Navigating the Great Unraveling with Resilience
In this episode, we chat with Asher Miller and Rob Dietz of the Post Carbon Institute about their latest report "Welcome to the Great Unraveling," which explores ways to navigate the environmental and social breakdown resulting from multiple intersecting crises. Recognizing human supremacy and overshoot as the drivers of the polycrisis, we discuss the threat of increased polarization, techno-solutionism, conflict, and suffering as the situation worsens. We speak about the need to grapple with complexity, uncertainty, and conflicting priorities, while maintaining social cohesion within societies and peaceful relations between them. Seeking wisdom and knowledge from communities who have experienced collapse and suffering, in order to build household and community resilience for this precarious time, can help us imagine a more hopeful future.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Rob Dietz 0:00
We're in the age of consequences: consequences from not addressing climate crisis, from not taking care of soils and waterways, from failing to protect the web of life, not figuring out how to work with each other, from following a program of continuous economic growth, the over exploitation of fossil fuels, and basically letting the whole extractivist exploitative mindset rule all of our boardrooms, all of our state houses, and really the whole culture. So the Great Unraveling is the costs of all that coming to bear.
Asher Miller 0:34
And I'm deeply concerned that as we go deeper into the Great Unraveling, even if we're not directly experiencing the impacts of these things, it can be traumatizing, and very difficult. And there's a lot of uncertainty and anxiety that we see. And sometimes I think of it as the anxiety of the privileged. You know, this is the anxiety people were anticipating things coming. And I think it's actually very instructive to talk to people who have been through unimaginable hardships to understand how they've gone through it because I think for a lot of us, we don't know how resilient we are. We haven't been tested in a sense.
Alan Ware 1:09
That was Asher Miller and Rob Dietz of the Post Carbon Institute. In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast we'll talk with Rob and Asher about Post Carbon Institute's recent report titled "Welcome to the Great Unraveling, Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown".
Nandita Bajaj 1:35
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot, and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, cohost of the podcast and Executive Director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:59
I'm Alan Ware, cohost of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals.
Nandita Bajaj 2:18
And just before we introduce our guests for today, we are excited to share that, based on listener feedback, we are increasing the frequency of our episodes, and we'll be releasing a new interview every two weeks starting today.
Alan Ware 2:33
We're excited about this expansion of the podcast as it allows us to go a lot deeper and broader with the range of topics we explore. And we'll be able to have a larger number of incredible guests on the podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 2:46
And also as we embark on the New Year, we would like to take a moment to express our sincere thanks to all of you, our listeners, for believing in our work and for being on this journey with us. Thank you so much.
Alan Ware 2:59
Thank you. And now on to today's guest. Rob Dietz is the program director at Post Carbon Institute with training and experience in ecological economics, environmental science, and conservation biology. He has built a career aimed at moving society in sustainable directions. Rob was the first executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy. He is lead author of Enough is Enough, a popular book on steady state economics. Asher Miller became the executive director of Post Carbon Institute in 2008. Prior to joining Post Carbon Institute, Asher founded Climate Changers, an organization that inspires people to reduce their impact on the climate by focusing on achievable actions anyone can take. Asher was also international production coordinator at Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, and a ghost writer of the autobiography of a Polish holocaust survivor. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 4:01
Hey, Asher. Hey, Rob. It's great to have you both on our show.
Rob Dietz 4:05
Thanks for having us.
Asher Miller 4:06
Thanks for having us.
Nandita Bajaj 4:08
Yeah, this is a real special episode for us because it's the first time we're hosting other podcasters. And you are, of course, two of the three hosts of the Crazy Town podcast which our entire team loves, especially how you guys weave in humor and lightness to such serious topics. No pressure, but we're counting on you to pepper in some humor to today's discussion. Welcome.
Asher Miller 4:32
Good luck with that, yeah.
Rob Dietz 4:35
Yeah. Well, we make ourselves laugh at least. But thanks for the kind words about the show. That's really sweet.
Nandita Bajaj 4:41
Absolutely. Yeah. And we're really excited about digging deeper into the new report that you guys have been involved in titled "Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown". And it's co-written by you Asher with Richard Heinberg, who we've had on the podcast. And Rob, you are, of course involved with the co- editing of this report. And so let's get right into that. In the summary of the Welcome to the Great Unraveling report, you state that 'the Great Unraveling is a turning point in the timeline of human existence. As such, it carries a significance on par with the emergence of language, the development of agriculture, and the industrial revolution. But it will likely be more perilous than those earlier watersheds'. So stating the obvious, the Great Unraveling is a huge deal. Let's start with the basics. What is the Great Unraveling?
Rob Dietz 5:41
Well, maybe even just starting with the term it was coined by the ecophilosopher and great teacher, Joanna Macy. The way I think of it is that we're in the age of consequences: consequences from not addressing climate crisis, from not taking care of soils and waterways, from failing to protect the web of life, not figuring out how to work with each other, from following a program of continuous economic growth, you know, meaning more people using an increasing throughput of energy and materials, the over-using and exploitation of fossil fuels and, and basically letting the whole extractivist exploitative mindset rule all of our boardrooms, all of our state houses, and really the whole culture. So Great Unraveling is the costs of all that coming to bear. Asher, you've been working with folks in the academic circles, like over at the Cascade Institute, and you probably have a more maybe technical or better definition. I don't know what's what's your take on it?
