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Professor Murphy good to see you honey so uh we are uh old friends and colleagues and earlier this week you posted an excellent essay The Simple
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Story of civilization I was so struck by its Simplicity and brevity and hard-hitting points that I gave you a call and thought we could have a conversation for you to unpack it
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yep glad to do that okay [Music] so in your do the math essay earlier this week you compared the span of human
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life on Earth to a single human lifetime to bring perspective on how much of an anomaly our current culture and economy are can you walk us through that analogy in brief
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sure so what we're going to do is take 75 years as a typical lifespan plus or minus and map that onto the two and a half to three million years that humans have been on this planet
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so for a little bit of context that itself is only one five thousandth of the age of the universe so this is still a narrow time slice in the big scheme of things but all the same
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in the 75-year span of human habitation on the planet the first 70 years are various species of humans evolving and coexisting on the planet mostly in a sustainable way the last five years of
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the 75 years is the age of homo sapiens um you know somewhat recent but we're getting used to it it's uh 200 000 years and mostly in a sustainable way it's the last 15 weeks that we would call the age
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of civilization that's 10 000 years where we've had agriculture settlements leading the cities in the last four days just four days in the 75-year lifespan it's the age of
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science that's 400 years for us then the last 36 hours a day and a half the age of fossil fuels that's 150 years of significant use but really that's ramped up so that the last
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50 years are the most important um and that comes the last little time slice which is the last 12 hours of the 75 year lifetime has been an age of a rapid Global ecological devastation
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and it's not so you know not coincidental that that overlaps with the you know heaviest use of energy by our society so I've seen this over the years presented many different ways on on videos online I thought this was a
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clever way of doing it so now let's consider going a step further what might this look like if our 75 year old friend or relative went through a similar progression
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yeah I think that really helps to bring it into focus and you know the first 70 years in this case not much happens in this lifetime it's kind of like a boring Uncle a very kind and enjoyable Uncle
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you know we don't want to diminish that that life but uh you know not not too exciting then another five years in the homo sapiens mode it's homo sapiens turn to be boring uh not a whole lot happens
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next five years it's just in the last 15 weeks you notice your relative doing something completely different different Behavior different values different relationships different personality uh
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it leaves you wondering you know who is this person even and it's as if they've adopted a new hobby or even maybe a gateway drug and they just you know they've just transformed and so I think
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about it is imagine you're briefing your your cousin you're talking to them on the phone after just a horrendous day dealing with your relative who's kind of gone off the rails and and you say get
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this four days ago this new hobby of his he took a whole new level and things just really kind of took off and what I'm talking about here is adopting science um which we can think of maybe as
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stepping away from the gateway drug into something like cocaine it really amps things up okay and then the conversation and then early yesterday he found the most dangerous substances of all and now he thinks he had
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superpowers he thinks he can fly out of Windows um and I'm talking about fossil fuels which in this drug analogy might be something like PCP where you do imagine you can jump out of a window and fly
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um and then you know since this morning he's destroyed most of his environment and this uncontrolled accelerating Rampage well the first question that comes to mind is will we make 80 or even will we
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make 76 but let me keep unpacking your paper so so that's what we're doing right now we're on a as a species we're on a destructive Rampage I thought we were just living Our Lives
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well to an individual life it does seem like that but if you really look at the data and look at what our ecosystem is doing we've lost about 85 percent of our
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primary forest and it's just gone that's a lot of important habitat for a lot of animals then you know 70 about 70 percent average decline in vertebrate
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populations since I was born in 1970 so that 50-year roughly time span a huge decline in animal populations at this point wild mammals are now just four
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percent of the mammal Mass on Earth most of it's humans in our livestock and so they're really being squeezed that's two percent in on land and two percent in oceans so they've really been kind of squeezed down
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it's very alarming it's happening in the blink of an eye on on this time scale that's the last 12 hours of this 75-year life but this was happening
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the prior 12 hours as well it just wasn't as as uh globally huge in its impact and it was happening 24 hours ago too yeah we just yeah it's absolutely been
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ramping up but it's all part of this new hobby so it's all you know within the last 15 weeks that we've seen dramatic changes so in your essay you also challenge your readers to question
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whether the very foundations of our civilization are wrong can you justify such a bold statement why go that far at that extreme
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yeah good question and I think this is an extreme moment I mean uh on this from this perspective you see that things have really uh kind of unraveled quickly and it really all does
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trace back to the start of our what we call civilization our civilization meaning Agriculture and then settlements and cities so prior to that we lived in approximate equilibrium with ecosystems
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and you know occasionally we might cause some extinctions but generally we were playing by the same rules as all other animals played by I mean we were part of that evolutionary set but once we took
