FRIDAY, JANUARY 5, 2018: NOTE TO FILE
Voluntary or Intentional eMigrant Movement
Abandoning Technoindustrial Society’s Spaceship of Fools
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: ABANDON SHIP, FROM THE WIRES, CORNUCOPIAN OPTIMISM
Abstract: I was informed that I could give a talk at the First North-South Conference on Degrowth held in Mexico City, and I thought to share an idea that, unlike most, could matter to humanity in the long-term if it were acted on.
TUCSON (A-P) — Voluntary movement, as in voting with your feet, is alternative to continuing your purpose-driven consumer ‘life’ in service of industrial society. If you know what money is, perhaps have some, and value money, then you are part of the global growth economy. Likely, at no point since birth, has it ever occurred to you to strenuously resist, to doubt or question why growing the economy, so more [humans] can consume evermore [environmental resources], matters.
Having enough matters. Living in a prosperous enough, cooperative, complex society based on interconnected trust, one that could actually persist as the centuries pass, will matter to posterity who will inherit patterns that work, as human extinction is the alternative. They will not inherit patterns (e.g. fossil-fueled industrial society) that don't work (for long) as the system selects against what doesn't work. Nature is unkind to they who do not listen. Humans do not determine what works.
The purpose of life, of all organisms, is to become an ancestor, to behave as if becoming an ancestor mattered. Those who are posterity blind, who live to maximize growth at the expense of their life-support system, their extended body, are living the cancerous life of a progressive, liberal, prosperously metastasizing cancer. For the Anthropocene enthusiast, as for the cancer cell, everything is going to look marvelously on the up and up; there will be seemingly vast expanses of resources/tissue to consume, right up to the time the body is in the ICU. The technology used to ‘solve’ various issues—the respirator, the IV drips, the monitors, the nursing care..., will seem intended to favor continued growth. The enthusiasm of Borg drones for short-term acquisition will not falter until the onset of multiple system failures that the technology, for some unthinkable (to drones) reason, fails to prevent. There will be no shortage of political solutions, but none will work during descent.
Your existential choices: (1) Deny, obfuscate, deny, deny, deny. (2) Work towards political ‘solutions’ and/or religious ‘salvation’ per idiosyncratic inclination as likely determined by an accident of birth. (3) Abandon the growth hegemon, i.e. subject the Growth’s Mandate narrative of illimitable ‘Progress’ (for humans who are exceptions to Nature’s laws) to the flames of an all consuming doubt and see what is left other than ashes, then consider real solutions. (4) Listen to Nature. Options 3 and 4 are not mutually exclusive.
Assume option 4, which leads to having existential concerns for humanity’s posterity (if not one’s own existence), the persistence of all life on the planet, and a willingness to consider real solutions, even ones you don’t ‘like’. The current ‘rules of the game’ select for complex societies as those opting to live the tribal life as hunter-gatherers are assimilated or displaced (made to go extinct). A few tribal peoples may still be fighting illegal logging or otherwise resisting assimilation, but the trend over the past ten thousand years is clear. A few agricultural village societies (e.g. traditional Hopi) resist assimilation into the industrial consumer society. Only one complex society, the remnant Taironans of northeast South America, continues to effectively resist assimilation into the collective.
Making the planet safe for tribal hunter-gatherers (the ‘natural and normal’ life as lived for 97 percent of humanity’s existence) would require the elimination of agriculture empowered empire-building. All agricultural humans who develop complex societies of chiefdom size or larger have the power to displace, assimilate, or destroy hunter-gatherer nomads (see past eleven thousand years of human history). Appealing to the conscience of agriculturalists to not expand may work until one community fails to not expand, perhaps secondary to overshooting their agroecosystem’s environmental productivity when rainfall is less than average and their children are starving, and is rewarded by successful conquest and acquisition.
The unmanaged commons selects for empire-building, for looking beyond the horizon and seeing a planet for the taking. Competing empire builder chiefs and priests create (no foresight implied) a system that selects for larger empires. Appeals to conscience favor the conscienceless. If a behavior is problematic, e.g. empire-building which has been selecting for increasingly complex societies over the past eleven thousand years, all of whom, with the possible exception of the Kogi, fail to manage their environment/power/society such that it can persist as the millennia pass, then the only real solution is to ‘change the rules of the game’, the contingencies of selection/reinforcement.