Asher Miller 6:48
Yes, so there is a community of people who are looking at it. They're using a different term, which is the polycrisis, to describe what we're seeing. And so folks like Thomas Homer Dixon, and his team at Cascade Institute, and the UN Foundation started a new, what's called an accelerator, which is to look at systemic risk assessment. But what they're really looking at is the polycrisis. And what really matters in terms of that term is the recognition that we're dealing with multiple challenges or crises simultaneously, and they cross over kind of boundaries. We typically think of these certain systems, right? The climate system, the economy, politics, would have you, in some ways as distinct systems.
And what we're seeing now is that there's a lot of interaction between these systems. And that changes in them, shocks, stressors that are happening in those systems are kind of bleeding over and impacting one another, in a way. And so there are people who are sort of studying the dynamics of that as a polycrisis. We chose the Great Unraveling term: one, because we're just depressing people, right? Like, you know, we got to follow the brand here. But no, it was really about trying to acknowledge the moment that we're in. Because I think people are feeling this. They're experiencing this.
And one thing I guess I would just add about this is a point of recognition, which is the Great Unraveling, for whom? And if you look at it from across space and time, there are many populations of people who've gone through the most profound unraveling of their traditional way of life. There have been people who have not benefited from the system that Rob was just describing, the sort of global economic system that we've created that's been driven by fossil fuels and accelerating pretty much everything. And so we just have to be clear about who we're talking about when we say 'Welcome to the Great Unraveling'. And we very consciously wrote that paper, and are trying to speak to people, for whom kind of the consequences, you know Rob talked about the age of consequences, the consequences haven't quite come for them yet. But now they're here for everyone. And I think that's clear within the climate system. But also, I think the pandemic taught us that there's no kind of safe space now in this world, where we've created all these interconnections. And this is kind of a new reality for a lot of people. We've been warning people for 20 years at Post Carbon Institute, that this was coming. And now it's here.
Alan Ware 9:13
It seems like you had talked about how the great acceleration in population and consumption, part of the reason we're having the great unraveling is due to that stalling, right? That as the economic growth machine is stalling that's making social inequality and other issues more contentious as we're moving forward. So how would you describe the origin, the historical overview, to the extent you can summarize it, of this era of the Great Unraveling?
Asher Miller 9:44
It's interesting, I think there's actually debate within the polycrisis community around this because there's some folks that are just trying to understand the dynamics of kind of environmental stressors or changes that are happening in environmental systems - biodiversity loss, climate change, topsoil erosion, freshwater issues, what's happening with pollution in the oceans, on and on, right, with social interactions, social dynamics. And in some ways, they're trying to remain sort of agnostic about that question that you just asked Alan, which is what's causing all of this? Is there are a source, a point, from which the polycrisis has emerged. And I think you could look at the dynamics and try to understand the dynamics, especially when you're trying to think about how we're going to navigate this reality. But I do think it's incredibly important to understand that there's a common root to all of this. In our view, that route is, well, it's a couple of things.
One, it's overshoot, which is if you look at ecological systems, and species and ecosystems, you know, this is a common pattern that you see when, when a species finds an abundant source of food, which is energy, they can overshoot the capacity of their environment to support their numbers, because they've just increased their population and their consumption. And then there's kind of a correction or a crash that happens. And that happens sort of in cycles, right? We've essentially been doing that. Our source of food, so to speak, has been fossil fuel. So I think the great acceleration has been really driven by massive amounts of ancient sunlight that was buried in the ground being burned by us, right? And that's accelerated all kinds of things. And now we're facing the consequence of that. It can't continue. At a certain point you have to pay some bills.
But there's another root or cause to this, I think. And this goes way back. Probably people would define it differently, maybe in historical terms, but it's really about separating ourselves as human beings from one another and the natural world, and forms of patriarchy, basically, moving from maybe animistic spiritual beliefs, where we see ourselves in relationship with the natural world to seeing ourselves as having domination over the natural world. And that leading ultimately to colonization in different forms, right? And I think that you have that ingredient of a certain value, worldview relationship with one another in the natural world. And it's embedded actually, in the Declaration of Independence in the United States, the pursuit of happiness for the individual. It's a marked change from how we as a species evolved for most of our history. And that's kind of the underlying operating system. And then we just poured a bunch of fossil fuels on top of that. That would be my view. I don't know what Rob would say.
Rob Dietz 12:30
I gotta say, that image of pouring a bunch of fossil fuels on top of it, it's not the most pleasant, but it's essentially right. Yeah, I, I think the 20th century is what marks this great acceleration in fossil fuel. You covered that. And then you went back way further. And I was thinking about that how scientists like Jared Diamond, I don't know if you remember, he wrote an article that was basically calling out farming as the worst mistake humanity has ever made. And I think it's because of what it led to and what you are getting at Asher, like you suddenly started having this grain agriculture where you could store the grain. And you could basically amass this wealth of energy. And then you started specializing. You had people to manage and to count the grain and to dole it out. And suddenly, we're getting into these power dynamics and abusing that power. And, of course, fossil fuels ramps that up.
