A predicament, per Martenson, has no solution, but only adaptation. Of course, as Heraclitus famously said, "One cannot step into the same river twice." This is because conditions change and the problem moves on. You cannot expect to solve the problem and return to original conditions before the problem. As for predicaments, they too are problems AND solutions very often are just adaptation. My third book, Paradigms for Adaptation (2024), recognizes this and treats adaptation as a solution. What Martenson and other authors and presenters do is obfuscate both solutions and adaptation by the false dichotomy. This has the effect of channeling people's energy into despair and a fase narrative which renders them impotent in implementing actions. (Unless you pay money of course.) You make a good point about false narratives, but when you refuse to talk about solutions, you reinforce the false narrative that there are no solutions. Let me give you a couple of examples. Problem: the military draft. Solution: mass action that forced the Nixon Administration to end the Draft in 1973. Result: You, Nate Hagens, and most of your audience did not have to adapt to killing innocent villagers in Vietnam or running off to Canada or going to prison. Problem: poor soil on my farm in Ferndale, Washington. Solution: tillage, cover crops, green manure, compost. Result: I grew a tremendous amount of food that I sold and gave away AND we got a better price for our farm precisely because of the good soil when we sold out and moved to France. Problem: poor, over-used soil in my half-acre garden in France. Solution: tillage, cover crops, green manure, compost. Result: greater tilth, better crops, more food to give away. Problem: Quantitave measurement of sustainability. Solution: a metric that crosses all platforms (kilojoules and kilocalories), rigorous data collection and methodology, feedback to the theories and paradigms. Result: I can say definitively that I produce food 25-35 times more efficiently than fossil fuel agriculture through mostly manual labor and just a little bit of gasoline for my tiller. Yes, we need to adapt to recession, depression and collapse, which I do every day. Every day. My current focus is on landraces and a return to medieval thinking. (Except the humans as icons paradigm so popular with the early Catholic Church. That is just rubbish.) The people around me had parents who were suppressed by the Nazis during WWII, so they have a different attitude which I can learn from too. Let me be as blunt as I can. Problems = predicaments. Solutions = adaptation. Refusing to craft solutions is just a cop-out. (A useful word from the 1960s.)
Nate, this conceptualization is great. The Rubic's cube lends nicely to how we have to fashion our responses. We need generalists to put together all the pieces to create the sort of "aspirational" response to the challenges we face now and in the future. I think we need AI to do a lot of the number crunching for our responses to prove our addressment of issues suits our goals. However, we do not want the AI to model for us an ideal society. That must be done by humans that have fully accepted the truths of our future. As you say, folks won't like the measures that are required. Perhaps over time, they will acclimatize to doing with less. Less is more when it comes to lifestyles. When it comes to the transition, it will be hard for folks to recognize the authority of one or a group of humans. The AI, or rather, the council of AI put forth by the various interested nations, would be the only source of that kind of authority. A rules based system that does not privilege any one group or nation. At the base of which will be the structure we all bring into existence. One point about planning sticks out to me, which makes your forward thinking so important, is that we can not do what needs doing without rainbows and unicorns. We will make great progress following a storm or calamity that unfolds. Predicting those events is mostly impossible. The big game changes will be sudden and lasting. Adaptive as you say. A feature of our future is anticipation of events beyond our control or, perhaps, comprehension. Rainbows will happen! Unicorns are the physical manifestations of our intellect. We will discover things that are game changers. As we put more resources towards science and R&D, we will create new avenues to address particular issues we have. The faster we ramp up on science and technology, the better. We need herds of Unicorns to set new pathways to the future we want. What do we want? 😊 Perhaps a good topic for a show...
We have become on average in the "developed world" a reactive species --- only accepting change in our lives to changes which we believe directly affect us personally. What will drive an entire population to change is a reaction to a national or globally destructive discontinuity in the current socio-economic trajectory. My hope is that it is a positive social change and not a negative ego-based one.
@@roo3515 Didn't Nate make the point that he doesn't have the solutions? And the point of this "Frankly" is that solutions that have been given so far have not been real solutions.
To "learn along" with me, you'd need to catch up on 75 years of insights re food and transport. For food, exploring the life in and produce from forest gardens that could as well exist where lawns are now would be a start. Transport is far more complex, its ranking as the sector emitting the most GHG's over time eclipsed on closer examination by its other devastating effects on human and ecological health.
Nate, we will need all of the communications tools at our disposal in order to create a disseminated narrative. A consciousness, raising experience that will be necessary to address the medical crisis at all. There are young people out there, who don’t have a positive narrative therefore they are protesting against fossil fuel energy, but through the use of the Internet, while it’s still exists as a tool for aggregating knowledge, working on the same problem in multiple locations and parallel to accelerate solutions sets not silver bullets, but ways in which to view the problem in a site, specific manner, and ways to congealed a desperate global community into the realization that we are all in this together, in this one large canoe we can perhaps build the Bible calls arcs to preserve what we have created in the civilization such that those who come in the future have a more solid foundation to work with. Yes, we are making a lot of mistakes but there are things that we should try to preserve for the next civilization.
Yah, I do worry about the jaguars in Argentina... I saw a documentary about the founder of I think North Face clothing and now his widow their purchase of land and efforts to bring the locals on board. I mean, now w Millei in charge. His determination to abolish pertinent agencies that woikd partner to protect the habitat 😢
MIT's En-ROADS offers insight about climate policies. It uses IPCC AIM models and is a free web based graphical interface. One thing it shows is that a steadily rising carbon fee on fossil fuel production and imports that increases $10 per year through 2100 gets us halfway to our 1.5 goal. Carbon Fee and Dividend with a CBAM makes it viable, durable, and has many co-benefits.
Hey John. A more politically viable climate policy looks like the Global Carbon Reward. Closer to a subsidy than a tax. And an “carbon asset “. Please have a close look at it.
Paris Agreement: "To limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest...". Carbon Emissions: Showing no signs of slowing through 2024. Can we all agree that climate policies aren't worth the ePaper displays they're being displayed on?
I was a committed participant in the early years of CCL. I applaud your continuing efforts but six years of butting my head against the walls in congressional office buildings burned me out. Since I dropped out in 2015, the political environment on this issue has not improved. Are you aware that the last 12 months exceeded the 1.5 C target? Also, global warming is accelerating. Jim Hansen sees the globe warming at 0.3 degrees per decade, up from 0.2 per decade 1980-2014. Please tell me I'm wrong.
Art and John. I was (and still am) pro carbon tax but there’s very little chance of them getting in place unless there’s a reasonable option to carbon consumption. And I mean a real practical economic choice. Make the right choice rewarded (as per Delton Chen) then (after) make more expensive the bad choice. Do you see another way out?