If success in conquest was not possible, then empire-building would fail and be selected against. Imagine a large island with one thousand hunter-gatherer bands who over the past seventy thousand years had worked out a pattern of tribal management units, territories, able to support each tribe's nomadic bands with only rare boundary disputes. One tribe learns of agriculture or independently develops agriculture, which allows their population to increase ten-fold. All the other tribes observe the life the agriculturalists live (are forced to live to maintain their population) and decline to adopt their life of toil until more data concerning the long-term development of their increasingly complex social system emerges in a few centuries to millennium or so.
It is extremely unlikely that the high-population agrarians will farm sustainably and avoid overshoot at any point as the centuries pass. Even if they do, the increasingly complex political and religious control system may fail due to emergent unforeseen issues (e.g. inequitable distribution to meet needs, manufacturing of wants, ideological compulsions, instutionalized stupidity). Even if all members of the agricultural society take a solemn vow to respect their neighbor’s choice to remain hunter-gatherers, with the death penalty imposed on any member who even crosses into their neighbor’s territory without an invitation, it would be a trivial matter for a priest, along with the priesthood that only complex societies support, to explain, when conditions became unfavorable to the agriculturalists, that their suffering was due to their Great Protector’s anger with them for tolerating their neighbor’s failure to wear the correct feathers in their hair.
Only by attacking the evil doers could they placate the Great Protector. The neighbor, having one tenth the population, would be attacked and the outcome would be predictable unless the 999 bands had foreseen their vulnerability and agreed to come to the defense of any member of their Federation of Hunter-Gatherer Bands. Even if one or several tribes were quickly conquered, all males killed, and all resources taken, the 990+ bands could still muster an opposing force nearly one hundred times larger to force the agriculturalists back into their territory, assuming the agriculturalists have not developed far superior military weapons or tactics (Pizarro, with guns, germs, steel, and horses was outnumbered 500 to 1 by the Incas). If the agriculturalists, perhaps after their population growth had more than replaced those who had died in the war, were to repeat the pattern, the hunter-gatherers would realize they needed to do more than push the farmers back into their territory, but to keep fighting until the committed agriculturalists were exterminated and the remnant population agreed to return to ancestral ways (or all the hunter-gatherers could agree to become agriculturalists with no clue as to long-term consequences or outcome, i.e. formation of empire-building chiefdoms on to empire-building states).
Should the agricultural way come to prevail, if each of the 1000 bands adopted the agricultural life of toil, then all would support a population in excess of 150. Social hierarchy would arise, elites (political, military, religious) would arise to extract services from willing commoners (or unwilling). Larger populations, when scarcity (real or perceived) arose, would expand their resource base. Those that didn’t would collapse from within or, weakened, be conquered from without. Examples from history and archaeology number in the hundreds (or thousands if failed chiefdoms who left no obvious trace are included) just within the last seven thousand years. The addition of a vast planetary vat of fossil fuels did nothing to change the pattern, but merely enabled, for the first time, a global empire to arise. You are living in that empire.
Those who believe that, unlike all prior complex societies, the current global SYSTEM will continue to provide increasing per capita consumption for an increasing population (thanks to clever ape technology and innovation) are among they who would rather believe than know. No amount of evidence or reason will matter other than to the few who would rather know than believe, who neglect to believe what they want to and who can actually think more than a decade ahead.
Those who would rather know than believe, those who can think more than a decade ahead, who at least dimly possess ‘foresight intelligence’, have the potential to opt out of the current anthropocentric SYSTEM. Doing so will not merely seem possible, but as some thoughts become increasingly thinkable, abandoning the Empire, its unsustainable economy and social system, will seem imperative as the onset of multiple system failures becomes increasingly obvious.
The fork in the road: (1) Continue to serve the SYSTEM. (2) Consider alternatives, perhaps 65,536 of them, and put a few thousand of them to the test. A managed Spaceship Earth is alternative to society’s urban/suburban technoindustrial Spaceship of Fools sprawl, but we need to understand this Earth and learn to live with it properly. That humans have that potential is a belief-based conjecture as we evidentialists note. Before breakfast, however, I’m a fideist, which is the source of my extreme cornucopian optimism.
In short, the 'Voluntary Refugee/eMigrant Movement for a Prosperous Way Down' idea is to transition from nation-states to watershed (or sub-watershed) management units (likely one at a time) each less than 100km averaged radius. This would be alternative to the one egg of our global economy in one basket Earth and put 5,000 or so watershed management units in 5,000 baskets, interconnected but not fatally dependent on the fossil-fueled growth of the global economy. Limited interwatershed trade would be based on emdollar evaluations, and the biophysical economies of each would be managed to support such populations of pets, livestock and humans the area can support, and so on, such that not all of humanity's eggs are in one basket.