Alan Ware 13:31
And throughout all of that a through line is the increase in power, as Richard Heinberg relates in his book, Power, that we're expanding from agricultural to then various empires centralizing and organizing. And then, in the words of William Catton, from his overshoot book, a kind of takeover - certain groups of humans and nation states figure out ways to subjugate and take over the lands and often the physical people into slavery. And that, then that amount of power, probably would have stagnated without fossil fuels hitting about a billion people. There were enough negative feedbacks through famine, war disease that probably would not have been overcome without the turbo boost of fossil fuels in the early 1800s. That kind of put this whole exponential growth curve into overdrive that I think certainly Richard and Post Carbon has helped teach me over the years. Thank you.
Asher Miller 14: 31
You're welcome I guess.
Rob Dietz 14: 33
Yeah, hopefully, it hasn't left you in some state of despair. I often joke that we could rename ourselves the wet blanket society. I often think okay, well, it would be way easier, just be ignorant of all this stuff. But to understand it, and then take some agency and decide how you are going to live your life knowing what you know, I think is a far better position to be in than ignoring the reality that's in front of us.
Nandita Bajaj 15:00
Yeah, and like what Alan just brought up with the takeover and drawdown, our most current form of that is the neoliberal capitalism, the market fundamentalism, which has given an electoral legitimacy basically, to the expansion of the global economic system.
Rob Dietz 15:17
Yeah, I'm not gonna break out my Bill Clinton imitation on your podcast, but we were pretty disappointed with what happened, in what was supposed to be a progressive administration, and pushing trade agreements that ignored the environmental problems that were going to arise and granting all the power to corporations. It's a dark part of our history.
Alan Ware 15:45
And that might have been even a further kicking into overdrive. When the wall went down, and the Soviet Union was defeated, democratic capitalism seemed to be the only alternative left standing. So the last 30-40 years have been a real unleashing of market fundamentalism throughout the world, and the power that that can accrue to getting a lot of things done, especially when you can be real innovative with finance, and with debt, and you combine the globalization, which then can kick the investment projects out decades into the future, assuming they'll have a payoff. But when the brightest minds in a society go into that kind of value production it's a sad statement on that.
Rob Dietz 16:33
One, even when I was in college, I remember coming out like the good jobs were in investment banks and management consulting firms, and it became an area of prestige. I mean, sure, being a doctor was still prestigious. But if you want the real money, then you go into Wall Street and create some kind of fantastical derivative, some product that you can sell all over the place to people that are probably addicted to gambling. But you look at the broader implications for society, you know, is this like you suggested Alan, should our best and brightest minds be trying to figure out that kind of thing? I don't know. But it sure was tempting. I mean, they wouldn't hire the likes of me anyway. But yeah, here we all are in the nonprofit world wishing that we were bankers.
Nandita Bajaj 17:23
Well, your story about like coming out of college with that kind of a mindset, that was my entire upbringing. I grew up in India, and just science, technology and engineering is the god of education there. Ecological education is not at the heart of most educational institutions. It's all about the techno-optimism that this is how we continue on the conquest of the world. And we can find our way out of all sorts of problems with technological innovation, not a lot of emphasis on protecting and nurturing the land. Technology and engineering and science are basically, you know, devoid of ecological science. It's very much a certain type of science that's privileged in education. So you combine a bias toward finance and engineering, you've got billions of young, innovative minds, coming into this world, just thinking about problem solving through those avenues. And the restoration and the preservation ideas are nowhere to be found. I mean, for me, the education has actually just happened on my own, through my own search for knowledge, long after my own whole educational career of being an engineer teaching about STEM for 10 years, and then finally leaving and thinking, technology is not, you know, it's going to help in some ways, but it's certainly not the panacea that it's being touted as.
Rob Dietz 18:57
Good on you Nandita for figuring out the path that you wanted to take and not just sticking in the science and engineering world. I'm sure there was a lot of pressure to do that. And I'll just say I think an ecological education should underpin all education that we provide to our children and young adults. And it's not to say that there isn't obviously a great role for engineers. I love engineers. But if engineers also had an ecological viewpoint, I think you would see a lot of changes in the way they go about their work.
Nandita Bajaj 19:31
So moving from where the education has been focusing to what you are pointing us to, let's examine some of the primary challenges humanity will face as you say it in your report. The time available to prevent unraveling has elapsed. We have only a brief period in which to find ways to hold together the most vital of threads while contending with the cascading consequences of misguided human actions to date. Doing this successfully will require the development of cooperative adaptive skills and behaviors across the social spectrum. So what are some of the cognitive and behavioral challenges?
Rob Dietz 20:12
As far as the cognitive, behavioral challenges that we're going to see, I mean, it really first comes down to the notion that we are flawed, right? We have what you'd call in the technical term cognitive biases. I would think of it in a non technical way as glitches in our behavior. Things kind of don't go the way they're supposed to. And there are a lot of different kinds of biases that we have to contend with. I have some of my favorites. One is the confirmation bias. That's where we tend to seek out and remember only evidence that backs up things we already believe. And it has a corollary, where we tend to ignore or somehow deny evidence that contradicts what we believe. And it's easy to kind of say, well, you over there doing that, I don't do that. But I think we all do it to some level or another. And this is one of the challenges is we've got to be humble enough to examine ourselves and be open to evidence and be willing to consider that we're wrong even though we never are, at least here at Post Carbon. I'm not.
Nandita Bajaj 21:26
Or here. We've got it down at Population Balance too.
