It’s more than just technology solutions to climate change – we a different approach to the metacrisis/polycrisis/nested crises
In my experience in the US as engineer in the clean energy space, sustainability discourse has progressed over the years, but tends to be fixated on just climate change – more specifically ‘decarbonization’ – and solving it new “high-tech” technology.
What about all the other environmental/ecological, economic, and justice challenges? Can we say this siloed divide & conquer approach we’ve been using is working when CO2 levels keep climbing, biodiversity continues to shrink, and we consume fresh water at unsustainable rates?
The Planetary Boundaries
The Planetary Boundaries shows not just climate change but nine important health categories for Earth. Six of the nine are exceeded, some to extreme degrees.
Credit: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Based on Richardson et al.
2023, Steffen et al. 2015, and Rockström et al. 2009
The Circularity Gap, Ecological Footprint and the Human Development Index
The Circularity Gap Report 2023 also highlights the scope of the challenge to bring our
current societies into alignment with what the planet can provide.
On the Ecological Footprint per capita, for a Shift country to go from 5 to 1 is an 80% reduction! The structure of current arrangement with the Earth (take-make-waste) means to achieve an 80% reduction in ecological footprint needs an 80% reduction in lifestyle. It’s imperative to break that linkage in order to find groundswell cultural support for ecological footprint reduction. This sounds like a tall order, and it is, but the current system does not work for the majority of people, and I think people are searching for a more meaningful & equitable system. We’re searching for meaning in more, more, more and it’s not there. There may or may not be meaning in less directly, but in all this more, in all the noise that’s creating in pursuit of more, we’re obscuring our own way to meaning.
Where are technologies taking us?
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
–Lao Tzu
I look at the Planetary Boundaries and Ecological Footprint, and ask:
Can this market and technology engine get you where you want to go?
Does the technology-first/forward approach usually/always result in the Hydra problem: solving one problem creates a few more? The Systems Thinking adage is “Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems.”
Bayo Akomolafe
Bayo Akomolafe in the DRRS MOOC used the analogy of the ant mill / death spiral: ants following their pheromone trail do not realize the trail has become a circle so the ants get caught in that loop and march themselves to death. Marching fast or slow doesn’t matter, they’ll die either way. Break the loop or stop are the only ways out. Bayo’s cracks and Godzilla metaphors speak to the need to break the loop. Our eco-disconnected economics and moneys are our death spiral. They deceive us into a structure that is killing us and the planet.