Have you ever noticed how management makes things worse? Not only in your job, but also, say, in the forest, where fire management has increased fire frequency and severity? Or how about where 'solutions' in management of a pest involved bringing in predator that made things worse? Complexity and management. Managing complexity. There is a cane toad for every proposed solution, I'm afraid. Maybe we should do as Alan Watts said, and stop trying to manage everything.
Well actually it's hard I think to make local current political and social problems fit in our minds with the bigger picture of the predicament you talk about beyond trying to consume less energy oneself.
ONE PROBLEM, inadequate understanding. ONE SOLUTION, adequate understanding. Humans don't have access to adequate understanding because this level of reasoning methodologies is missing, let alone existing in a form that's effectively teachable so populations are enabled to manage necessary fixes.
Nate, I really appreciate your perspective and the project underway with the Great Simplification, but if there was ever a release that made me skeptical of the whole project, it was this one. If we in the western world/global north cant achieve on even the simplest goals/baby steps towards mitigating the unfolding disaster, how are we to convince the entire world to accept the Simplification? It makes me fear we are headed for the hardest possible break, not the bend. I understand that you don't have the 'solutions', no one does yet. But this Frankly ultimately feels like a 'shrug' with a dream that while everything is crashing down around us we will come out of the other side with Libraries of Healing where you can bring your homegrown tomatoes to barter for a yoga lesson.
It just seems to me, (and I think to many others), that the "shifting baselines" have to likely get much worse, before appropriately drastic actions emerge, in a desperate struggle for survival. It may likely be too late, (at that point), but nature itself has to light a fire under our collective asses, for us to stop looking like dumb dinosaurs. Our greatest achilles heel is food production. So how bad, worldwide, does that need to get, under worsening conditions, and when? Is anyone out there giving it the research, and speculation, it deserves??
I have a feeling that a more process-focused approach, rather than an entity-driven one would end up simplifying the situation. Rather than think about individuals, values and policies, we could lean into collective meaning-making, dialectics and governance protocols. These systems we use every day frame our thinking, creating mental patterns that represent division, conflict and dualism. As you point out, we will never all agree on what is right, but we might have some success in agreeing on the way that we will discuss it. Then you can fall back on these grounding principles without needing to feel that you are giving up your identity, beliefs or opinions.
@@thegreatsimplification Thanks for the pointer, I'll investigate further. My ambition, I think, is in a more radical interpretation, following Niklas Luhmann's Social Systems Theory, which I think does an amazing job of explaining a pluralistic world. Long story short, he describes the social communication system as autopoietic, with coupling to the biological and mental systems. He imagines a world defined by functional differentiation - a bit abstract, but worth it :)
@andybaldman That's kind of glib. Of course we're all going to die. The question is how - By old age? By heatdeath? By starvation? It makes a difference, especially because we are already baked in +2.5C above preindustrial and our GHGs are still rising and accelerating, we lose most predictable Large scale organized agriculture between +2.5C and +3.0C.
Solutions are liquid, when everyone seems to ask for concrete. The meaning crisis is a language crisis of provocative semantics and spells. The news would be to ask, were you there? The reportage would be to ask, what is journalism’s time involved v consumer sensation for selling drama? Public office, is it on social media? Toxicity is hidden in its efficiency.
Nate and his fine class of thinkers need to brainstorm and outline for the future where humans must cluster around hand-picked coal reserves - until no more hand-picked coal. The maximum length and width of the cluster (Tainter's queue of Ants) - are the maximum boundary of the Superorganism talked about at length in recent years - not any longer or wider. There is no such thing named Superorganism without the 17 million barrels of finite crude oil go today from war-torn nations in the Middle East and other regions to China daily - mainly looted. To walk from Basra to Baghdad in Iraq, it takes one a week. How long it would take to walk from East to West cost of the US? How long it would take sailing from California to China or back rowing? The ongoing and dramatic political events in the US are the golden opportunity today for the US to kiss the rest of the world goodbye, while there are still vast Energy resources in America. The US should urgently bring the age of Christopher Columbus to a close, in respect to the laws of nature. There are no more forests, oil, coal, n. gas in America to share with the rest of the world - the resources that was better to be kept for 3 thousand years - thank you all very much. Nate and his fine class of thinkers need to start and call for the badly needed and long due Independence of the US and the Americas from the rest of the world. "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).
Plans are maps for action. Action is incapable of fulfilling every nuance of any map. What matters is understanding the differences and the relevance involved. Equity is an ideal, reality always has something to say about it.
Wetlands are great for biodiversity. But... are not good for the climate. They do absorb CO2 that is true. But turn some of it to methane. The heating they produce due to the methane is typically twice that of the cooling they produce due to the CO2 they absorb.
Is the global geo-political system literally more complex than alternatives? What if it is merely more monolithic and rigid? It should be possible to have more complexity with less rigidity and fragility. Human society does not have to face simplification, empirically, by every measure. We can have distributed power and social structures that give rise to higher overall complexity, while still being more stable and more sustainable, as long as they incorporate circular models of consumption, instead of runaway linear models. We don't need less complexity. We need more autonomy at small and medium scales. We more autonomous regional and community governements, and more small businesses and other organizations, which answer to those smaller governments, instead of runaway geopolitical power blocs and multinational monopolistic mega-corporations who answer to nobody. The looser relationships between smaller actors can allow the formation of emergent complexity that is adaptable and flexible. More overall complexity, less overall vulnerability.
@7:10, regarding the siren song of conspicuous consumption... I'm not so sure the lure of that melody is not MORE tempting to a population of people for whom conspicuous consumption offers a far more potent material advantage than it does to people in our society.
"The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao." Great video, as always, Nate. These animations are excellent! TGS has a kick-ass team.
"The Earth is precious. If you alter it you will ruin it" - Lao Tzu
"We're in it to win it" - Pops
Bill Mollison said that Permaculture would be a revolution that happened in the middle of the night that no one really noticed.
BOOM 🎯
@@anthonytroia1 🤫
@@anthonytroia1 not so loud
@@andywilliams7989 LOL. that was funny
Hi!!
Two things concern me deeply :
1) That the persistent introspective wisdom and wonderment that the Great Simplification always attempts to provide SEEMS to be conspicuously absent from the focus our global leaders, the movers and shakers, our "deciders".
2) Human Exceptionalism. Our collective failure to recognize and respect the symbiotic interconnectivity of all living things; or to see those other living things as merely convenient adjuncts to us humans. It SEEMS as though ancient wisdom has been replaced, to large extent, by a form of juvenile hubris and denialism.
I am old and will be gone soon. Ironically, there is some comfort in that inescapable reality. Earth is an absolute miracle. We, as a species, are not as great as we like to think.
Hagens can't address those things unfortunately so it's almost as good as if he didn't say anything. Very sadly.
