Exploring Civilizational Overshoot and Modern Techno-Industrial Culture
Ruben Nelson, 2020 presentation to CACOR plus transcript
The Short of It
We MTIed (Modern Techno-Industrialized) ones are not part of any transition to a viable form of human (posterity). We can only end, though elements of our form, its flower and fruit (e.g. Hubble/Webb images) may persist.
Instead, we need to find and face actuality: transcend, leave behind metastatic modernity. To choicelessly do so — know then thyself as modern human (without thinking good or bad).
To know (not believe, but understand) that your form is not different in kind from a metastatic pancreatic cell, will interfere with our Anthropocene enthusiasm (have a lethal effect on human exceptionalism and help us moderns to embracing the coming fall from our hubris heights).
AI Overview
Ruben Nelson introduced the concept of “civilizational overshoot,” arguing that modern techno-industrial (MTI) cultures are in a complex, self-created crisis. He compared this to flies trapped in a bottle, suggesting that MTI cultures are similarly unable to escape their own complexities. Nelson emphasized the need for a new form of civilization that transcends modernity, advocating for a meta-reflexive, integral, and wise approach. He highlighted the importance of women’s education and empowerment in population control and discussed the potential for geoengineering to mitigate climate change. The discussion also touched on the role of religion and the need for a collective consciousness to address these challenges.
AI Outline
Civilizational Overshoot and Modern Techno-Industrial Culture
Ruben Nelson introduces the concept of civilizational overshoot, developed with evolutionary scientist Bill Rees.
Nelson explains the analogy of flies trapped in a fly bottle to illustrate the complexity and potential death of modern techno-industrial cultures.
He emphasizes the need for reflexivity to understand and overcome civilizational overshoot.
Nelson discusses the trauma in the United States since 9/11 and the lack of effective leadership in processing it.
Levels of Generality and Cultural Constructs
Nelson introduces the concept of Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) culture and its blind spots.
He explains the importance of moving to a higher level of generality to understand and address complex problems.
Nelson differentiates between culture and form of civilization, using the example of the environment as a social construction.
He discusses the constructivist view of culture and the differences in environmental understanding between modern and indigenous perspectives.
Form of Civilization and Cultural Shock
Nelson defines form of civilization as a shared human way of knowing, experiencing, and being in reality.
He explains the concept of culture shock and how it differs between modern and indigenous cultures.
Nelson discusses the historical evolution of human cultures from nomadic to settled agriculture-based empires.
He highlights the modern techno-industrial form of civilization and its potential for collapse.
Modernity and the Need for Transcendence
Nelson argues that modernity is not sustainable and that a new form of civilization is needed.
He discusses the limitations of modern techno-industrial culture and the need for a new culture that is beyond modernity.
Nelson introduces the concept of a public wake for the industrial age to grieve the passing of modernity.
He emphasizes the importance of consciously co-creating the next form of human civilization.
Transcript
0:00
So, here we go. I’m delighted to be here. I’m going to speak for about 30 minutes, just so to set your expectations, and then I’m happy to engage in conversation, listen to your comments. I’ve been a member of CACOR for a long time, and I’m delighted that it we’re learning to use Zoom, because it has the promise of helping CACOR become much more of a national organization since I moved to from Ottawa 31 years ago, awkward to participate.
0:35
So this is great. I want to thank you all, particularly those of you in Ottawa for doing this. I want to share a new concept, civilizational overshoot. It’s a concept I developed a couple of years ago for speech in San Francisco, and then Bill Rees, and I assume many of you know his work, if you some of you may know him personally, extraordinary. Evolutionary scientist out in UBC. He and I did a session at the recent triple AS annual meeting in Seattle under the heading of, will modern civilization be the death of us?
1:16
And we argued that it will; this is one of Bill’s slides.
You know, you may know that he is the father of the concept of the human footprint, and he argued, has argued for a long time that we’re an ecological overshoot, and he and I now argue that we’re also in civilizational overshoot. And what’s more, if we’re actually going to deal with ecological overshoot, we have to understand and deal with civilizational overshoot.