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control of our food production a lot of things happen so suddenly we had Surplus we needed ways to store that Surplus we had settlements to stay close to our stores and the land that was producing our food we started
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accumulating material possessions that led to hierarchies and systems to kind of preserve that status standing armies to protect those stores from
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yourselves and other nearby populations it led to property rights this crazy idea that we can own the land and the property rights together with accumulation of material possessions led
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to uh want a desire to continue that ownership into further generations and that led to patriarchy scheme which by the way got tied into our our religious
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schemes and became monotheism so you have this great paternal um sort of overseer and then you know we had subjugation of humans and animals to do work for us led to all kinds of
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ecological problems from Soul soil degradation habitat destruction um Extinction rates far above normal and all the rest all the things that we see today just sort of a connect the dot straight
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from this idea of Agriculture so not now that we've kind of dialed up this rate of Destruction it's more obvious what the pattern is showing us which is that this initial impulse to control nature
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was itself kind of a flawed um premise and consequential very consequential so since then we've actually been doubling down on that idea of control so that we keep trying
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to control more and more but it's never going to be enough we're never going to be full Masters and so it's going to fail it's guaranteed to fail and unfortunately this system that we've constructed is so
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huge that the failure is is almost by definition going to be spectacular and awful and lamentable because we just built it up so large foreign
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So when you say the failure will be spectacular are you saying that uh as a physicist or um just as a human who's learned all these facts and are observing it
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yeah and sorry there's a deer walking through the snow so very much uh yeah you're entitled to a pause yeah so that's what it's all about after all so yeah I mean um
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it's the the spectacular failure is just it saddens me that we can be as destructive to ourselves and to Nature especially to Nature
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um all for the wrong reasons and offer something that never could have worked and could have been avoided sooner before we built it up to this Colossus
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so at its core then Tom what is fundamentally wrong with civilization yeah so I think it's really kind of the philosophy behind our civilization is not even remotely
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predicated on principles of sustainability and just to be clear something that's not designed to be sustainable is almost certainly unsustainable you'd have to get you know crazy lucky for
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something that wasn't designed to be sustainable to you know accidentally be sustainable our civilization is very clearly not uh sustainable and I like to think of
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flight analogies here so a rock is not designed for sustainable flight it can't continue level on definite flight it can however be launched to soar upward for a while but inevitably
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it's going to come back down toward Earth and I think our civilization is very similar because it's also like a rock not founded on principles of sustainability
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it can soar upward for a time as we're doing now as we spin Earth's inheritance it's a big spending spree and it's great fun for the paying passengers and lots of
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satisfaction but it's temporary and patiently waiting is Earth and what I would call Planetary limits so that's going to find us before long
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so is this our fault is this an immutable flaw in humans I I used to kind of think so um but I've come around to thinking no it's not really it's a flaw in the
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systems that we've adopted and we've done so not fully conscious of their long-term ramifications um so I don't blame us for going down this road but the fact is we have lived
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sustainably before for much longer stretches of time and our recent binge that we call civilization is the anomaly so we ought to be trying new ways of living on this planet that are
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sustainable it doesn't mean necessarily A reversion to other ways that we're sustainable it just it's a proof of concept that our current way is not the only way and other ways can go for millions of years
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there might be other constructs that can do the same well it depends on how you define civilization because couldn't we hold on to civilization and maintain it as a much
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reduced level for a very long time kind of like a steady state yeah that's a very appealing notion that you know hold on we don't have to ditch the whole thing maybe we've got enough to work with here and we can just
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eliminate the bad stuff and I can't say for sure whether we could hold on to civilization for long term but the fact is no one can uh and so it's important to recognize
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that the concerns I have kind of come from a quantitative origin in that you know we've blown through a large fraction of our inheritance in the time scale of something like a century and to to be clear it wasn't our
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inheritance we we're just the ones that found it and dug it up but go on that is true that's something that I still fall into uh is this possessive uh uh Instinct um but yeah we had this non-renewable
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inheritance that we did stumble onto and and claimed for our own and spent a large fraction of that in the course of a century or so and if we greatly reduced our footprint
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say a tenth of our current scale which by the way um you know maybe a billion people or so but living at Global standards which is already much lower standard of energy
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and resources and materials than we're used to in the US for instance um so even if we did that maybe we get a thousand years or a few thousand years out of it and if we did the most
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aggressive recycling campaign and had more materials than I'm giving credit for um maybe 10 000 but that's still short I mean on this 75-year span that's still
