Collective Co-existence, Climate Apocalypse, and a Nature-Relational Way Forward

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.