@@madameblatvatsky He humbly acknowledges those conundrums (and his own human short-comings) But at least his addressing the problems of contemporary human civilization! Unlike our politicians and plutocrats.
It's simple. The channel is called the great simplification and, thus, the answer is rhetorical. Those leaders and politicians only exist because of a highly complex system. Simplification, as Nate points out in all his videos, is something that is happening to us, with when and where the only uncertainty (depending on your location in the world). It stands to reason, then, that the answers can't possibly come from our current leaders, our current politicians and our existing system structures (democracy, and other stupid, unnatural, man made ideas).
There is no overriding, top down, system that can work (work, as in lasting success without collapse) without cause to complexity. There never has been, and never will be. As soon as we see ourselves as a part of nature, in cooperation with nature, then it becomes fairly obvious. As soon as you take the position: "I can't do X without destroying Y, so I won't do X" (as opposed to "I'm doing X without consideration"), the answer is always simplification, and less is more.
@@ricos1497 yes
On point ☺️.. hope you’re enjoying the moment 🙃
你的中文太好了！(your chinese is really good!). Having spent quite some time in China, I really appreciate your idea of featuring a Chinese guest. I'd like to volunteer some thoughts.
When discussing China, there is often a significant confirmation bias in Western countries. People tend to seek information confirming their beliefs and disregard anything contradicting them. Most people lack a proper understanding of what China is like, and a few days in a hotel in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Beijing doesn't change that.
Understanding Chinese culture is an ongoing process that requires an open mind. Judging it prematurely can lead to misconceptions. From my experience, many people stop at a surface-level understanding and form judgments based on initial, often ill-informed responses.
One key point is that people in China are more concerned with societal changes, such as family structure and success than with their government or the social credit system. To grasp this, one must appreciate China's 3000 years of history. This isn't to say everything in China is perfect. While Shanghai is becoming quieter, with over 60% electric vehicles and blue skies with white puffy clouds, the COVID-19 situation was challenging, and I could go on for hours on both sides... to no avail.
Ultimately, the goal is not to balance the discourse but to recognize and address our biases. Thank you again for your immense contribution.
If that means that millions fly to China to „understand“ more nothing is won.
Great post
Always grateful for your work. Whenever I check in with you and Daniel S, I am always grateful.
You have truly come to warm my heart with your intelligently informed and compassionate response to what we may choose to call the “meta crisis.” And today I heard you say again the “great simplification.” I’m listening. I’m inspired. You bring hope to me. Thank you.
I’m a ridiculous and devoted artist, just one creative response to a “great annhiliation” of Self-Respect. And I am honored now to observe these solutions emerging in the communities I love. And your voice is connected to what I see. Thank you again.
Your work is a good place to rest, brother. That’s a helpful work to me today.
Thank you, Nate
Nate, you, a past me and many others are dreamers, we are, were dreamers living in a world designed to advance the sociopaths and penalize the dreamers. I’m old and tired and I have learned this, the sociopaths will ultimately win. Our only win is, to live your best life within your given circumstances.
"Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of."
Julian Jaynes
"Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds. What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world."
Terence McKenna
“If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.”
Abraham Maslow
Do look after yourself. Thinking about these issues can be exhausting. Live your best life, but don't despair. Get some rest and come back at it. The world needs your imagination now more than ever. And remember, you're not alone.
Yes and no. It is so wonderful that our predicament is physical - and will not be beaten by the poltical or the emotional. But I agree, the harsh reality is totally new for Humans - hard to accept. It seems wise to pay attention.
🦉Wise counsel
"If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete."
Jack Kornfield
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."
attributed to the Talmud, but it's more accurately a loose translation of a commentary on a part of the Pirke Avot. The Pirke Avot is a commentary on Micah 6:8.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: The New Paganism: How the Postmodern Became the Premodern
ua-cam.com/video/1Nr2Q2zGNC8/v-deo.html
solutions will totally be emergent. and I'm really fascinated to see what they will be.
"Wicked problem" is better terminology for the issues we face than "predicament" because "wicked problem" captures the contradictory nature of requirements of a "solution," the social complexity of the problem, and the fact that there is no single "solution" (Rittel and Webber, 1973). "Wicked problem" is the terminology used in social planning.
There's an additional nuance that the term "wicked problem" captures: The moral imperative to enter discussion the aspects of the problem that any proposed "solution" (e.g., electrification) fails to tame (Churchman, 1967).
That "bright green" proponents of electrification do not bring out aspects of the problem (e.g., species loss) that electrification would accelerate is something that must be called out.
You might consider the definition of “Super Wicked Problem” where time is running out
I’m heartened to start seeing thinkers present multi-dimensional models instead of the model of two John Henry’s at two different points, beating on a rail with their nine-pound hammers, as a mechanical, two-dimensional proposition.
A lot of people probably still don’t get what I mean by that. Take a leap - further than you think you can. Don’t worry, it’s just thinking, so you’re in no danger by doing so. Perfectly safe thing to do.
Ily
Thanks Nate, another great, humble video. Appreciate your work as always.
"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." - Albert Einstein
Of course you dismiss the "learning while doing" strategy. As a side note, it is too bad Einstein didn't put more thinking into the nuclear weapons program before endorsing it. When he realized his mistake it was too late.
@@wvhaugen 'Learning while doing' certainly has its advantages in certain scenarios. Maybe not with nuclear bombs.
i am old enough now to see the change over decades, and it is troubling.
each new generation are born into and perpetuate the system/culture, and builds on it haphazardly. and that how we got this deep into destruction :(
no reasonable size of effective change can happen to prevent the collapse of almost everything.
we still need to just do stop the bad things abruptly, and start living in a way that is sustainable.
spending your life trying to figure out a soft way to deal with the future is wasting the future.
Nate, all your communication is well considered, honest and uniquely realistic. You and Dan are leaders in articulating the uncomfortable tensions in our predicament.
The best podcast yet from Nate. Thank you, Nate, from the bottom of my heart. If only we can see the picture you paint of the potential future and how we can prepare for it.
Nate, I just happened upon your youtube station a few years back and have learned so much. Your description of what you are now doing (educating) is a necessary ingredient for people to think more deeply. I have been in healthcare for 50 years and I saw much of this coming in that field many years ago. I could name it, see the interconnections between several industres and capitalism and how the system is so interdependent and complex. As more and more people get out of their silos, I believe some light will begin to shine through. Thanks for all you do.
I just read the entirety of the responses to Frankly 67. The effulgent complexity of the ensuing commentary was brilliant! You are helping people to think. To think deeply and broadly. No one can thank you enough for generating this discourse. If there is such a thing as HELL I will miss you because you most certainly won't be there!