Rob Dietz 21:31
Got it exactly right. So that's one that's really important. I think, one of my other, I say favorite in air quotes, because I mean, they're interesting, these biases, but also really dangerous. So one of my favorites is the sunk cost bias. It's also known as the bias of previous investment. And that's where we invest in something, whether it's putting in money or putting in our time and effort. And if that thing doesn't pan out, or it turns out it wasn't a good investment, we have this bias toward keeping it going, doubling down on it, because we put in this effort. And sometimes that leads us down pathways that hit dead ends, or that are really detrimental. And some of that kind of thinking and that bias is what's leading us into the crises that we face. You know, you can think from a societal perspective, you invest in something like the interstate system in the United States, and that becomes the backbone of our transportation network. Well, we know we need to get off fossil fuels. But how many highway projects do you see out there on the landscape. We're always repairing. We're always adding new lanes. We're always building more. And what really needs to happen is a totally different investment. But, using this sunk cost bias, it's one of the things that's helping us keep investing in an outmoded way of transporting people and goods. So lots of challenges like that.
Asher Miller 23:05
Yeah, I just want to add one thing to what you're just saying, Rob, because I think it points to part of the challenge. It's not just a sunk cost bias that we need to recognize and say, okay, well, let's rethink how we move ourselves and move our goods completely differently. It's compounded by the fact that there are actually values that we have, or concerns that we care about, that are embedded within those things that we've sunk investments into. So for example, in the United States, I will show my political leanings here. You know, I'm in favor of unions and organized labor. So I've been heartened to see what feels like, from a pretty low point, a kind of resurgence in strength within the unions. And we have this thing happening right now with the Auto Workers Union, going on strike with the major car companies in the United States, and part of the struggle there for them is like, what are their jobs look like in an electric vehicle transition. And so there's discussion that's happening there. More broadly, though, here we are supporting, I'll speak for myself, supporting these auto workers for you know, organizing and saying the bosses have made billions of dollars and we've been left behind and wanting to support those people. But at the same time, what we're doing in that case is supporting the personal vehicle.
And so these values sometimes become in conflict with one another. The unions have actually been opposed to a lot of clean tech stuff or worried about transition away from the current system because of what it means for jobs. So we have to be thinking about all those things at the same time. And so not only is it hard to imagine how we move ourselves and move our goods without cars and trucks and all that stuff. It's hard to imagine like how are people working? What are the sectors the economy?
So I just wanted to mention that to your question or point Rob around, kind of, navigating the liminal space. This is a bit of a, you can call it a cognitive bias or something to do with individual psychology. But there's also something around group psychology that I think is really key. And I'm deeply concerned that as we go deeper into the Great Unraveling, and I experience this myself, and so I imagine that many of your listeners can relate to this, seeing, bearing witness to the aspects of the Great Unraveling, particularly in this hyper-connected world. Even if we're not directly experiencing the impacts of these things, it can be traumatizing, and very difficult. And there's a lot of uncertainty and anxiety that we see. There's climate anxiety. There are people that are working in that space right now to truly try to help people navigate their anxiety around climate change. And sometimes I think it is like the anxiety of the privileged. You know, this is the anxiety people were anticipating things coming. And I think it's actually very instructive to talk to people who have been through unimaginable hardships, to understand how they've gone through, because I think for a lot of us, we don't know how resilient we are. We haven't been tested in a sense.
We're dealing with more and more uncertainty, because the honest truth is we cannot predict how all of these kind of environmental and social dynamics are going to interact with each other. What is this unraveling look like? So here we are seeing, bearing witness to things that are really horrific in many cases and traumatizing. We're anticipating more hardship, more difficulty ahead, including for us, for ourselves, and our loved ones.
And in all that complexity and noise and uncertainty, it is understandable, and this is part of our evolutionary biology, where we seek safety and certainty, oftentimes within a tribe. I mean, that was how we always survived. That's why we're here is because humans worked collectively together in bands. And there's things that they had to give up in terms of their individual, quote, unquote, liberties. But there's also always a risk of being pushed out of the tribe. And that was a death sentence for people. That's like, deeply embedded in our wiring, right?
So when we're dealing with uncertainty, we're worried about the future, things are getting more difficult, it is a natural tendency for us to seek that security and will seek that security with tribes that we know. And then you have to kind of virtue signal, or you have to prove your adherence to the values of the tribe. And that actually creates people to become more and more extreme in some ways, because they're trying to signal that they belong. I think it exacerbates the polarization that we see, the binary thinking that we see. I'm just very concerned that that's what's going to happen. We're going to spin out more and more. We're gonna have more and more false solutions offered to us to like relieve us from that uncertainty, to provide a sense of security for ourselves. So they're going to be strong men types that are going to offer the answer to us. There's going to be lots of potentially xenophobic attitudes or othering of people in all of this stuff, and people shutting down from looking at complexity and nuance and just really difficult questions that we have to wrestle with.