1:53
So that’s the logic of the two of them. So we’ll turn to Wittgenstein, a philosopher in Vienna, who was once asked, What is your aim philosophy? And he said somewhat enigmatically, to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.
You can see a fly bottle there on the right hand side. And what you can’t see from this angle is that the bottom of that pop bottle is actually cut out, and there’s sugar water placed in the bottom bottle.
2:25
And flies have developed evolutionarily enough that they can sense where there’s food, some distance away from the food. So they pick up that signal, fly down in through the top bottle, through the narrow neck, into the bottom bottle, and they can fly around and think there’s food, and it’s great, except, of course, they can’t get out. Fly bottles are fly traps, and the flies are meant to die.
2:49
So you can see where I’m going with this, that the view of civilizational overshoot suggests that we in modern techno industrial cultures that are form of civilization. We are now living like the fly. That is, we can get into situations that are so complex that we ourselves can’t understand them, and therefore we’re on a path to death.
3:19
The difference between us and the flies is that, in principle, we have enough reflexivity we can, in principle, understand this. And the question is, well, what do we have to do to do that? And one of the answers is, understand civilizational overshoot, because this is not something that we understand now. It’s not yet an established concept in the literature, and so we’re at risk.
3:47
And so the question I ask is, how do we overcome the blindness? MTI stands for Modern techno industrial. That’s us. That’s who we are in our culture, the OECD world, broadly, and as Louise Penny said in her second last book, nothing good ever came out of a blind spot. And we know that. We know that when we’re blindsided, that is when we’re we’re hit by something that traumatizes us and we’re not expecting it, that it’s far deeper trauma than if we mishandle something we see coming and that we’re expecting.
4:24
And all you have to do is think about the trauma in the United States from 911 and the fact that there has been no leader since that time, not at the time, and not since that have helped the Americans process this in a way that it’s helped deal with their trauma.
4:42
And so since 911 the trauma in America from 911 has got deeper and deeper and deeper, and they’re increasingly neurotic, and this is not good for them. It’s not good for us. So Einstein said, well, one of the ways to see better if we are blind, to see. Something is to go to a higher level of generality, because you can’t solve problems at the same level that quote from Einstein is well known by now.
5:08
And Bill and I apply this to our form of civilization. That is that we in modern techno industrial cultures, cannot deal with the problems we’ve got ourselves into without, in fact, moving to a new level of generality. And so here three levels.
You can think of subcultures, which you can understand within a subculture, but you can see them more clearly if you look from the point of view of the whole culture and how the subculture fits in the culture.
5:39
And in the same way, you can see our culture more clearly if you move to a higher level of generality, namely the form of civilization. So the important point here is simply that the language of a higher level of least a form of a form of civilization is a higher level of generality. And so the two critical concepts are culture and form of civilization. The most common use of culture, if you say it to most people in our culture, they think of arts and culture.
6:09
So that’s that little c in the in the blue space. But we also use culture that’s equivalent to the whole of the blue space. That in lots of sentences and lots of times, people talk about culture as if it’s the whole of society. And so the triple bottom line is often talked about environment, the economy and culture.
And of course, if you’re an environmentalist, you draw the diagram that way, the way Bill and I use it we mean it this way. We’re both constructivists when it comes to our ontology and epistemology. That is, as human beings, we we create the worlds we live by as social constructions.
6:50
And so even the environment is for us a social construction in the modern world. In other words, if you think of the environment in a modern way, it means very different things than it would, for example, to Leroy Little Bear, who’s a Blackfoot elder in the blood reserve in southern Alberta. And Leroy can talk knowingly about both Blackfoot metaphysics and modern metaphysics and how they’re different.
7:18
And he will tell you that what Blackfeet mean by the environment is not at all what we mean. And even in my lifetime, when I was a child, there was no environment. There was indoors and there was outdoors. The environment is something we’ve literally co created in modern culture in my lifetime. And that makes the point that I’m making.
7:40
Northrop Frye, the great Canadian literary critic, understood that cultures make sense for us and of us. We’re all born into a culture that makes sense of the world. We absorb that. And as Frye points out, whatever culture produces, whatever is a symbol of that culture. He understood it as a CO as a system and Stafford Beer. Some of you in Ottawa will remember him from when he lived in Toronto and used to come to Ottawa.