Don't worry...."hell" is a crock. ha ah
A most important episode thanks Nate. The potential for folks to waste time, energy and resources on non-solutions is massive. We are doing what we can to provide the awareness and education required to navigate at the specific local level.
Hola Nate! Regards from Peru. Thanks for this and your work! This was brilliant.
The most important take -away from 9-11, was the unveiling of the tactic used, and the adaptation of air travelers to the threat it posed. Over the span of about 2 hours, during the opening actions of the the attacks on the US, that war started, and ended. The rest of bloodshed of that decade was based on the mistaken belief that there was an on-going war for survival. That war ended in the field at Shanksville. Adaptation happened so fast, it was missed entirely.
Nate IS correct in positing that any attempt to "Solve" the metacrisis will kick off any number of unexpected adaptations. Any "Solution" which does not consider the broader implications will be pointless. The adaptations that will start appearing as individuals attempt to cope with their local situations will be surprising to most. Some will cause other issues. Some may not. Every contributor to the metacrisis was somebodies' adaptation to some perceived crisis in their own lives. This will be a constant.
Ty Nate! Fav podcast! Maybe this is a bit of hope, My 3 20 something children are aware of this and try to make some decisions based on this. Such as not going into big college debt so.that they can do these things such as working at National Grassland seed collection.
Hi Nate. I am French. In French, we don't have a word that can translate the English word "predicament".
We are facing a very big predicament. You are right, We must understand the nature of the situation before thinking in building new paths.
Thank you for helping us to understand better the predicament.
In German predicament would translate best into „Zwickmühle“. This is a vernacular way of saying that there are no good moves, a quandary. The word is taken from an old traditional game called „Mühle“ ( English: Nine men Morris) that has been played for generations, since Roman times. The way to get out of a „Zwickmühle“ situation - if there is any - is to do a costly sacrifice to destroy the enemy formation.
Love this episode Nate, for your wisdom, honesty and humility. Thank you 🙏
So grateful to have come across your channel Nate having the much needed conversations we need to have. Thank you 🙏🏻 😊
This resonates so much. If you're in India again, would love to organize a gathering of interested folks.
"If we can teach people about wildlife, they will be touched.... Because humans want to save things that they love." Steve Irwin
No they don't. They like to virtue signal. Threaten their morning latte, their car, their a/c, then it is a different story. The fluffy animals will have to fend for themselves.
Thoughtful post.
I agree understanding is step one, and you are doing a great favor in this respect, Nate. You intellect is matched with your humility. There are trade offs, but in a complex dynamic system there are no solutions.
The concept of triage comes to mind when you acknowledge that energy use may (must) decline. It seems that generally people strongly prefer to not lose what they have i.e. have their living standard reduced. They start talking about rights to resources such as ample clean water, food, health care, shelter, safety and security. Once a person has a switch for power or a connection to water, sewer or garbage removal why would they opt out? Same for the apparent independence of individual powered travel. This compulsion to maintain or even grow ones available personal power use ain't going to be altered by any utterances of an imagined a policy maker. There will always someone willing to tell us what we want to hear.
When the mordor moment occurs (has it already?) the chaos set lose will consume most if not all of applications of the concepts you have outlined. Cowering in the dark in the husks of cities may be the final scene. What about the deliberate conscious process of reducing the totality of the human footprint? It is a taboo to acknowledge the need to immediately cut the actual human face on the planet down to what might be a "sustainable" number (less than one billion?). The thing is that it must happen eventually. It is the nature of overshoot. If one takes overshoot as truth there is no other way. Sooner would be "better" for the planet but not for individuals alive at this moment. Being willing to sacrifice, to stop being a selfish consumer, by choosing instead to become the compost which is our ultimate destiny may be the only rational "solution."
For a long time, I have been coming to these concepts and ideas in a parallel way to you, and agree that it starts with learning and understanding, listening and imagining the broad possibilities. I also see a need for a philosophical and spiritual paradigm shift, and a more pressing need to get to the root of power and start to change what we can and what is acceptable in the immediate future. There s low hanging fruit just waiting to be picked, but our current politicians won't do it... that we like minded humans, for whatever our own reasons and approaches might be are wanting to change, we cannot let the current systems and destructive behaviours continue to do more damage... Your examples of finding another wetlands to replace the one destroyed by Walmart is not a solution what is lost is unique, irreplaceable... and soon, there will be no further wetlands to use as offsets... the better solution is to not allow Walmart to develop that place... not when there is already human habits that are idle or can be repurposed... that is where having some power (enough power) to implement such a simple policy solution would be agreeable to many, at least the majority that would be required in a political sense. Corporations don't care, and should be reined in... of course, we need a multifaceted approach, but there are starting points, and we need to start, whilst we look further into the future and deeper into the options to find the longer term changes required. If you ever come to Australia, We need to talk, face to face... time is running out for the unrepresented - every non-human life form on this planet that humans have co-opted for themselves...
The understanding of multidimensionality is crucial to make our concepts of issues more adequate. For example all the hype about many categories being "on a spectrum" falls short and is just another state of misconception as long as a oversimplified model of two dimensional, linear spectra is proposed, while a 4--dimensinal "solar system" of fixpoints in most cases would probably closer describe the kind of spectrum that composes an entity or issue when this allegory is used
yes
common or shared inertial states relative to all else.
Im having huge problems getting my wife on board. We have 2 young kids and a big mortgage in the city. Im a parttime farmer too (weekends) in Ireland and i want to get out of the mortgage, quit my job in the city, and do regenerative agriculture and tourism on the farm (ive converted one cow shed to a very successful airbnb and am converting another). I want to get out of debt now, but she thinks this is crazy talk. Im worried first and foremost about a financial collapse, i think it will be very very soon. But she doesn't buy it. There must be others in this scenario....
Remember to put your children first. I agree with getting out of debt, but don't rush yourself into poverty. I grew up off grid, it is tough. Just move to a smaller house in the suburbs if you need to. Don't rush into farming etc if you have no background in it. Your first priority must be your children. She will be thinking of them
And remember to lead by example, rather than preaching/ telling
I got my husband on board with peak oil and all that, but it took years. Just having interesting conversations and doing what we could together. I hope that helps
OK, great. Thank you, Nate. Thanks for answering my question re: action strategies. Now i understand the reasoning behind your podcast.
The parts about policies and humans who drive them behind the scene is so inspiring! Unfortunately, it is very difficult to imagine such processes in some significant countries like Russia.
Great episode! I’m a huge fan of efforts to reforest man-made deserts on an epic scale like they’re doing in China, Africa and India. I recently came across that practice being used in a way that was less than honest and not in the spirit of healing the Earth. It was a gut punch and I find a genuine ray of hope and optimism knowing there are little elves working in the dark of night fixing things without us knowing about it 👏👀
Wonderful podcast and couldn't agree more. What is illuminating is that this theme is based on my next book, Dukun, the art of healing which is about the management consulting industry. My first book Hammerhead, A collection of short stories has received great reviews where awareness of our predicament is woven into individual perspectives and transformation and not solutions. Cheers and can't wait for the next one.