Back to liminality which we feel like is really key. And this is, by the way, not an area that Post Carbon Institute has ever delved into before. We were always in the business of trying to help people understand. We were kind of an educational organization focused on people's prefrontal cortex, you know, and now we feel like we actually have to be more engaged in helping people process their emotions and be present with all of this stuff, and to not feel alone and maybe have a tribe of people that are also trying to look with nuance at things. So when they look at issues around population and consumption, they can see both things are true, for example, right? And so trying to create safe spaces for those people to not feel alone, because I think that's really key and also being able to stay in the place of that. What's a liminal space? A liminal space is that threshold between two states of being, that you are uncertain about what's happening. There's lots of potential, but there's also lots of fear and uncertainty. And we all have to stay in that space. Because, otherwise, we're just going to spin out into, I think, probably solutions or responses that are not going to be beneficial to where we need to get in the long run. So it's just really key. And I hope that we can all kind of do that, which is one, it's taking care of ourselves, right? It's recognizing those struggles and those needs within ourselves and doing self care, but also doing that and providing that for others in our lives because we cannot do this alone.
Alan Ware 29:32
So moving out from these cognitive behavioral challenges, you've already kind of made the bridge into the social challenges that, as we tribalize, the social cohesion of larger social units like nation states starts disintegrating more. And we've seen definitely social trust in the United States, I think it peaked in the 60s or some time and I think the year I was born. Ever since then it's been on a....
Rob Dietz 30:02
Don't take that to heart.
Alan Ware 30:04
I was the high watermark.
Asher Miller 30:06
Right, that's a good way to think of it. That's your glass half full.
Alan Ware 30:11
So and many other countries are also on a polarization, social trust decline. So what do you see is broadening out to societies as a whole? What do you see as some of the bigger challenges as we move through the Great Unraveling?
Rob Dietz 30:26
Well, there's so many of them kind of like at the individual brain level. I like, Asher, you said we used to address the prefrontal cortex. I guess we're an amygdala bunch now, which socially acting with your lizard brain might not be the, the way forward. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot to overcome socially. I mean, Asher, you've hit on this a few times already. But we have gone way overboard on the individualism front to the detriment of taking action together that benefits the community or benefits the whole. Of course, you want to protect individual freedoms to some extent. But doing it to the extent that we have has led us to a whole bunch of problems. And you can see some other cultures around the world, recognizing that and changing. So, for instance, I got to recently interview the degrowth economist, Timothy Parrique, and he was talking about how in Sweden, they've banned advertising to children. Here, we're so individualistic, it's like, well, the advertisers are allowed to do whatever they want. The child is an individual who can make their own choices about whether they want to buy a bunch of plastic crap or not, or eat a bunch of sugar. And where Tim is coming from they're saying, well, as a community, we know it's better if we're not trying to push a profit making agenda on a child. So we're just gonna stop doing that as a community. So I mean, I think trying to overcome that, of course, in our society, especially in the United States, there's more inequality, more inequity when it comes to the distribution of wealth and income. And the epidemiological studies on that show that everybody's worse off. Even the richest are worse off, because of the stratification that occurs across society. You lose that cohesion. So maybe this is, again, kind of an expansion of the individual versus community. But when you allow your society to have that much inequality, and it results in so many issues with health, with drug addiction, with crime, with lack of trust. And I think it's kind of getting at what you were saying, Alan, that trust has been going down for decades. And that's part of it. And it's kind of entrenched at this point. You start addressing taxes, and the blowback politically is immediate and severe. So that's another social side of it, that we've got to get over and, of course, racism and other forms of discrimination, we still have a long way to go. You mentioned, Asher, the possibility of looking for solutions when you're uncertain from strong men or from authoritarian regimes. I think we've seen some hard turns to the right in the world. And rather than working with one another, we'd rather be told what to do by some authority figure. So trying to figure out how to change society, to where we we have a more community flair, rather than just the individual, I think, is a great challenge of our times.
Alan Ware 33:47
And I think it's interesting in the report, you mentioned as the great acceleration fails, and we start the Great Unraveling, that that economic growth has often been used to paper over the inequalities. As long as the poor feel they're getting just a little bit more, they don't resent so much the rich getting massively more. But once people are actually ground down into more absolute decline of their living standards, the tolerance for that inequality will lessen. Another element that might be interesting is the global south being less willing to go along with a globally north led world order, specifically kind of a US led world order. And you mentioned in the report, over a 25 year period 1990 to 2015, the value of all embodied raw materials, energy, land and labor appropriated from the global south by the global north equates to $242 trillion, which is over two years of entire global GDP. So there's a lot of resentment, understandable resentment, historical resentment building in the Global South, and I think we're seeing that in some of the climate talks where they're asking for loss and damages. Increasingly that seems to be where the climate talks are kind of breaking down, where the global north is just, that's a road too far for them. So that's another element you do mention in the report in terms of social challenges, the relationships between nations. And, of course, as we've seen with Russia and Ukraine, and now Israel and Hamas, we're seeing what seems to be an increase in interstate conflict.