The only bit verging on novelty is my proposal that each unit take in ten times more refugees than the watershed area could support sustainably. Becoming a refugee (from 17th century French réfugié ‘gone in search of refuge’. The word, like everything else, has been politicized by intelligentsia types—for example, you can only be a refugee if you cross a nation-state claimed imaginary political border devoid of biophysical meaning, unlike watershed borders, and per UN crossing an international border while fleeing a natural disaster is disqualifying) involves forfeiting the 'right' to reproduce. Nature determines the sustainable population of a watershed area, no one gets a vote, and births would equal those needed to maintain the sustainable population (as determined by best-guess of system ecologists or population biologists). Initially few willing and able to have children would reproduce, but in less than one lifetime rapid population degrowth would mean the average woman could have 2.1 or so. Initially dry foods with 50+ years storage potential and temporary building materials for the surplus population would enable population degrowth without negative Malthusian feedbacks, nor the 90% to 100% loss of information typical of the collapse of complex societies (currently there is only one for the first time in history). Refugees could pass on their memes if not their genes. Initially agriculture, without fossil fuel inputs, would produce condiments to go with the stored food diverted from current animal feed production. I have a special interest in 'real solutions' and merely claim my proposal could work. If not, I'd like to know. Note that a voluntary refugee plan selects for foresight intelligence, while the current SYSTEM selects against it.
Political systems are ephemeral. The Feudal system and its 'Divine Right of Kings', aka 'God's Mandate' narrative gave way to the 'Growth's Mandate' narrative of the Industrial Revolution, which could give way to the Global Caliphate or to those carrying a cross and wrapped in a flag, among many other unforeseeable systems of demagoguery as usual during descent. Alternative would be a foundationally different sociopolitical economic system based on a 'Nature's Mandate' narrative. The first watershed management unit could self-organize when the first 100,000 voluntary refugees worldwide, 0.0014% of humans, agreed to vote with their feet. Help form natural scientists would help make it happen. The current political systems and corporate entities will at some point be irrelevant or non-existent. 10 years? 50 years? 500 years? It will vary as the number of failed states increases.
At one point in the early 1930's, about 15% of Californians supported the Technocracy Movement that M. King Hubbert was the instigator of. If the descent had not been self-inflicted, but had been biophysically based, another year or a few could have seen a foundational change in the political system such that nation-state legal entities would be the stuff of history books. I envision a United Federation of Watersheds to define biophysical limits and for each watershed unit to support a militia that normally provided interwatershed transport by land and sea, but should any member watershed be attacked, all watersheds would cooperate to provide a defense. There are other details, but I certainly don't foresee the current SYSTEM being tweaked into a Federation of Watersheds. Humanity may come to 'a teachable moment' and I'm thinking we should be ready for it. The public's willingness to consider the 'crazy ideas' of the Technocracy Inc. informal think tank was totally unforeseen by all.
"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know... I was in New York in the 30’s. I had a box seat at the depression. I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We’re doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929–30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it’s not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history... Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered." —M. King Hubbert
At some point some (5% or 375 million? 1% or 75 million? or 0.1% of humans?) may consider 'unique' solutions. Until then, of course, it will be business-as-usual (for a time, a reasonable and informed guess of the coming climax would be between 2030 and 2070 followed by rapid descent as usual, but 2020 or 2120 is conceivable, as is 'energy too cheap to meter' that could extend the pulse up to a millennium or two until the Dyson Sphere is complete).
"If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing." —H.T. Odum
"True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true." — Laozi
‘Ecological Footprint’
Sustainable consumption?
Net Primary Productivity 20–31% consumed,
60% of freshwater runoff used = Anthropocene era so far.
But we can do "better": we could consume 80% of PP with 80% reduction in bio diversty
by the end of this century (by growing the economy, stupid), or join the 80%80 Movement ASAP!
We live alone in so far as our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions fail to note the interconnectedness of all things that are not things, not permanent nor separate, especially such things as live within the crust, in the crust's soil, on the surface of the land and in the waters and air on up to the stratosphere. We are such things as life on Earth is made of (star stuff). We of industrial society fail to know or note that we are the environment. We fail to live as if we are the world and In this we are alone.
All other beings live as if they were the system, without pretense or belief in exceptionalism. None but humans think of themselves as selves, the original pathology. I live alone in a world of pathologies because none of my fellow pathogens can own up to their pathogenicity, can let go of their cancerous lives. It feels better to believe oneself special, to be a little lower than the angels (or better than non-existent angels).