8:12
I have great memories of lying on Kathy stars living room floor with him. We were all children of the 60s in then Pierre Trudeau, early 70s. And of course, he points out that cultures are systems, and that the kind of problems we identify and think they’re just mistakes we can fix are actually outputs. And we know from other work that cultures are path dependent, that once you’re formed in a culture, the inclination for both persons and the culture is to keep that culture going.
8:46
If you don’t believe that, look at the behavior of those of us in Alberta who have are now path dependent on oil and gas and by God, would rather destroy Canada than change our path. So that every culture makes an unconscious bet that the way it construes reality actually has an adequate grasp on reality, and what it takes is knowledge it can be trusted with one’s life.
9:15
And yet we know that whole cultures can live by mythic systems that get it wrong enough for the culture to go into ecological and cultural overshoot, and when they do, they collapse. And what Bill and I are doing is upping the ante by saying it’s not just ecological and cultural overshoot, as if the American culture can collapse, that Canadians will be fine, but rather the whole form of our modern techno industrial civilization is at risk. So let’s think then about the different uses of civilization. It’s what philosophers do of add subscripts to different senses of the word so we can distinguish them and not be confused.
9:57
And the ones in yellow are. The subscripts the uses of civilization that we deem to be acceptable. So civilization G is global, as in the sentence, civilization is now at risk. That means the whole of humanity. Perfectly good sentence, and it’s a legitimate use of the word civilization. Civilizational is the original term, as you may know.
10:26
It emerged in the 1700s in France, drawing on the Latin that it meant people who were civilized were the people who lived in towns, which meant that our indigenous cousins were uncivilized, and of course, the Europeans that came from Europe to Canada and met indigenous people here treated them that way. And by and large, that is deep in our psyche even now.
10:53
And what we’re saying is that that use of civilization has to be struck from our mouths. If you use it that way, wash your mouth out with soap. We don’t pay attention to the 17th Century views of women or of people with dark skins. Why should we pay any attention to the use of the language of civilization? But there’s also the language subscript p that means geography.
11:20
So the talk of Eastern or Western civilization is very common, as if, in fact, these are well formed concepts, but they’re not. There’s nothing in the Earth’s atmosphere. That means that geographically, there’s something about living east of Iran, maybe that makes you think one way and west of it in another. Because if you actually understand what people mean by Eastern imagination, you will find that it maps on to most indigenous ways of thinking.
11:54
It also maps on to the ancient Hebrews way of thinking, which are part of the so called Western world. So that’s just confused stuff that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, as we as people were beginning to discover other people were around, and as we think more clearly, we can leave it behind. And finally, there’s a use of culture that is very common, that applies.
12:18
There’s a use of civilization that’s common, and what it essentially does is it’s equal to the integral use, the holistic use of culture that Bill and I and others are using, so that to talk of Chinese culture, to talk of Chinese civilization, there’s no difference cognitively in what you mean by it. If you’re talking in a holistic sense of culture, rather, is just an honorific.
12:45
That means that for cultures that are kind of big and long, lasting and impressive, we call them civilizations, or if they’re old enough, so we talk of ancient Greek civilization, nobody talks of Icelandic civilization. So it’s just an honorific and it has no cognitive content. So if we get rid of it, then it helps us think more clearly. So this form, the language of civilization that I’m thinking about today, means form of civilization. It’s always indicated by subscript f.
13:17
So indigenous people are a form of civilization in others, whether you’re indigenous whatever part of the world and whatever time of history, what we’re saying is that however dramatically different those indigenous cultures are, they’re still more like each other than any of them are like modern cultures. This is not good bad.
13:37
We’re just phenomenologically looking at it so that a form of civilization is a shared human way of knowing experience and being in reality and being human, the core paradigm of which is fundamentally different from the core paradigm of a different form of civilization. So that I draw your attention to the diagrams. The one on the left is just kind of a blank form of civilization.
