Humanize the Earth!

Upward Spiral

A couple of week back, I wrote about seeing the Upward Spiral by Paul Krafel I’m showing it again at my place this Thursday at 8pm, if you’d like to see it. Or let me know and I can send one to you (or buy it yourself from Paul’s website). In a conversation about the film at omidyar.net, Arthur Brock made this comment that’s good enough I’m reproducing it here whole:

Paul seems to be asking himself “If the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is right, and energy winds down to less and less usable forms… How is it possible that life exists? From a planet of rock & water, how is it that more and more complex forms of life have evolved? Isn’t that against the rules?” 

His answer: “Sunlight.”

It was really a planet of rock, water & sunlight. The second law provides for particular energy levels to go up, when they’re harnessing a greater flow of energy going down. That’s how we drive our car to the top of a hill (creating greater potential energy for it to roll down again). We harness millions of little explosions of gas to turn the engine and push it up the hill. More energy is expended in the little explosions than the car gets by rolling down the hill.

Life has evolved by taking the energy of sunlight and converting to the energy of life. Now it happens that life needs some other important ingredients as well, such as water.

The thing that is most striking to me, is how EVERYTHING WE USE TO SURVIVE is built on the 2nd solution. For millions of years, life has been making deposits of energy into earth’s bank account and we’re all trust fund babies that are cashing in big time!

All of human civilization is built on harvesting natural resources - schools of fish, hillsides of lumber, fields of rich soil, etc. Our whole modern economy is fueled by sunlight energy that life stored up - oil, coal, biodiesel…

Now taking his very simple principles of flow - if inflow is greater than outflow, things accumulate; outflow greater than inflow, the level diminishes. Are we consuming these resources faster than are being replenished? Is outflow greater than inflow?

Duh.

In just the past few hundred years since the industrial revolution we have managed to spend much of the principle that it took millions of years for life to build up in earth’s energetic bank.

So how do we shift that balance? When our politicians and businesses want to continue to over-fish our oceans, clear-cut our forests, deplete our soil, poison our rivers, and pollute our air… When the very design of our economic system requires constant growth and the core building materials for this growth is MORE natural resources.

He points out how difficult it is to block the flow once its power has become concentrated in the gullies, but it is possible to make small changes to stop it from getting there at all then natural forces team up with you to help fill in those gullies.

My observation is that money is one of the tools for concentrating power. The very design by which it’s issued ensure this. It allows for just enough exceptions to the rule for us to carry that banner of the American Dream of making it to the top.

One of the most critical leverage points is taking back our ability to facilitate our own flows, our own exchanges, our own sharing of resources. Once our interactions are mediated through dollars we’re already in the gully.

For example, today we’re struggling with issues around being able to afford elder care and child care. These are new problems because we used to address these things inside of shared responsibilities in the community. Now that we have to PAY for child care and PAY for elder care, it puts a huge drain on most people’s ability to earn enough to simultaneously meet their own basic needs. And of course, staying home to take care of kids or grandparents doesn’t register as value in our economy. It only counts if you PAY for it.

Similarly, if we started caring about being efficient with our resources and decided that 40 houses in a neighborhood don’t actually need 40 different lawn mowers, but could get along sharing one (if we handle the scheduling problem for them). From the perspective of resource and energy consumption this is a 40-fold improvement. But it would be disastrous for our economy, because our economy relies on those 40 purchases and the planned obsolesce of them needing a new one every few years when it becomes more expensive to pay for 2 hours of skilled labor to repair/tune it up than to buy a new one (with the 20 hours of sweat shop labor, transport across the ocean, pillaging of metals, spewing of toxins in making the plastics, etc.).

If we can’t create our own means to do something as simple as share a lawn mower and have to mediate it all through the market economy, what are the chances of shifting this balance?

To me, that’s exactly where building the tools for the gift economy come into play. The gift economy is primarily about the 2nd solution – investing for our collective (rather than individual) benefit. Open Source software is a brilliant example of how this approach can even out-compete the 1st solution approaches.

If you’re interested in digging deeper, you can listen to a discussion / presentation about gift economies from the BALLE pre-pre-conference in Burlington, VT. (I recommend the shorter version where I cut about 45 minutes of the discussion which wandered off topic.)