Needed changes include the destruction of technoindustrial society on down to social greetings: Instead of "How ya doin?" learn to say, "How ya path'n?", which, as everyone will know, is short for "How are your pathologies altering you now?" The implication that all humans living in industrial society are to some degree living a pathological life, as a pathogen, will be accepted as a truism, because, well.....
Destroy industrial society? Negative Malthusian feedback loops will suffice, but destroying the belief in Growth's Mandate, one mind at a time, will be a good start. Those who become unbelievers will become voluntary refugees who will endeavor to self-organize to form long-term functioning complex societies, watershed management units, able to resist conquest by those who do not listen to Nature nor learn from history.
Proposed talk at Degrowth Conference: First draft
The Voluntary Refugee Movement for a Prosperous Way Down
Refugees from industrial society can vote with their feet and sever their dependency on the global growth economy. Initially widely dispersed, they will move to watershed management units whose biophysical economies will operate per known energy principles (H.T. Odum, C.A. Hall, et al.) and limits defined by Nature.
Are there limits to growth? 
Are we in overshoot? First, let's degrow the economy to lessen humanity's footprint.
And, let's degrow the human population at the same rate to maintain per capita consumption of needed resources (water, food, education) to reduce our footprint and lessen....wait... 
There seems to be an elephant in the room, but let's agree to ignore it.
How much degrowth, beginning in the North, is enough?
Some will barely notice the degrowth to come:
Of course elites living in the cities will notice.
If depopulation were thinkable, what is the long-term carrying capacity of our planetary life-support system?
[Georgia Guidestone's 1980 500,000,000 graphic]
- Howard T. Odum, systems ecologist, 500,000,000
- E.O. Wilson, polymath, 200,000,000
- Jack Alpert, engineer, 50,000,000
Sorry, that damn elefante came back.
Normal humans tend to think in terms of political solutions and joining movements:
So, to SAVE THE WORLD you could join the:
[show list but read only every other one]
1. Enough is Enough Movement
to transition to a steady state economy, as if that were still possible.2. Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
3. Millennial Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere
though not necessarily in that order of importance.
4. Freedom from Big Sky Daddy Tyranny Foundation
5. The International Society for BioPhysical Economics
for evidence-based economics.
6. Voluntary Eunuch Society
7. Prosperous Way Down Movement
for a non-business-as-usual alternative to growth for its own sake.
8. Celebrate Celibacy Society
9. Anti Anthropocene Movement
to get right with Mother.
10. Association for Human/Pet/Livestock Population Management
Or you could:
Empower women, educate women, provide free birth control, offer micro economic support for women (e.g. Kiva), encourage women to depower men, support a woman's right to not have children, legalize the public pilloring of convicted rapists. Return to the Mother, the Earth Goddess, Aluna, Gaia, Mother Nature.... Or otherwise GET RIGHT WITH REALITY.
'Reality', aka 'What-is', i.e. Nature, the nature of things.
And also work to depower the 1 percent, which, of course, requires:
Political solutions: (which are always humancentric)
- First, kill all the empire builders [stop reading] (financial, economic, political, religious, media, exploiters of Nature and commoners,... aka white people—I'm 'white', all my ancestors in the past three hundred years have been empire builders, and I want to depopulate the planet of humans, so I'm a 'racist' and I agree I should be killed or perhaps be allowed to kill 100 or more white people first, as that will help depopulate the globe, even though not in the way I advocate),
- then kill all the lawyers. Next,
- de-employ the intelligentsia, the politicized non-evidence-based academics and media talking heads and typing hands,...
- strangle the last kings,
- with entrails of last priests, then marginalize
- televangelists,
- gay conversionists,
- and politicians.
OR CONSIDER:
Naturocracy solutions (always naturcentric, i.e. let's iterate 'towards real solutions'):
- Form the United Federation of Watersheds,
- run for office on the Ecolate Party Platform,
- protest unsustainable denial,
- or ...
Become a Voluntary Refugee
Join the Voluntary Refugee Movement for a prosperous way down by degrowing the economy by 80 percent and degrowing the human population by 80 percent as soon as possible.
Whose's a pathogen? I'm a pathogen. I've been living the pathogenic life since my birth as an elite hyper consumer who is now living alone in a world of pathologies (alone—given that I appear to be the only pathogen to self-identify as such).
Let's talk about degrowing the pet, livestock, and human populations, which includes elite pets and exceptional livestock. I'm guessing 80 percent of those who may still have been listening just stopped listening because of the elephant thing, but I'll continue.
Voluntary Refugee Movement for a Prosperous Way Down
Voluntary movement, as in voting with your feet, is alternative to continuing to serve unsustainable industrial society.