14:02
And the thing that’s important about it is the big, thick, gray line that is around it. And what you see there is that a form of civilization can actually be defined cognitively and emotionally and spiritually and distinguished from other forms of civilization.
14:20
So it’s not just a vague notion. And what you see in the middle is a form of civilization that makes the point that there can be very different cultures in it, but those cultures are more like each other than they’re like cultures in other forms of civilization. So on the right hand side, there’s a second form of civilization. In this case, it’s not totally different from the one in the middle.
14:43
They’re both blue. One’s blue yellow, the other’s blue green. But the point is that the folks in the right hand form of civilization, their cultures, while different from each other, are still more like each other than any of them are like the cultures in the middle.
14:58
And I can use a very. I mean an example that that is true that some of the folks from the Stoney Nakoda, who are my neighbors, went to what we think of as Siberia and eastern Russia and visited their indigenous people. This is 12 or so years ago, and the interesting thing is, when they came back, they told us that they felt they were at a family reunion.
15:20
These are people that they’d never met before, but they realized that these people were more like them than any of the people who live in lack desert or in Canmore, who are their modern neighbors. And this is not a statement about whether they liked us or not, or whether we care for and love each other. It’s a statement of just culturally, they fit together in a way that was extraordinary.
15:47
And the core paradigm of form of civilization has to do with the way that the folks in this in the cultures of that civilization, know, imagine, think things through and conduct themselves regarding. And these are the three core elements, the nature of reality, the nature and power of human persons, relationship of persons to reality.
16:10
In other words, if you understand the ontological and epistemological assumptions that the cognitive content that goes into those three things, if they’re different enough, you may be dealing with a different form of of civilization, and not just a different culture.
16:28
So that this suggests that culture shock, if you if, if you’ve gone from Canada for the first time, if you’re those of us who are at all my age, we remember culture shock when we were very young, when we first left Canada to go to other countries, but they tended to be countries in what are we think of now as the modern world. And yes, there was culture shock, but it was nothing like the culture shock that we got when we went, when, for example, when Heather and I went and lived in India 50 some years ago that there was something about that that not judging it in a good, bad way, but simply phenomenologically.
17:07
These people, in significant ways, lived in a different understanding of reality and what persons were and how you relate to that, which means, then, that each form of civilization holds the possibility of actually doing the human as living beings on the earth in different ways, which means, then that the trajectory of history changes when a new form of civilization emerges.
17:35
Because what up to then has been an adjacent possible, in Stuart Kaufman’s terms, now becomes an actual, not just a potential.
And you can see that in the way that cultural anthropologists actually talk about our actual history, that two or 300 years ago, each each one of these colors are major forms of civilization, yellow, green, red, and we know that as we descended from our great ape ancestors and became Homo sapiens, two or 300,000 years ago, we all lived in small group, nomadic cultures for 95% of the time, we’ve been Homo sapiens.
18:15
And up until the Holocene, 10 or 12,000 years ago, as the Earth began to warm some of those people, only some of them. So the words in blue matter a process began that was optional and unconscious over very long time periods, centuries and even millennia, in local and regional places that some of the folks who had lived in small group nomadic cultures began to learn to live in local, settled, agriculture based cultures, and by the time that model was really clarified and crystallized, they didn’t even recognize their cousins and nomadic cultures as cousins.
18:55
And we’re back to their uncivilized and then eventually, about five or 6000 years ago, regional agriculture based empires emerged, China, Rome, Egypt, the Mayans. And then in the last 1000 years, we’ve been developing our modern, techno, industrial way of being in our own skins, being in the earth, experiencing ourselves and reality. And then, far more recently, there have been a couple of modern empires.
19:26
The British and the Americans were the only ones very good at it. And even the British lasted 100 years, and Donald Trump is doing what he can to make sure the American empire isn’t longer than 100 years. It’s part of the modern techno industrial myth. This is not globalization as phenomenon, as phenomenon. We’ve been discovering over a very long time that other people live in different parts of the world, although we haven’t found anybody we didn’t know was there for over 30 years.