Yes - our #overshoot predicament has no solutions, only outcomes. #Collapse is inevitable.
OMG. The opening got me. I have been listening to your podcast since two months ago. Absolutely agree with your analysis on the super organism and I thought "I wish I could discuss with you about what I have observed from living. studying, and working in both U.S. and China. Plus, what I have observed from animal tracking in South Africa the past year. I started my bilingual podcast in fall 2021 when I moved from Boston to Shanghai to establish the field of music therapy in healthcare. I'd be interested as I feel often frustrated with how most solutions are not targeting the root causes of the massive challenges we face today. I would be AMAZING to connect and explore this possibility!
Collapse the existing economic system - by detaching, down sizing, down scaling, defunding, divesting and gifting. Not socially acceptable but adaptive in a time of the metacrises. I agree focus on the social system not the superstructure.
That’s precisely the argument that David Holmgren made in his paper, “Collapse on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future,” as well as his most recent book Retrosuburbia.
Along with energy-blind, we are also blind to speciesism. We virtue signal about dogs or dolphins while we enthusiastically fund the creation, subjugation, and murder of 80 billion+ similarly sentient land animals per year. 2 trillion sentient sea animals per year, a growing proportion also factory farmed. The notion of caring for a species should be redirected as caring for the individuals of that species- rather than perpetuating some odd collector mentality. The distinction between species is also arbitrary when we separate from our egotistical view as the curators of life on earth. The life of that chicken, pig, or cow matters just as much to them as the life of a dolphin matters to the dolphin.
Make sure not to miss next weeks Frankly 🙏❤️🌎🦆🐬
my money's on collapse, maybe some kind of Foundation could speed the recovery. No idea of the timeframe though. Not less than 10 years, not more than 100, maybe?
Bio-complexity is currently in "collapse". All civilizations have and will collapse. We are currently in mid stage collapse and it is being masked.
There is no "recovery". Humans are being given a choice: Work together to preserve enough natural complexity for the sake of all other species, which may in turn save some humans, or cease to exist.
Currently ocean expansion will indeed end this civilization assuming it lasts another ~50 years.
Not less than 10 years?? The fragility of our systems means the collapse could be any time.. and not more than 20 for this to hold together, just my thoughts
@@benlatimer9495 like I said, I don’t know, but that would be my guess
The financial part of collapse could be any day now
Some selected quotes from the last page of From AT WORK IN THE RUINS, by Dougald Hind: "... we stand near the beginning of a process that will take a thousand years, because that is how long it will be before the old growth forests have returned, how long it takes for the mother trees to grow back...Modernity has gone around the world making no end of scars. Under its spell, we think the world is trying to kill us, because we have forgotten that dying is part of what we're here for and have come to treat it as an error in need of correction... And we think that we are here to kill the world, that this is how our species shows up, as a destroyer. But this spell is wearing off....We will never know how all of this turns out."
Solutions are out there. It’s time to get moving. The circular economy concept doesn’t clash with existing systems, it can integrate seamlessly and solve the nitrogen cycle, CO2, toxic chemicals, global supply chain fragility, food nutrient density, soil health, and more issues all in one. We can start reversing things right now. If we put a war time effort into switching over in this way we could be 80% to 90% switched over without collapsing our economies within 10 to 15 years. And we can continue to shift our way of thinking about how to improve and refine how we eliminate waste. In a 100% circular economy it doesn’t matter how much we consume because there is no such thing as waste. Everything we consume (weather it is as part of industry or as a consumer) becomes a product in some form. The current concept of waste and rubbish needs to be eliminated and the best way to do that is most likely by heavily promoting and incentivising circular economies. Attached is a community wide (all levels of the community) complex integrated system of the establishment of a circular economy in a first world democratic, capitalist and high consumption materialist society. If Australia can America can. It is possible
Not sure if UA-cam content ever gets geofenced so maybe use a VPN for Australia to access this content if necessary) ua-cam.com/video/9MbjjIuy1wQ/v-deo.htmlsi=NQnCLVeWOzVT15mR
Its amazing that an estimated $184 billion will be spent on AI related costs in 2024. What better things could all this money be used for.
Do you need a "solution" to respond to a problem? It's a semantic issue of whether calling something "a problem" implies the existence of "a solution". It doesn' have to. OK, so we often look at something we dislike, and say, "That's a problem." And we want to make that problem go away. Ideally, at minimal cost. But life is choosing between imperfect options. I think the point is that we have options, so we have to choose between them. But we can also spend some time thinking about whether there are other options. Different people will decide that different options qualify as "solutions", even if they aren't honest about the actual compromises and costs, and who they effect.
In a sense, the whole "problem" is that not everybody gets what they want. But they mostly believe they can get what they want, individually, as long as someone else doesn't get what they want. And that's good enough for many people. Even if it means that they are leaving everyone's fate up to a gamble. But they believe that they are special, lucky, or chosen, and so it's fine. Hubris and arrogance are innate. The only "solution" to them is a sufficiently large culling, by way of natural evolution.
However, evolutionary pressure seems to select for arrogance, not humility, both individually and collectively. At least, in the short and medium term. So, if all the humble and wise peoples get obliterated by the psychopath societies, who will be left after the psychopaths obliterate themselves? It would take a very powerful cultural selection mechanism to prevent such a self-destructive process. That might not be a "solution", but it might be an effective strategy, if we can conceive and execute it, to at least mitigate harms, if not completely prevent them.
Less consumption, especially by the insatiable ownership class. Less private property, more public stewardship. By whatever means necessary.
Нейт, привіт! :)
Вважаю що настав час долучити до дискусії John Michael Greer.
Hey Nate, I didn't know you taught a reality 101 class even though I have watched your podcasts for a while. I read your reality 101 book with DJ, and it has really been a life changing read that I wish I had read 10 years ago. I will have to read it again, because my first read was quick, and it has helped give me some insight on where to focus my time and energy.
I don't think I have the resources to become a carrot farmer or an alpaca farmer, but your book doesn't suggest that anyways.
I could probably ask a million questions on the book, but I will go through that on my own time.