Living in a prosperous enough, cooperative, complex society based on interconnected trust, one that could actually persist as the centuries pass, will matter to posterity who will inherit patterns that work as, if they don't, human extinction is the alternative. We are tasked to pioneer new patterns that work by listening to Nature.
The unmanaged commons selects for empire-building. Competing empire builders select for larger principalities, nation-states, corporations and other complex systems that fail to manage their environment, power, and society to persist as the millennia pass (see past 11,000 years of history). The only real solution is to ‘change the rules of the game’, the contingencies of selection.
Those who would rather know than believe, those who can actually think more than a decade ahead, have the potential to opt out of the current SYSTEM. Abandoning the Empire, its unsustainable economy and social system, will seem increasingly imperative as the onset of multiple system failures becomes more obvious.
The fork in the road: (1) Continue to serve the SYSTEM. (2) Consider alternatives to nation-states and the corporatocracy, perhaps 20,000 watershed management units (WMU), less than 100km in radius, managed within limits as determined by Nature, i.e. the nature of things as evidenced by best-guess systems ecology.
Here's the big idea. It may be possible to manage a complex society, well above the tribal level, without empire-building, elite consumption, or collapsing the life-support system. Each WMU to live sustainably on local resources and some interwatershed trade. Accomplishing this feat may already have been done by the Tairona of Colombia.
We can go on talking about what to do, about policies, causes, projects, 'solutions', but let's consider one real solution before we die and perhaps vote with our feet to make it happen. First, sell all your assets in industrial society, then gift the money to a watershed management unit of your choice, who would have you as a member, to help purchase most of the land within a selected management unit. Your gift will allow you to become among the initial pioneers, a voluntary refugee from industrial society. Your contribution, if above average, may allow you to influence whether your children or grandchildren are accepted as refugees when the time comes (i.e. when they wake up and agree to abandon the sinking ship of the global technoindustrial growth hegemon currently composed of nearly two hundred sub-states, that could be replaced by 20,000 or so watershed management units). In this way you may be able to pass on your genes. Otherwise you will spend the remainder of your life working to pass on such memes you may possess, that will contribute to the long-term prosperity of your watershed management unit, including the prosperity of those humans living within it.
Money in excess of what is needed to purchase enough of a watershed area to manage it will be used to purchase building materials needed for future short-term refugee housing and for enough dry foods, mostly grains, that can be stored for 50+ years to feed the surplus population of refugees. Each watershed management unit (less than 3.1415 million ha in size) will take in ten times more humans than the environmental resources of the watershed can sustainably support while using less than twenty percent of the watershed's surface area. Those agreeing to become refugees will agree to forgo any 'right' to reproduce. The sustainable population, one tenth the initial population, will determine the number of births per year needed to maintain that population. As for how many, no one gets a vote. The number of permitted births could be distributed by lottery or other means. Failure to enforce the limit as determined by best guess of systems ecologists and population biologists would eventually overshoot and collapse the system (as usual—see last 11,000 years of history).
One watershed in a region would likely not survive conquest by outside groups. Multiple watershed management units within a region would each support a mobile militia pledged to come to the defense of any other watershed management unit. Members of the United Federation of Watersheds, in addition to defense, would share information. Federation Embassies would provide other services. Members would agree to Federation defined limits. Interwatershed trade would be based on emdollar evaluation with overview by the Senate of the United Federation of Watersheds governing body.
Watershed management units will be named WS+four digit number in hexadecimal allowing for up to 65,536 designs, of which 5,000 to 25,000 may be reduced to practice assuming a statistically significant number of humans volunteer to live in Federation watershed management units. The Federation thereby selects for foresight intelligence. Otherwise all Federation watershed management units will be conquered by outlying empire builders per business-as-usual.
So, it may be possible to manage a complex society, well above the tribal level, without empire-building, elite consumption, or collapsing the life-support system. Accomplishing this feat may already have been done. We may have something to learn from the Tairona of Colombia, but we know too little of them.
"Kogi ideas about the structure and functioning of the Universe, and Kogi cosmology is... [pay attention, bitches] a model for survival in that it molds individual behaviour into a plan of actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources. In this manner the individual and society at large must both carry the burden of great responsibilities which, in the Kogi view, extend not only to their society but to the whole of mankind." [or humankind] (‘Training for the Priesthood among the Kogi of Colombia’ in Enculturation in Latin America 1976. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. Emphasis added.)
Presentation paper Aug. 20, 2018 as presented.
Degrowth talk and slides more or less as given September 4, 2018.
Hu-mans Wake Up!