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just weeks or months and it also says that we're perhaps nearer the end than the beginning of what we call civilization and this thing we have at the end of the day it's still fundamentally
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unsustainable it was wasn't built on sustainable principles and so you could stretch it but it's not built for the long term it can't really do that the most energy efficient invention to
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my knowledge of mankind is the bicycle because it combines technology and materials with human effort to get a person from A to B uh in the most using
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the least amount of energy versus a car or a plane or a tractor or whatever can't we use the remaining fossil and mineral Seed corn in combination with
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technology to find and fix the problem that we face well you know I don't want to be someone who rules out anything but I do see that the problem that we're having today or
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the set of problems the predicament is is due to technology at some level it's the illusion that we can completely control nature and I'll just point out again it's not working so well
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um it never really has we've only really mounted problems at the global scale and we just sort of blindly keep keep trucking on and and ignore them sweep them under the rug but we'll never
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really fully Master we'll never own nature and the sooner we stop thinking that we can the better and stop floundering in our attempt to to accomplish that so I don't see it really as a matter of
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solving problems or mastering nature of exerting our will and our efforts of defining what nature should be according to our Notions uh dictating what it should be that's all kind of a hubristic
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way that's not working and can't work at some level so I I really think we ought to we ought to spend more time considering not technology as a an Avenue but humility and figuring out
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ways to tuck into this amazing biodiverse world that we live in in a way that doesn't use that world but it's it uh it builds
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a relationship and a kinship at some level with that world foreign well I agree with you on that but let me continue to talk to the physicist within
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your your human body so renewable energy renewable technology um isn't an answer to Fossil depletion and climate change well you know I I used to think that
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that's kind of how it started out as a physicist approaching these problems and I did a lot of calculations about how much we could get from solar and land and what are the practical uh ins and outs and limitations and the the
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problem I have now with it is it only really doubles down on this destructive scheme and the question really is what is it that we do with abundant energy what have we done we tend to expand the human Enterprise
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we clear more land for agriculture and other human use and the way I the humorous way I tend to put it is if every jackass on the planet had access to Abundant even clean energy
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what would they do with it would they do good things like ecological restoration where there's no money in that so our financial economic system won't support such things or will they do what I would call bad things like you know plunder
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the Earth more for their own personal or economic gain so I think it's very clear what unleashing a lot of energy would do and the other framing is what would the animals want if you ask
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the squirrels and the newts and the parrots and the lizards you know what what do they hope will do at this Crossroads are they hoping that we're going to pull off this renewable energy transition so we can keep
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civilization fully powered and trucking along hell no that's the worst possible thing the most destructive decision we could make from their point of view I remember from our first podcast last
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year you are a newt and salamander aficionado so maybe we should make a reality TV show or movie and call it ecological jackass I'm kidding so so here's here's kind of
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the problem I have with this or not it's not the problem but uh it's it's a little bit of a pushback you say that we didn't plan to be sustainable
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um or we chose to do this economic system I think everything that you just said would have been true a hundred years ago or 50 years ago or 10 or 20 years from now probably
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um we are part of nature Tom we didn't make the choice to create civilization it was the byproduct of a social species finding this huge amount of ancient sunlight just under the surface
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self-organizing around this energy Surplus and expanding our nodes of trade and transport and dopamine so when did we as a culture ever really have a choice and will we ever have a moment in
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the future where we have a choice yeah I think that's a really deep and interesting question and I know that you've had some guests on your podcast uh especially I remember Daniel schmuckenberger talking about uh
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Technologies being kind of an obligate thing that it's it's a game theory it's whatever out competes other uh other modes just ends up winning and so at some level no
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it wasn't really a choice we never sat around a table and plotted this course we're just kind of along for the ride and it's been a fun one I also think of it as hey look what we can do uh
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approach to to living in this world so um you know the the issue is that yeah we didn't make this conscious choice and part of it is that very few people could have understood the long-term
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consequences you know it's it's hard to nobody has crystal ball it's hard to appear into the future some had some really interesting insights and premonitions and Malthus comes to mind
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and now the you know named Malthus is ridiculed because he didn't see the fossil fuels as part of the story and you know that's a lesson there are things that maybe we're not seeing as well like oh yes sure you you could
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always say that but but you know the the writing is on the wall in a lot of ways we do have this you know tremendous decline in biodiversity but when you ask you know when or or
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will we ever have a moment to make a choice we always have this moment in fact that's the only moment we ever have we don't have the future yet and we can't do anything about the past so we have now to make a serious change