Really wish I could've attended your lectures when I was 18, but this channel for the most part is the same.
please also read Reality Blind Vol 1 (Vol 2 finished but havent had time to do final edit and submit, alas): read.realityblind.world/view/975731937/i/
Yes, please, could you invite guests from China? I worked in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong for twenty years. Unfortunately, Americans do not want to know what people think and do in other countries, and that's dangerous. The project of persisting (good news for ten-year-olds) is a cross-cultural, global project. (OMG! What could that be, some other form of governance?) What do Russia and China think sustainable growth means? People put their faith in leaders appointed by Players of The Great Game 2.0 and have yet to learn what organized groups of committed, self-educated people can accomplish. The USA has had many Tiananmen Square events over the past twenty years, and all of them have been absorbed and domesticated by the Profits/Growth First Empire and its pernicious belief systems. Why is this? Let's talk about it for another twenty years and come what may. "What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be oubiosphere's’s handmaiden an" - Howard T. Odum, Energy, Ecology, & Economics, 1973.
No answers, just asuming thousands of questions; no prepp-mode just an essay to understand, admiting and embrasing uncertity. No big succesfull publications, but underground movements creating themselves underneath, while noisy systems around decay and fall.
Best Lullaby to go to sleep here in the South. Dreaming with a better world is still possible.
Thank you Nate. You're great.
I have come to the impression that „solutions“ will not primarily originate from politics or science or economy. The first step is of course understanding the complexity of the predicament. But after that quite quickly comes the openness to AND practice of great simplification in our personal lifes. That might comprise no more flying, no individual cars (EV sharing is sufficient), basic clothing only, reduced living space by e.g. 50%, basically vegan lifestyle, more care work.
There is a famous line by German poet Erich Kaestner „there is no good unless you do it“. So, fellows in the Global North: let‘s do it. 🍀
It’s worse than we think. We have come up against Mother Nature Herself, according to the interpretation from my meditations.
The solutions not on UA-cam? I can't believe Nate never read my comments.
A wee challenge to the solutions will not be televised: if the solutions are spiritual/ relational maybe they can be. When I hear the ''solutions won't be televised'' I hear the solutions will be decided for the influential class in the interests of their class. As a working class person I think this is a creepy concept with alot of class baggage.
You mis-hear it. To say it won't be televised does not mean a solution will be created as a deliberate action by self interested actors. It means we return to a biologically sustainable self nature and value system. Aka the Way. Not as actions we are aware of or chose but more as sustainability forcing itself onto us because there is no sustainable non sustainable option. It's in the word.
You won't know this change has happened. Your kids won't know. Neither will theirs.
Experienced reality and our genetic natures will simply rejoin after a relatively short separation.
Nate is a type A kind of guy who tries to learn the words and say them but doesn't understand how the Tao aka Way works. Hint: -those who know don't speak, those who speak don't know".
I would love for Yuval Harari to watch this and give his response.
Might we please discuss the physical literacy education over sight please? Why is it, and how is it that we teach or fail to teach transport sports? Recreation that becomes transportation.
The main cause of problems are prior solutions.
I'm worried we seem to caught in a loop of trying to frame the problems. I agree that a wider generalist perspective is needed, but also it needs to be married to something quantitiative. A good reference would be Sir David Mackay's Sustainability without the Hot Air which is free online. Here, he not only frames the problem, but quantifies it to the best of his abilities also, and it is the combination of both together (as Nate does with his discussion on oil usage), that makes the argument powerful.
the problem is civilization it's self is NOT at all "sustainable". One dimension of this is bio-complexity. Any activity outside of Nature, such as harnessed fire; mono & agriculture; pointy sticks always degrades bio-complexity.
This in turn affects the natural carbon cycles and the natural extremely efficient energy consumption of life processes. The more layers of bio-complexity the more each calorie of solar and geo sourced energy is used (an overall cooling effect).
Climate models virtually ignore increasing pressure and 200 thousand years of anthropogenic thermal-mass (including heat & CO2) in the oceans.
The models largely ignore Earth's spin and Gravity as well as mass movement to the tune of ~100Billion tons of material per year from deep underground to the surface.
The ocean water rising will be radioactive as the ~1000 nuclear reactors around the world go supercritical (they can not cool as atmospheric and ocean temps increase) do to increasing thermal mass and pressure.
It takes some 80 years to "shut down".
There simply is no choice.
~90% of ALL anthropogenic thermal-mass since slash & burn and pointy sticks is in the oceans.
Ocean Temperatures for Last 700000 Years ua-cam.com/video/5YKeSI2g3z4/v-deo.html
I think we've reached the point where ecological catastrophe is inevitable and in fact is already beginning. We need to think more about how communities can react to this sort of disaster. Of course, it will affect different communities differently, but aren't there some effects which will be worldwide, for example, breakdown in supply chains. Instead of talking about solutions we should be talking about coping strategies, and how to keep societies from descending into chaos while facing a lot of hardship.
Nate, completely agree, and I share your love of nature as you will find when you finally come to visit the Seeger institute in Hawaii. There are no solutions, but there are steps in the right direction and they can be taken by very very wealthy people through the establishment of what I’m calling private Commonwealth Are institutions to create the intellectual property, train the leaders of the future and love and empathy and stewardship through the creation of natural capital form of genetic material both Kona flora and microbial that can be spread in an effort to transition to a more local lower energy future. We have to be the Arcadians assignment. Michele says we have to have a 250 year viewpoint of the world and understand that spirit of self interestbehoove us to do the work to lay the foundation for generations we in the future. Keep up the good work coming to visit and play with the animals.
John D. Liu would be a great guest to have.
Well Nate, you sounded as if you had fallen into the problem/predicament false dicothomy. But then you deftly sidestepped it. The most notable presenter of this false dicothomy is probably Chris Martenson in his The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment (2011), who said that a solution is a response to a problem that returns the conditions back to the original. A predicament, per Martenson, has no solution, but only adaptation. Of course, as Heraclitus famously said, "One cannot step into the same river twice." This is because conditions change and the problem moves on. You cannot expect to solve the problem and return to original conditions before the problem. As for predicaments, they too are problems AND solutions very often are just adaptation. My third book, Paradigms for Adaptation (2024), recognizes this and treats adaptation as a solution. What Martenson and other authors and presenters do is obfuscate both solutions and adaptation by the false dichotomy. This has the effect of channeling people's energy into despair and a fase narrative which renders them impotent in implementing actions. (Unless you pay money of course.)
You make a good point about false narratives, but when you refuse to talk about solutions, you reinforce the false narrative that there are no solutions. Let me give you a couple of examples.
Problem: the military draft. Solution: mass action that forced the Nixon Administration to end the Draft in 1973. Result: You, Nate Hagens, and most of your audience did not have to adapt to killing innocent villagers in Vietnam or running off to Canada or going to prison.
Problem: poor soil on my farm in Ferndale, Washington. Solution: tillage, cover crops, green manure, compost. Result: I grew a tremendous amount of food that I sold and gave away AND we got a better price for our farm precisely because of the good soil when we sold out and moved to France.
