Collective Co-existence, Climate Apocalypse, and a Nature-Relational Way Forward
Citation
Kahn, P. H., Jr., Sabine, S., & Gray, C. E. (2024). “Chapter 6 Collective Co-existence, Climate Apocalypse, and a Nature-Relational Way Forward”. In Postcollectivity. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004694880_008
The authors open by looking about 15 years into the future. Close enough to imagine realistically, but far enough to see how much change could occur. In the past, people might have looked a century ahead, but today the world is changing so quickly that even 15 years can bring massive transformations.
To understand this speed of change (exponential functions), think of what happens if you double a dollar every day: after a week, you have $64. After a month, you’d have more than a billion dollars. That’s how exponential functions works — starting slowly, then skyrocketing.
Human progress has followed a similar pattern. Over 1.5 million years ago, early humans learned to use fire. About 50,000 years ago, humans began creating tools and art. About 10,000 years ago, agriculture began, followed by metalworking, the invention of the plow, and the spinning wheel. Then came the Western Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. But the most dramatic leaps have happened in just the past 50 years, especially with digital technology.
In 1965, computer engineer Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a microchip doubled roughly every two years. This rapid technological progress has also brought fast social change. The telephone took 70 years to become common; the cellphone did it in just seven. Now, social media on smartphones spreads information instantly, but it also creates echo chambers, spreads misinformation, divides communities, and threatens democracy.
Fifteen years from now, the outlook for our planet is concerning. Around the world, people are already feeling the damaging effects of climate change, including longer droughts, water shortages, rising seas, wildfires, crop failures, and extreme weather events, that used to happen only once in a century.
It’s easy to think the future will just bring more of the same, but the truth is more alarming. Climate change doesn’t progress in a straight line; it speeds up and intensifies. Scientists warn that as these events interact with one another, their combined effects could grow much faster and more severe than most expect …
Abstract
We begin by looking into the future – not too far in years to be too far-fetched, but far enough to point to a critical time in terms of our collective coexistence. 15 years ahead. If we were writing this in the early 1900’s, our time frame would have been around 100 years. Our timeframe is shorter now because in technological terms the rate of change has been increasing exponentially. As an example of an exponential function, take a dollar and double it every day. After a week you have 64 dollars, which is a nice amount but nothing too surprising. But after a month you have over a billion dollars. That is part of the experience of exponential functions: They can start out looking rather modest, if not linear, but at some point shoot skyward, at which point it is difficult for the human mind to comprehend even the next iteration. So, it has been in our evolutionary history (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2008). About 1.6 million years ago, Homo erectus is believed to have first controlled fire. About 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens deliberately used bone, ivory, and shell objects to shape projectile points, needles, and awls, and engaged in cave painting and sculpture. About 10,000 years ago, with the rise of agriculture, rudimentary tools were invented to domesticate land and animals. By about the middle of the third millennium B.C., blast furnaces in China were invented to cast iron. By the sixth century there was the iron plow, and by the thirteenth century the spinning wheel. The Western Renaissance emerged in the 1700’s, and then after that was the Industrial Revolution. The greatest amount of technological innovation in the shortest period of time has occurred in the last fifty years, and even in the last twenty years, especially with those technologies that build on digital computation. Back in 1965, Moore’s (2006) law was that the number of transistors in microchips doubles about every two years, which pretty much continues to this day. In turn, exponential technological growth has spurred equally fast social transformations. It took 70 years for the landline telephone to become pervasive in modern societies and transform modes of communication. It took seven years for the cellphone to do the same thing; and now, more recently, for social media by means of smartphones to create “information echo chambers” where falsehoods are amplified, social life splintered, and democracies threatened.
What we see 15 years from now is not pretty. Currently, most of the world has been experiencing the destructive effects of climate change, such as droughts, water scarcity, rising sea levels, wildfires, famines, once-in- a-hundred year (or thousand year) extreme weather events, and so on. We could say: “well, in 15 years there’s going to be more of this,” which is true. But what do we mean by “more?” Again, most of us think linearly not exponentially, which especially comes into play when trying to apprehend the predictions from climate scientists, and the interactions of major climate events …