Asher Miller 35:27
Yeah, a concern that I have, and I'm not the only one with this concern, but if we anticipate social polarization and dysfunction within nations, as things get harder, as the Great Unraveling gets deeper, and one of the responses to that is to fixate on an external enemy of some kind. So you could see how a response to internalized tensions and challenges, especially I think on the part of those who are in power, wanting to maintain the status quo will direct all that. And by the way, this has been a playbook of the wealthy in some ways or those in power for a long time, right? I mean, racial disparities and cultural tensions are often stoked as a way of keeping, basically, the working class or poorer people in society from organizing. So yeah, I worry that one of the responses will be global conflict as a result, and there does seem to be a shake up that's happening in the global world order. You talked, Alan, earlier about the fall of the Soviet Union sort of leading to the US being sort of the single dominant superpower. And I think that that's all changing pretty rapidly. And there's sort of new constellations or political alignments that are happening. I'm not sure it's a consistently sort of global north versus global south thing. I think there are lots of dynamics that are there. But that creates lots of risk, right? There's a definite risk of nuclear conflict and other issues that are pretty horrific to imagine. And then to the point that you brought up that stat just around the sucking of resources and exploitation of labor from the global south, to benefit those in the global north, I think there's a deep concern around our response in the global north to these issues. Like let's address the climate crisis means we need to go through an energy transition of sorts. Is that a continued exploitation of the resources and the labor of other people in other parts of the world that are not going to get the benefits of that technology at all, which is a big part of why we've long argued for not only community resilience, and sort of more localized, kind of a bit of a reversal of globalization, but also massively powering down our consumption in our habits in the global north, because there's a huge justice question there. But there's also just feeds into further tension and conflict and suffering.
Alan Ware 37:56
Now, there are a group of people who would argue, yeah, there doesn't have to be a great unraveling because of technology, the techno-optimists who believe technology can solve any problems we encounter. And it's obvious from reading your report, you don't agree. And neither do we. So what are some of the main reasons for your skepticism for why the technology can solve these problems with energy, materials, pollution, as we move into the Great Unraveling?
Rob Dietz 38:24
Well, I think the first and most obvious one is, really, we're going to use the same thinking the same playbook that has pushed us into this predicament? I mean, we've already talked about it was the combination of fossil fuel and the technology that you use with that, that's gotten us in this overpowered and overshoot situation. So we're just going to double down on that as our way out? Let's just look at this with a little bit of depth and a little bit of humility before we power on pretending that we're gods who will subdue all of nature and bend physics to our will. It's kind of a magical sort of thinking really.
Asher Miller 39:10
There are lots of, I would say, biophysical constraints on the role that technology can play that, you know, we can get into if you want to talk specifically about the energy transition. There are dynamics within that the different characteristics of quote unquote, renewable sources of energy, compared to fossil fuels. I won't belabor that. You know, we actually published a book a few years ago called Our Renewable Future. And what we tried to do there was actually look at, if we have this goal of 100%, renewable energy, what does that look like? And we looked at it more from the demand side than the supply side. So much of what people are offering out there is this idea of like, how do we ramp up renewable energy sources. And what we looked at, it was more like, well, how are we using energy? And where is it easy, and where's it not easy to substitute? So I just recommend people check that out, Our Renewable Future. And ultimately, to Rob's point, it's a worldview and a belief system thing. There's that adage that it's easier for people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Like we're so locked in to the current system, and people are so concerned about losing what they feel like their life is or what they expect of the future, that we limit our ability to imagine something different, that could be much better for us in terms of health and well being and all of that. In some ways, the reliance on technology is a symptom or an expression of that.
Rob Dietz 39:33
I think people often forget that there's a distinction between energy and technology. They kind of just lump it all in as technology, but they're really distinct. I mean, as we were getting to before, technology leverages energy. It's like we have to collect and gather the energy first. And then we apply our technology, using that energy to do the tasks that we want to do. So you think about that, if energy is limited, you know, we have to get off of fossil fuels. And there's limitations to what we can do with solar and wind. Think about, we have limited electricity. We have limited fuels. What use is a computer or a backhoe or a rocket ship? You know, these are technologies. What use are those if we have limited electricity or fuel to run them? You can develop the most wonderous technologies, but really it just becomes a great big paperweight if you don't have the fuels to run it. And there's one other piece that really rubs me wrong with technological optimists. And it's that they make so many assumptions that technology will always be put to good purposes. And sometimes it just isn't. You can look at all the ways that we've used technology to fight savage wars, to tear up entire ecosystems. And, you know, I like technology to some degree. So we do put it to good use sometimes. But I'm not so rosy as to pretend that we're always going to do that. And there needs to be a certain amount of wisdom, a certain amount of restraint when it comes to wielding technology, and humanity hasn't quite gotten there yet. So I think the whole like, let's rapidly build out wonderous technologies. Well, yeah, there's a certain appeal to it. But I would say let's work instead on ourselves, build out our humility, our wisdom, our restraint. And then let's see where we go with technology.
Alan Ware 42:48
Yeah.
Asher Miller 42:49
I think we just start and end with looking at artificial intelligence, the fact that you have the very same people who are running pell mell, and raising a bunch of capital, at the same time, into trying to build these artificial intelligence technologies, at the same time, warning us about the existential threat that they raise. That is just patently insane. And I think, all you have to do if you want to critique technology, or just start asking questions around some of the assumptions, that technology is always good. Just look at that. That's a pathology. Right? Who does that?
Rob Dietz 43:28
Are they're just following the lead of the social media companies, right? Same kind of deal of let's race to get this out. Make sure children are using it. And, you know, years later, we'll do a mea culpa.
Asher Miller 43:41
So you're right, Rob, this is the great acceleration. This is innovation progress happening in real time. It took the social media companies, I don't know, a decade to start realizing the consequences. These guys are warning us as they're doing it. So we're getting better. That's progress.
Rob Dietz 43:56
We need to ask AI how to stop ourselves from developing AI.
