Global Dynamics Part 1: Humanity at a Crossroads

Before I begin I would like to acknowledge Professor Jay W. Forrester (Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at MIT and founder of System Dynamics) for writing this book, "World Dynamics" after which I have named this series. Here's a picture of his book, which you can buy on Amazon.com for around $100 (or-- you can go to the library and get it on an inter-library loan).

My friend Art Steele let me borrow it two or three years ago and I have yet to finish reading it because it is very dense- it reads like a cross between a technical manual and a draft of a Senate spending bill. Pages in the book mostly look like this:

I like it because there's a graph on almost every page.

Mostly, I like this book because it explores the possible future(s) that Humankind is facing. We are living in a time of unprecedented circumstances, and every person on Earth ought to understand this. The cause-and-effect of our world is far beyond linear-- that is what it means for a system to be "dynamic". Professor Forrester pointed out (as did Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, much more recently)  that these unprecedented circumstances are nothing less than the consequence of applying unlimited growth to limited resources. He was far ahead of his time in envisioning the world that we live in and the problems we will soon face.

But there is a lot more to the picture than what lies ahead. The origins of Humankind are murky, at best. Our earliest records go back no further than six thousand years, yet modern Human beings have been around a lot longer. It depends on who you ask, but I believe the current theory tells us that Humans over a hundred thousand years ago were every bit as intelligent as we are today.

Our genetic roots seem to stem away from Africa about sixty thousand years ago, although evidence of modern Humans found in a cave in Israel carbon-date to approximately 125,000 B.C. and some archaeologists claim there were several previous waves of migrations from Africa. There is a massive amount of missing data. What we do know is that at some point Humankind learned language and began storing knowledge verbally. With this, we began to define ourselves and our society. We came to understand ourselves and what it means to be Human. This was the dawn of civilization.

Possibly the most important feature of Human beings is not our biology- although it does endow us with the opposable thumbs and an unmatched manual dexterity- it's not even necessarily our intellect, although that does play a part, as we are able to communicate very complex ideas to each other and can complete highly advanced tasks...

Our greatest characteristic is our ability to work together for the common good, even when we don't like the people we are working with. We cooperate better than any other mammal that I know of, and to achieve things that our group has a shared belief in, because we can communicate very complex ideas and collectively reason through them together. This is part of what it means to have a Culture: a commonly agreed-upon system of beliefs and traditions that form a unifying purpose among a population of beings. When I reference Culture later in this text, I mean little more and no less than this.

As hunter-gatherers we used our cooperation to form tight clans who hunted and foraged for goods produced naturally by the Earth and we learned very quickly that by sharing and cooperating, the rewards were exponentially higher than fending as individuals. As agriculture spread throughout the world, the concept of cooperation and interdependence became simultaneously more obvious and more fruitful. When we invented symbology and developed the written word, we became able to transmit our knowledge across time and space.

So we have developed this Culture of Interdependence- where we have created a complex system of specializations to support the good of the general population, a system which we could scarcely live without. We are interdependent. Let that sink in; because it's very important. This is the secret of our success as a species and when applied properly and with purpose, it has an extremely positive effect.

A Culture of Interdependence.

It has lead us to a situation like this, where one can clearly see that in terms of unchecked population growth we're more successful than ever, right now:

Is this what success looks like?

The reason I chose this graph is not because it is accurate or precise. It certainly is neither. In order to accommodate the startling upward acceleration of population, a certain degree of precision had to be eliminated on the basis of scale. This graph shows our current population to be well above seven billion, which we know is false (for now)- but mostly all of the graphs on Human population that I could find looked basically like this. We have seen totally unprecedented population growth since the beginning of the Industrial Age. I just wanted to point out the magnitude of increase.

What is a convenient advantage to the graph above is that it clearly marks the "age" (in terms of "ages" of civilization). It shows rough boundaries of the Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages (the "Old Stone Age" & "New Stone Age"), the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Middle Ages, and the Industrial Age. With the exception of the Middle Ages, each "age" denotes the material or system dominant in our production of both weapons and tools. We first made our tools and weapons from stone, then bronze, then iron-- more recently we have "industrialized" weaponry by creating and building automatic weapons, tanks, tactical lasers, nuclear warheads and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). One could imagine that we have just crossed into the "Information Age" -- although information has been both a powerful weapon and a powerful tool throughout all of Human existence, and specific populations have reaped rewards from either sharing or withholding information.

Something more for us to consider is this: despite record extinctions of species (including ones we didn't even know existed until recently, for example), there is more biodiversity on the planet now than at any time during Earth's history (according to the fossil record). There may, in fact, be a higher quantity of complex forms of life alive now than in all of history combined.

Please excuse the typo, "...during of the..."

We don't know what the limits of our planet are for sustaining life. This has never been tested before, to our knowledge. We are facing problems, in a manner of speaking, "of Biblical proportions". We have an accelerating pollution problem, an impending climate change disaster, a failing economic system, a rapidly ballooning population, a shortage of clean water (partly due to our pollution problem), an impending food shortage, and dwindling fuel resources. Many of these problems can be solved, but not with the current political and economic system- or at least not without a dramatic restructuring of both of these.

We must examine the very fundamentals of our society, here in the US and Globally. Humanity is at a crossroads. We have some very important decisions to make in the next few years- and we have to act fast. As I will show, a few years are indeed all the time we have to make these critical decisions which will affect the lives of our children, grandchildren, and our subsequent descendants for at least a millennium to come.

Moreover, the decisions we make must be both Ethical and Rational if Humankind is to escape the coming pitfalls. There are plenty of seemingly "easy" answers. We could "eliminate" vast portions of populations- that would appear to "solve" many of our problems, wouldn't it? We, in the U.S., could use our unmatched military prowess to capture resources for our own use or we could deny others access to medicines or food or clean water. That is- if we wanted to subscribe to endless war and sell out our own humanity to the false distinction of "nationalism" (I will show later that even hoarding all the world's resources will not save us).

Additionally, in the scenario we are now facing, doing nothing is just as violent as deciding to go to war for our resources or planning mass "exterminations" of our own kind. Make no mistake about it: sitting idly by and making no progress on these issues is actively killing people -right now- and will doom our future to total collapse of everything we have achieved. The possible consequences may include, but are certainly not limited to things which are already in progress today:

    •    Global financial collapse
    •    Domestic and international political upheavals such as wars, revolutions, police-state activities
    •    Famine and disease
    •    Ecological concerns/disasters
    •    Cultural Erosion/Devolution

I believe that there are solutions to our problems which are both Ethical and Rational. The options before us are neither easy nor comfortable but it is our duty to explore these and come to a decision, either as a nation or as a planet, and to commit to a course of action immediately.