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CONTENTS
Issue 6
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People
Involved with the WCP: Dennis Meadows is one of the principal co-authors of Limits to Growth (along with Donella Meadows and Jorgen Randers) and the two follow up books, including the thirty year update that just came out a month or two ago. He gave a talk at the Wilson Center for International Understanding on 14 October in Washington, D.C. and I had the good fortune of attending. While he is not directly involved in WCP, certainly the work he has done with my late Professor Donella Meadows of Dartmouth College have given impulse to the need for worldview change and the sustainability movement. Limits to Growth and subsequent work are based on the World 3 computer model which models resources and population on a global scale to generate scenarios and recommendations for policy to avoid the worst scenario. His principal message that drives many of us forward has not changed over 30 years. If civilization continues on its consumptive course, the economic system will re-adjust its population growth and economic output through collapse during this century. Since the tumult caused by the book in 1972 the indicators haven’t changed much. Population and economic growth continue to climb. Now carbon in atmosphere continues to climb (though this was not modeled for the first book). He discussed how many people criticized the book and its sponsor, The Club of Rome, as being wrong since we haven’t run out of resources yet as many people interpreted the book as predicting. Aside from the strategy of presenting scenarios with well documented assumptions (the latest book comes with a CD so that you can run the scenarios right on your home computer), the book never predicted that we would run out of resources (least of all oil which was never even modeled). Actually he points out that collapse will come about when the costs of economic output grow so much that the system cannot longer sustain that growth. He gives the example that as high grade quality materials get used up, we can use lower grade which costs more to purify and use. While technology can shift the timing and costs, it cannot change this relationship. Thus as the costs go up eventually the system won’t withstand it and it will collapse as so many systems can do. He noted fisheries as one of the most visible examples of how fast a system can flop. There is evidence that abrupt climate change has occurred on the order of a few years, not so quick as in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but much faster than nay-sayers attest it would occur. Meadows pointed out that in 1972 society still had the luxury of talking about sustainable development because humans were using up resources at a pace beneath that which the Earth can replenish them. But in 1980 humanity crossed the threshold when it was consuming resources faster than the Earth could replenish them. Today humanity uses the equivalent of more than 4 Earths in terms of natural productivity according to Global Footprint calculations. The difference of course means humans are eating away at the Earth’s capacity to renew, thus reducing its carrying capacity. This is characteristic of pre-overshoot and collapse scenarios. Now, he says, we can no longer talk of sustainable development, we must talk about reduction of consumption. We can only think about sustainability when we are below carrying capacity. But the speed at which a system can collapse is also a source of hope (and has been for me for several years). As Meadows recalled when he worked in Europe in the 1980s, Germans said that the Soviets would NEVER pull out. Yet only a few years later they were gone (I’m reminded as well at how fast the Fellowship of the Ring overthrew Sauron of Mordor). Change can happen quickly as the work of exponential forces become apparent. Who knows what kind of exponential forces are at work now? Maybe it will result in collapse or maybe it will result in a rapid worldview change before its too late. What I’m Reading:
What Is Enlightenment? and Spiral Dynamics I have recently been reading articles from the magazine What Is Enlightenment? This magazine strives to map out possibilities and trends in human spiritual transformation. One particular concept of interest covered in the article was about Spiral Dynamics. Based on the work of Dr. Clare Graves, Don Beck has been developing this theory he dubs “The Theory that Explains Everything.” Basically the theory says that over time humanity has been evolving through successive value systems relating to consciousness, or memes. Each step in the evolution decreases exponentially in time. As each new system arises, new human behavior and thought expressions emerge, everwhile the previous systems continue to be present. The system can be used to describe both societies as well as individuals. A person’s individual transformation moves along hese tiers in the same way as societies. But why “spiral?” Don Beck says, “Spirals are a dynamic expression of natural and cosmic forces, a ‘dominant universal fractal’ evident in everything from our DNA code to the spiraling galaxies that inhabit the universe. Spiral Dynamics posits that the evolution of human consciousness can best be represented in this way: by a dynamic, upward spiraling structure that charts our evolving thinking systems as they arc higher and higher through levels of increasing complextiy. Certainly, human consciousness has dramtically increased in complextiy over the span of millennia, as evidenced by our fast-paced highly interactive world. But despite any illusions I may have about how far up the spiral I am in my technology-rich postmodern life, according to Spiral Dynamics, we human beings are only just emerging from the first great episode of human history — a 100,000-year epoch defined fundamentally by survivalism: the Spiral’s ‘first tier.’” For an interactive flash introduction to Spiral Dynamics designed by What Is Enlightenment? click this graphic.
If you want a downloadable summary graphic (224 kb jpeg), click the following.
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Dennis Meadows
Don Beck
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“Cosmopathy” is the pathology of worldviews, whereby a person suffers from competing worldviews or the need to change worldviews because the gap between the worldview’s beliefs and perceived reality cause a breakdown, a condition which the Worldview Change Project aims to help. Cosmopathy is distributed to those interested in the progress of the WCP. Your name can be added or deleted by submitting a request to the author.
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April 7, 2005