20:00
Uh, so that, I mean, right today, we could give all seven and a half billion of us GPS coordinates and locate us all on the planet. But as project, as a as a cultural and civilizational project, globalization has been to take modernity and the market economy to the ends of the earth, and the fantasy is that that’s development.
20:25
We got really committed to it after the Second World War in development projects, and even sustainable development was an extension of that same development, although we kidded ourselves that sustainable development was really different. And now the UN strategic Sustainable Development Goals are both sustainable and development goals, and they fit.
20:50
They’re just an extension of modernity, and they’ll all become like us. And what’s more, they’ll all be better for it. And in 1989 Fukuyama blurted out in his silly little book that we were the end of history, that the rest of history is, in fact, what most citizens in modern cultures ask their governments for, and that is to continue modernity forever and ever, just improve it and make it better.
21:21
And so they support innovation, they support enterprise, they support entrepreneurship, they support creativity, as long as it gives them a better version of the modern world. So the normality that people want to go back to after COVID Is that world. And the question is, can it happen? So civilization overshoot?
21:46
I can now define that, having set that up, that what we mean is civilizational overshoot occurs when the core paradigm of the presuppositions of a whole form of civilization no longer enable the people or cultures in that that exemplify that form of civilization to make reliable sense of much less enable them to cope with the existing and emerging realities and challenges which characterize their time. In short, if your form of civilization collapses.
22:21
It means no culture of that form has a long term future. And if you think of indigenous forms of civilization, it’s reasonably clear and a pretty good bet, because it’s already two to 300,000 years old, that it’s robust and resilient enough that that won’t happen. But if you look at our modern form of civilization, which is the most recent you don’t have.
22:44
There’s a ton of data that is suggesting we are like the flies in the fly bottle, and we’re just having trouble coming to terms with it, that we’ve created complex, messy situations that we don’t even understand. And what’s more, we don’t yet have the humility to say we don’t understand it. So most of the people doing sustainability stuff are fighting with each other as to which of their solutions is best.
23:09
That is, they won’t even talk about the possibility in a serious way that our modern techno industrial form of civilization is an overshoot and facing collapse.
And so Bill’s reasoning is important here. The fundamental conclusion is that we have to transcend our modern techno techno modernism, and catalyze a personal to civilizational change that change at every level, from deeply personal to civilizational, into ways of being in the earth in which we live, spiritually satisfying lives more equitably within the means of nature.
23:48
Unless you think that bill is is peddling 19th century religion. What he’s saying by spiritually satisfying lives is that the world has to be meaningful for us, enough that there’s an intrinsic basis, not an extrinsic basis. There has to be an internal basis for self restraint, because without self restraint, it’s clear that we moderns destroy the world.
24:14
And the irony is that modernity rejoices in the fact that modern freedom means you don’t need to be self restrained. You’re only restrained by other people, and therefore, unwittingly, this is not a deliberate plot. We’re destroying the biosphere.
24:33
But as Bill points out, in a constructivist way, the means in which we apprehend reality determines the reality we apprehend. And as I’ve tried to point out, our way of apprehending reality doesn’t get reality now this is an extraordinary thing to say, particularly at a meeting of the American association with the advancement of science, because at the core of our modern way of apprehending reality is first enlightenment science. Science.
25:01
And the myth is that before first enlightenment science, there was ignorance and mythology. And now with science, we have objectivity in the truth and will go on forever. And what Bill and I are saying is sadly, that is not true, that first enlightenment understandings of the world do not get reality. And what’s more, we don’t get the fact we don’t get reality.
25:25
And so we’re not investing in trying to move beyond it, which puts us in both ecological and civilizational overshoot. So we don’t know in modern cultures that we have no long term future?
Yes, there are individuals who know it. There are even some organizations who know it. But there isn’t a politician in the world. There isn’t a president of a bank, there isn’t a deputy minister.
25:53
There isn’t even, at this point, many Anglican Archbishops who would take that seriously? University presidents, you have to hunt long and hard to find them. So we need a new culture that is beyond our modern, techno industrial way of being. And what’s more, that new culture has to exemplify a new form of civilization. And that’s the hard part. And if you think I’m just talking through my hat, here’s a Canadian example.