Nandita Bajaj 44:03
We can go to the aspect of the Great Unraveling that, you know, you talk about how the tapestry when it starts to unravel, at first, only a few threads may be lost. But over time, the integrity of the whole declines. And as we've already spoken about, we're past the point where we can avoid the Great Unraveling. We're in the middle of it. But in the version as it stands, the audience for whom you've written this report, you know that there are better and worse ways that humanity can move through the Great Unraveling. What would a good version of the Great Unraveling look like and what are some actions that people can engage in to manifest that version?
Rob Dietz 44:48
Yeah, well, I think you've got to start with a vision. You know, what does a good future look like for us? And you know, everybody's gonna have different opinions on that, but I think of a community with a thriving local economy. Most of the food is grown right there locally. The water is clean. The ecosystem is in good health. People share the landscape and the waterways with each other and with other species. People have genuine connections to their neighbors and to the land, and connections also with the non human species and where they live. And the economy then is focused on meeting needs, and increasing our well being. It's not focused on maximizing profits or growing, whatever, 3.747% per year. And then wisdom rather than greed, informs how we use our resources. And then that, maybe a final piece of this vision, is that equity and fairness are the standards by which all of our institutions operate. So if you have a vision like that, then you're asking, how might we achieve a good society or something along those lines. The first step to solving problems is admitting that you have them. So recognizing that we're overpowered and in a state of overshoot. We're in the Great Unraveling. Systems are being destabilized. There's breakdown. But what you want to avoid is out and out collapse.
And so there are interventions that we can take. And I think what we were just talking about with technology, we can't any longer sit around and hope that technology is going to save us. So it's essentially a call to stop delaying, stop falling prey to the sunk cost bias, and the other maladaptive aspects of our status quo. Quit doubling down on what we've got just because we've known it. And, Asher, you brought up something too, that's worth repeating here, I think, as well. And that's stop continuing to separate ourselves so much from nature, and really look for ways to genuinely connect or reconnect with it. And that's one of the ways we can slow the kind of techno, overly exploitative, economic mess that we've created. We talked earlier about how important it is to have an ecological education. One of the things that's so important about is it helps us think in systems. Ecology is all about the ecosystems. You're looking at broader relationships among how things work. You try to understand that there are feedback loops that influence when you intervene over here, it affects something over there. It's a real big picture way of thinking that we're not used to, but the more we can do that, I think the more likely we are to get to a society that works for us, and that doesn't undermine the life-supporting capacities of the biosphere.
Nandita Bajaj 48:00
Yeah, and I think as you've both made it super clear that a lot of the goals now moving forward is to minimize suffering. So much of I think what you're speaking to is how do we save the little good that is left and to build up from there. And that's really key.
Asher Miller 48:21
This is part of why I really like thinking about navigating liminal spaces or liminal realities, because the truth is, you're just saying, we have to accept in a pretty profound way that loss and suffering and more destabilization and possibly breakdown of all systems, even ecosystems, communities, is unavoidable. And yet we still act. And that is a really hard place to be. I think it's very understandable. I get really mad sometimes. And if you listen to Crazy Town, you hear me dropping F bombs a lot, because I get frustrated with people who are trying to effectively double down on what we've been doing to quote unquote, solve the problems that we have.
But I also understand it, and that's because when you try to look with open eyes at the suffering that's already there, and the suffering that is kind of baked into the system, it's horrible. And so we want to avoid that reality. We care. We do care. And it's not just caring about ourselves. We do care about the fate of others. But ultimately, if we want to have a livable planet, for humans in the future, for our descendants, for other species, if we want to have the picture that Rob was painting, which I would like, there's going to be quite a tricky road to get there. And that requires us to do both practical things right now, which may not lead to, quote unquote, solutions that we get to see in our lifetimes.
We've actually talked about that on Crazy Town. I think Jason was the one who brought this up. People used to work on building cathedrals or other great monuments that they never got to see completed in their lifetime, you know. And we're an instant gratification society. But in fact, maybe what we have to do is think maybe our meaning and purpose is to begin walking a path collectively that we might not see the end of. So holding our vision I think is really important, and then holding on to values that we care about, and try to embody those in our lives.
And at the same time, there are things that need to be done to reduce the risk of that being an impossible future, no matter what we do. I think Bill McKibben said this to me once and I thought it was really wise. He was like, you know, we have to adapt to the things to which we can't mitigate against, but we also have to mitigate against the things that we can't adapt to. Because we have to operate in both those spheres. So there is a resistance thing that needs to happen. There's a resilience thing that needs to happen. And there's a regeneration thing that needs to happen. And collectively, we have to engage in all those ways.
That can feel overwhelming for people. I don't think it's fair to say to people, you have to operate on all those levels at all times. You've got to push on every lever at the same time. That's madness. So we have to figure out for ourselves, where we intervene, but to see that that's the collective journey, the collective story that we're on, and to be supporting kind of an ecosystem approach of how to address those different needs. And knowing that it won't be solved is really, really tough. And that's why I think it's really key for us to not feel alone in this, because we need people, we desperately need people, that are able to stay in that space. We need, it's like a pre-inoculated population of people who can be sort of calm agents in the storm, so that we're not spinning out and doing really destructive, regressive, whatever things you know.