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I just don't know how to precipitate that effectively or if it's even really possible but but sure we can do something now I feel you on that uh and that's why my
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friend I'm doing these podcasts I don't think you or I are going to change the world um or make this choice but my hope is that passing the Baton of ecological
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Information Systems education might Inspire and inform other people around the planet and in aggregate some emergent process happens I mean that's a naive Hope on my part but I hope
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nonetheless so how would you even define success what would have to happen for us to achieve success and what is success yeah I think
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in order to get to success every human concern would have to be built on a foundation that's biophysically sustainable and so what I mean by that is if you
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look at the what I mean by concerns economics politics belief systems human rights science technology everything that you know look at a university catalog you know everything that we care about and teach
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um would are currently not predicated on an insistence for long-term ecosystem sustainability the first chapter in all of those books of the first lecture is not about
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that uh sustainability and the conditions for that um so all these concerns will fail in their current formulation it's almost guaranteed that the if they're not built on sustainable principles then they're
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unsustainable they will fail so you have to start every consideration with something like this question of would this action be a net help to the whole world which by the way is mostly
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non-human or would it be in that harm now most decisions we make today are clearly net harms because they're very narrow in their focus and their goals
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and so that's a start you have to sort of start on that Foundation but it would require a reformulation from the ground up of all human interactions and organizational schemes and how we
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interface to the planet and so I don't really see it as an evolution or a tweaking or Knob turning of our current civilizational uh aspirations and and mindset as a new
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start from scratch it's kind of a you know hey the civilization idea has so many flaws we can't Salvage it we have to build something completely new so do you have any hope for that sort of
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a major transition well I always have a little bit of Hope um that we could embark on something as radical as that voluntarily uh in aggregate I mean that's what it would
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take would have to all uh or you know and large numbers want to go in this new Direction uh I'll seize whatever hope I can I mean it might sound counter-intuitive and
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like a disjoint but I'm actually an optimistic person um I am fairly happy-go-lucky and uh I I see a lot of the the troubles but I I
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fundamentally just have to believe that there's something we can do um it can't be false hope it can't be based on a faith and Technology I think that's that's mostly peddled today but I think that's you know if you step back
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we can see that this period is an anomaly in most of what we've learned our mindset is is a very temporary stage it's not likely to last and I guess the final thing I'll say about Hope is that the
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human mind is incredibly plastic and one thing that means is that a child born a thousand years from now we'll see whatever world that looks like
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to them will just be normal and accepted and so and they'll get on with things and so or 50 years from now too yeah you could say that about any moment in history is that to a child it all looks
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just normal it's it's it's by definition normal so I think that we we have a great potential in the sense that this system isn't part of our DNA
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and it's something that once gone is is not going to plague us and those children of tomorrow aren't going to cry over what we have that they don't it's
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just not part of their uh their their world view so I think in this uh very articulate unpacking of a simple story of
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civilization I think we there's two paths ahead two questions ahead there's one which you're working on um with this line of thinking which is
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what does a more sustainable future look like where we do no harm and we and we help and all the ecological biophysical social cultural
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um you know research and and study and and inference from that and then the second question is how to get there from here and those are two things that need to be worked on concurrently
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um because um once we start to have less energy every year or um more costly and less energy every year all of the the current cultural
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assumptions of what technology can do for us start to change from what they've been the last 50 years um so thank you for this
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um I appreciate you Tom and I look forward to having you back again on this show and thank you for doing the math with your head and doing the caring with your
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heart my friend do you have any closing comments on this short little conversation I appreciate the opportunity and um you know I'm constantly striving to to
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get a handle on what this is all about and and how we might make those Transformations I think you know a large part of it it's kind of like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz you know we've had the
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the special shoes on all this time and we just need to decide that we need to click them and do something different because this culture and the civilization only exists because we create it in our heads and so in a sense it's the easiest thing
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for us to dismantle if we put our minds to it uh so I do think that's a really important thing to start think about how that happens well I mean this is this is our work and
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finally after 20 years people are now recognizing the truth of of most of what you just said on this call and there's a lot more people that recognize that now the what to do about it and that's
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that's another question uh so to be continued my friend and uh thank you great [Music]
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