Problem: poor, over-used soil in my half-acre garden in France. Solution: tillage, cover crops, green manure, compost. Result: greater tilth, better crops, more food to give away.
Problem: Quantitave measurement of sustainability. Solution: a metric that crosses all platforms (kilojoules and kilocalories), rigorous data collection and methodology, feedback to the theories and paradigms. Result: I can say definitively that I produce food 25-35 times more efficiently than fossil fuel agriculture through mostly manual labor and just a little bit of gasoline for my tiller.
Yes, we need to adapt to recession, depression and collapse, which I do every day. Every day. My current focus is on landraces and a return to medieval thinking. (Except the humans as icons paradigm so popular with the early Catholic Church. That is just rubbish.) The people around me had parents who were suppressed by the Nazis during WWII, so they have a different attitude which I can learn from too.
Let me be as blunt as I can. Problems = predicaments. Solutions = adaptation. Refusing to craft solutions is just a cop-out. (A useful word from the 1960s.)
💜
Nate, this conceptualization is great. The Rubic's cube lends nicely to how we have to fashion our responses. We need generalists to put together all the pieces to create the sort of "aspirational" response to the challenges we face now and in the future.
I think we need AI to do a lot of the number crunching for our responses to prove our addressment of issues suits our goals. However, we do not want the AI to model for us an ideal society. That must be done by humans that have fully accepted the truths of our future. As you say, folks won't like the measures that are required. Perhaps over time, they will acclimatize to doing with less. Less is more when it comes to lifestyles.
When it comes to the transition, it will be hard for folks to recognize the authority of one or a group of humans. The AI, or rather, the council of AI put forth by the various interested nations, would be the only source of that kind of authority. A rules based system that does not privilege any one group or nation. At the base of which will be the structure we all bring into existence.
One point about planning sticks out to me, which makes your forward thinking so important, is that we can not do what needs doing without rainbows and unicorns. We will make great progress following a storm or calamity that unfolds. Predicting those events is mostly impossible. The big game changes will be sudden and lasting. Adaptive as you say. A feature of our future is anticipation of events beyond our control or, perhaps, comprehension. Rainbows will happen!
Unicorns are the physical manifestations of our intellect. We will discover things that are game changers. As we put more resources towards science and R&D, we will create new avenues to address particular issues we have. The faster we ramp up on science and technology, the better. We need herds of Unicorns to set new pathways to the future we want.
What do we want? 😊
Perhaps a good topic for a show...
If you can find him, talk to Kevin Jensen regarding topics on China. If I can find him, I'll try to have him make contact.
We have become on average in the "developed world" a reactive species --- only accepting change in our lives to changes which we believe directly affect us personally. What will drive an entire population to change is a reaction to a national or globally destructive discontinuity in the current socio-economic trajectory. My hope is that it is a positive social change and not a negative ego-based one.
Can we safely say that no one has a better understanding and can guide us to a better understanding of the human predicament ("metacrisis") than Nate?
Maybe Schmachtenberger. .... but articulating the problem and leading solutions are also two different things
There are lots of useful people out there. They all bring valuable points to the discussion
@@roo3515 Didn't Nate make the point that he doesn't have the solutions? And the point of this "Frankly" is that solutions that have been given so far have not been real solutions.
See his interview with William Reese.
To "learn along" with me, you'd need to catch up on 75 years of insights re food and transport. For food, exploring the life in and produce from forest gardens that could as well exist where lawns are now would be a start. Transport is far more complex, its ranking as the sector emitting the most GHG's over time eclipsed on closer examination by its other devastating effects on human and ecological health.
Nate, we will need all of the communications tools at our disposal in order to create a disseminated narrative. A consciousness, raising experience that will be necessary to address the medical crisis at all. There are young people out there, who don’t have a positive narrative therefore they are protesting against fossil fuel energy, but through the use of the Internet, while it’s still exists as a tool for aggregating knowledge, working on the same problem in multiple locations and parallel to accelerate solutions sets not silver bullets, but ways in which to view the problem in a site, specific manner, and ways to congealed a desperate global community into the realization that we are all in this together, in this one large canoe we can perhaps build the Bible calls arcs to preserve what we have created in the civilization such that those who come in the future have a more solid foundation to work with. Yes, we are making a lot of mistakes but there are things that we should try to preserve for the next civilization.
Yah, I do worry about the jaguars in Argentina... I saw a documentary about the founder of I think North Face clothing and now his widow their purchase of land and efforts to bring the locals on board. I mean, now w Millei in charge. His determination to abolish pertinent agencies that woikd partner to protect the habitat 😢
Point 6 is the most important point. And it's the point which will drive us into apocalypse.
Nate should talk with a guy named James Howard Knustler from upstate New York
He knows him
MIT's En-ROADS offers insight about climate policies. It uses IPCC AIM models and is a free web based graphical interface. One thing it shows is that a steadily rising carbon fee on fossil fuel production and imports that increases $10 per year through 2100 gets us halfway to our 1.5 goal. Carbon Fee and Dividend with a CBAM makes it viable, durable, and has many co-benefits.
Too little too late. That time scale needs to be over a decade, given the faulty presumptions and missing feedback loops in the modelling.
Hey John. A more politically viable climate policy looks like the Global Carbon Reward. Closer to a subsidy than a tax. And an “carbon asset “. Please have a close look at it.
Paris Agreement: "To limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest...".
Carbon Emissions: Showing no signs of slowing through 2024.
Can we all agree that climate policies aren't worth the ePaper displays they're being displayed on?
I was a committed participant in the early years of CCL. I applaud your continuing efforts but six years of butting my head against the walls in congressional office buildings burned me out. Since I dropped out in 2015, the political environment on this issue has not improved. Are you aware that the last 12 months exceeded the 1.5 C target? Also, global warming is accelerating. Jim Hansen sees the globe warming at 0.3 degrees per decade, up from 0.2 per decade 1980-2014. Please tell me I'm wrong.
Art and John. I was (and still am) pro carbon tax but there’s very little chance of them getting in place unless there’s a reasonable option to carbon consumption. And I mean a real practical economic choice. Make the right choice rewarded (as per Delton Chen) then (after) make more expensive the bad choice. Do you see another way out?
Loved the bivalve analogy
Have you ever noticed how management makes things worse? Not only in your job, but also, say, in the forest, where fire management has increased fire frequency and severity? Or how about where 'solutions' in management of a pest involved bringing in predator that made things worse?
Complexity and management. Managing complexity. There is a cane toad for every proposed solution, I'm afraid. Maybe we should do as Alan Watts said, and stop trying to manage everything.
Thanks for sharing that. Meddling and managing is what we do! I have little use for the woman in the tank-like SUV telling me to leash my dog.
Redefine the current list of human rights.