But we're trying to walk that path that we need to walk on. And the one area of hope I do have is that we can serve as pathfinders for people and that in moments of crises, alternatives are picked up and can be rapidly adopted. So the task of living in a different way of embodying a different values, different choices, can put us on a path that we might not see themselves, as I was saying before, but also can lead others to adopt the same practices when they're looking for alternatives in a time of uncertainty.
Nandita Bajaj 52:26
Yeah, I really love the concept of the liminal space that you're speaking to, to leave some kind of a blueprint that future societies could then be inspired from.
Asher Miller 52:38
And actually what you're talking about, what we're talking about here, in terms of blueprints, have actually already been drawn out by indigenous societies for millennia. It's really just in some ways, like listening to people in communities who've one, gone through the most unbelievable struggles, and understanding kind of how they understand the world and that journey, but also the practices that kept these communities intact for countless generations. We've recently launched a podcast called Holding the Fire, which is based on interviews with indigenous thought leaders from around the world just to try to tap a little bit of that, hopefully, not in an exploitative way, like teachers, great masters, you know, or whatever, but really trying to listen to people with lived experience or a community experience. That is an old way that I think for many of us is a new way, if that makes sense.
Alan Ware 53:31
Yeah, I think the study of history could help in that liminality of other people and groups that have moved through uncertainty. I mean, certainly indigenous people have had their cultures collapse, and have had to be resilient through that suffering and find meaning for a future and hope. And art can definitely be something that can help us see reality in different ways, shift our perspective, and a lot of times it can help us imagine a more hopeful future. I know I would like to see more stories of a more realistic future instead of like what Nandita was mentioning of a kind of hopeless apocalypse, or, although we don't have these 1950s Gee whiz, or even the 1990s Star Trek Next Generation type of positive progress stories anymore, which is very interesting that there is some kind of cultural anxiety and foreboding that I think is preventing some of those stories from even having a lot of cultural cachet. But where do you think the role of art might be in what I feel is we're missing a huge hole of music, film, books to a lesser extent, but definitely a pop culture missing of new stories?
Rob Dietz 54:46
It may not be the mainstream that you see in art right now, but there are pockets of it. And you know, navigating the Great Unraveling I think we've established is tough work. Right. It can be super heavy to think about and burdensome, and art, and for me especially music, has a huge role to play for inspiring us. You'd be hard pressed to find successful movements throughout history that didn't have art and music behind them. Sometimes, with Crazy Town, we talk about how stand up comedians are often 10 or 20 years ahead of the curve. They're making jokes about things that's really just a very pointed social commentary. And it gets people thinking. And it can start the ball of change rolling down the hill.
So I think there's a huge and expansive role for art to play. And we've kind of embraced that. We did a webinar a couple of years ago with Chris Jordan and Jenny Price, two artists. Jenny's kind of like an activist artist trying to needle the system, you know, and she's had artistic things that she's done to try to get private and closed beaches back open to the public, for example. And, and Chris is more of a visual artist and a photographer, and he's famous for his pictures of albatrosses that their bellies are just filled with plastics. I think a lot of people have seen those. And it makes you think about what are we doing? What are we consuming? What's the point of it all? I think it has a huge role in waking people up to realities. And then the inspiration piece, again, is huge. When you have art that inspires you to action. And one thing I want to say, in addition, on the action front, taking action and feeling like you know, I'm not going to solve the climate crisis by holding up my sign of protest or going out, I always think this way and tell people look at movements throughout history, we'd like to look at them as heroes that came along and changed the whole world. Because, you know, those are the stories we like to hear. But that's not really how it works. There were millions of people that played a role. And everybody's tossing their little pebble on the mountain side. And if everybody weren't doing that, you wouldn't get the landslide of change that happens. So go out there and toss your pebble on that hillside and play a role. I mean, it'll help your mental energy as well just to be confronting something that you see as wrong in the world.
Nandita Bajaj 57:32
Yeah, I really liked that analogy of throwing in your own little pebbles, because in a way, it's really confronting the individualism of our current society of like, well, it's all up to me, I have to do it all, versus the collectivism of the traditional wisdom, which has, really, as you said, laid out not just the blueprint for how to live, but also how to build from the collapse that they've experienced. And the collectivism spirit really also takes down that pressure, the anxiety that you feel that, you know, it's the burden is all on you. I think the onus is on us to build those new tribes, because there's collective power to tribalism, when everybody just bands together for a bigger cause. And in this case, we are trying to confront the old tribalism of wanting to hold on to power to creating a new form of tribalism, that is creating this new vision that you're laying out.
Rob Dietz 58:31
I mean, what you said is well said. I think if you're trying and you're putting forth earnest ideas, and not sugarcoating the problems, but also not just wallowing in the problems, then hopefully, people will come along, and you can start tossing those pebbles and start a change.
Alan Ware 58:52
Yeah, we really appreciate all the work you're doing to help us through the Great Unraveling, and help us understand it and guide many people through it.
Rob Dietz 59:01
Well, thanks so much for having us on. And thanks for the work that you all are doing as well. You touch a topic that is often described as a third rail and you do it with elegance and eloquence and really appreciate your voice there.
Asher Miller 59:15
Thank you both for having us. Appreciate it.
Alan Ware 59:19
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit population balance.org. to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 59:49
Until next time, I'm Nanda Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts and helping us all shrink toward abundance.