Well actually it's hard I think to make local current political and social problems fit in our minds with the bigger picture of the predicament you talk about beyond trying to consume less energy oneself.
the title is another way of saying "the solution is whatever will happen" (not to say that you are wrong)
ONE PROBLEM, inadequate understanding. ONE SOLUTION, adequate understanding. Humans don't have access to adequate understanding because this level of reasoning methodologies is missing, let alone existing in a form that's effectively teachable so populations are enabled to manage necessary fixes.
Nate, I really appreciate your perspective and the project underway with the Great Simplification, but if there was ever a release that made me skeptical of the whole project, it was this one. If we in the western world/global north cant achieve on even the simplest goals/baby steps towards mitigating the unfolding disaster, how are we to convince the entire world to accept the Simplification? It makes me fear we are headed for the hardest possible break, not the bend.
I understand that you don't have the 'solutions', no one does yet. But this Frankly ultimately feels like a 'shrug' with a dream that while everything is crashing down around us we will come out of the other side with Libraries of Healing where you can bring your homegrown tomatoes to barter for a yoga lesson.
It just seems to me, (and I think to many others), that the "shifting baselines" have to likely get much worse, before appropriately drastic actions emerge, in a desperate struggle for survival. It may likely be too late, (at that point), but nature itself has to light a fire under our collective asses, for us to stop looking like dumb dinosaurs.
Our greatest achilles heel is food production. So how bad, worldwide, does that need to get, under worsening conditions, and when? Is anyone out there giving it the research, and speculation, it deserves??
diffusion of (discourse) innovation
I have a feeling that a more process-focused approach, rather than an entity-driven one would end up simplifying the situation. Rather than think about individuals, values and policies, we could lean into collective meaning-making, dialectics and governance protocols. These systems we use every day frame our thinking, creating mental patterns that represent division, conflict and dualism.
As you point out, we will never all agree on what is right, but we might have some success in agreeing on the way that we will discuss it. Then you can fall back on these grounding principles without needing to feel that you are giving up your identity, beliefs or opinions.
That’s superstructure structure and infrastructure. Marvin Harris Cultural Materialism
@@thegreatsimplification Thanks for the pointer, I'll investigate further. My ambition, I think, is in a more radical interpretation, following Niklas Luhmann's Social Systems Theory, which I think does an amazing job of explaining a pluralistic world. Long story short, he describes the social communication system as autopoietic, with coupling to the biological and mental systems. He imagines a world defined by functional differentiation - a bit abstract, but worth it :)
I am scared
Me too. Millions of us are, probably tens of millions. And the good news is that fear makes us pay attention and consider how we might change.
Don’t be. We’re all going to die.
@andybaldman That's kind of glib. Of course we're all going to die. The question is how - By old age? By heatdeath? By starvation?
It makes a difference, especially because we are already baked in +2.5C above preindustrial and our GHGs are still rising and accelerating, we lose most predictable Large scale organized agriculture between +2.5C and +3.0C.
Scared,we should be terrified!
I am happy that a lot of people will leave soon❤
Solutions are liquid, when everyone seems to ask for concrete.
The meaning crisis is a language crisis of provocative semantics and spells.
The news would be to ask, were you there?
The reportage would be to ask, what is journalism’s time involved v consumer sensation for selling drama?
Public office, is it on social media?
Toxicity is hidden in its efficiency.
Where can I find the Reality 101 book, would love to read it. Thx
Florida is a perfect example of what not to do to the an Ecosystem
Nate and his fine class of thinkers need to brainstorm and outline for the future where humans must cluster around hand-picked coal reserves - until no more hand-picked coal.
The maximum length and width of the cluster (Tainter's queue of Ants) - are the maximum boundary of the Superorganism talked about at length in recent years - not any longer or wider.
There is no such thing named Superorganism without the 17 million barrels of finite crude oil go today from war-torn nations in the Middle East and other regions to China daily - mainly looted.
To walk from Basra to Baghdad in Iraq, it takes one a week.
How long it would take to walk from East to West cost of the US?
How long it would take sailing from California to China or back rowing?
The ongoing and dramatic political events in the US are the golden opportunity today for the US to kiss the rest of the world goodbye, while there are still vast Energy resources in America.
The US should urgently bring the age of Christopher Columbus to a close, in respect to the laws of nature.
There are no more forests, oil, coal, n. gas in America to share with the rest of the world - the resources that was better to be kept for 3 thousand years - thank you all very much.
Nate and his fine class of thinkers need to start and call for the badly needed and long due Independence of the US and the Americas from the rest of the world.
"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).
It could be a conscious contraction
Perhaps it should be called solutioning instead of solutions. An ever active verb and not a collection of nouns. ❤
Is it really that they can't be named, or that you're too interested in your own safety, convenience, and audience capture to name them?
The future time is probably gonna be the "more unstable state"
ecologically maybe, but not economically -we don't get much more economically unstable than we are now - ever.
Anyone know any pro social prepping channels?
A search mostly returns traditional “doomsday” prepper stuff or lectures on pro social behaviour.
Provident Prepper, Rose Red Homestead and Self Sufficient Me.
Plans are maps for action. Action is incapable of fulfilling every nuance of any map. What matters is understanding the differences and the relevance involved. Equity is an ideal, reality always has something to say about it.
talk with jason hickel,nate❤
I don't know what I care about anymore. I'm afraid to.
No Nate, according to some not the passengers who took down the ........
Wetlands are great for biodiversity. But... are not good for the climate. They do absorb CO2 that is true. But turn some of it to methane. The heating they produce due to the methane is typically twice that of the cooling they produce due to the CO2 they absorb.
Is the global geo-political system literally more complex than alternatives? What if it is merely more monolithic and rigid? It should be possible to have more complexity with less rigidity and fragility. Human society does not have to face simplification, empirically, by every measure. We can have distributed power and social structures that give rise to higher overall complexity, while still being more stable and more sustainable, as long as they incorporate circular models of consumption, instead of runaway linear models. We don't need less complexity. We need more autonomy at small and medium scales. We more autonomous regional and community governements, and more small businesses and other organizations, which answer to those smaller governments, instead of runaway geopolitical power blocs and multinational monopolistic mega-corporations who answer to nobody. The looser relationships between smaller actors can allow the formation of emergent complexity that is adaptable and flexible. More overall complexity, less overall vulnerability.
@7:10, regarding the siren song of conspicuous consumption... I'm not so sure the lure of that melody is not MORE tempting to a population of people for whom conspicuous consumption offers a far more potent material advantage than it does to people in our society.
Nate, Have you ever invited Clive Spash on your program?
"YEEEEHAWWW" - Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.
Yes they are called Eco-Socialism and there is actually a beautiful book called. Half-Earth Socialism. Check it out and invite the author Troy Vettese