26:25
This diagram some of you may have seen. It’s from a horizons Canada report done for shirk. And as you know, shirk funds the humanities and social sciences in our universities. And about three years ago, shirk said to horizons Canada, which is the in house foresight group of the federal government, would identify for us the major challenges, the grand challenges of the 21st Century that we in Canada and the rest of the world have to cope with.
26:55
And shirk horizons Canada did an 18 month project, and this is the diagram of that they’re in their report, their reports on the horizons Canada website. You can download it. And what they’re seeing is that in these 16 spaces, or in some combination of them, in other words, some grand challenges may need things for more than one of these spaces, but in these 16 spaces or combinations thereof.
27:22
All of the major challenges that the Government of Canada and Canadians will face are here. And if we should look at that and say, well, on reflection, we think you’re missing something, they would point to that dotted box in the bottom left hand corner and say, Well, if there’s a 17th tell us what it is. We don’t think we’ve missed it, but tell us we’re open we’re open minded. And if we say no, that’s not really what we mean.
27:49
What we mean is that this way of grasping reality, this way of thinking, that you can take reality and its challenges and divide it up into 16 tidy silos, because if you look at that as an image, just as an abstract image, it looks like a classroom in the old days where the screws were the desks were screwed to the floor and face the front and the teacher is, as you know, at the front of the room. It looks like an org chart. It looks like an aerial view of downtown Calgary, where the streets run north and south and the avenues run east and west.
28:28
But what isn’t seen here is that the need to transcend modernity and mature into the next form of civilization did not even occur to them. It’s not even on their map as a candidate to think about, and tragically, this idea is not on the list of any grandson of any 21st Century grand challenges.
And you may know that the language of Grand Challenges emerged in the European Commission about 15 years ago.
28:54
There’s now dozens of them around the world, from church groups to the triple A s to governments, and none of them have this on their list. This is the group at Cambridge.
There are now a dozen of these kind of groups around the world dedicated to the study and mitigation of the risks that could lead to human extinction or civilizational collapse, and none of them have modernity on the list as a possibility even think about now, if I’m wrong, we can all sleep well at night, but if there’s anything into what Bill and I are saying, then we are in way more trouble than we know.
29:38
And there’s an irony here, as well as a profound threat that our MTI efforts to save the future now use and utterly trust and depend on the fitness of the very ways of knowing, being and living that got us into this complex living messes that now threaten our future, that is our modern, techno industrial ways of knowing, seeing things.
30:00
Working and living are the deepest source of our troubles, and as of today, we, who are MTI people, are not seeking to transcend or escape from that should be from the modern form of civilization that’s simply not on our agendas. Rather, we’re seeking to improve and extend the way of life of our MTI cultures by making them to be global, equitable and sustainable. And that’s what folks that’s what the SDGs are about.
30:32
It’s what most people who are talking about. What we can learn from COVID are, I don’t despise being kinder and caring for one another, if we don’t understand the deepest threat that will kill us, then the best that may happen is that we’re holding hands in friendship, all good as we die. And so the core work of the 21st Century is this. It’s not to improve and make modernity sustainable.
31:01
It’s not what we think it is. Rather, it’s to learn, to know, imagine, think through and respond to the actual situation that we’re in, and that’s a situation of ecological and civilizational overshoot, which means that we need to let go of and outgrow our MTI identities at every scale. This means as men, as women, as religions, as universities, as corporations, as business, as governments, as deputy ministers.
31:34
It means that all of the ways of knowing, imagining, thinking things through and responding are at least candidates to say we need to think about that, and we need to think about it in a holistic way. It’s a fantasy to think we can imagine a new economy without thinking about what this does for our spirituality and psychology, except that’s the way we’re going about it, so that even the things, the projects we hold up as transformative are more deeply modern than they know.
32:06
So we need to commit to the new work of consciously co creating the next form of human civilization by nurturing into resilient being consciously co creative persons and cultures. So in a sense, the blunt choice is to extend the modernity or transcend it. Now transcend.
32:25
This isn’t a value judgment in the simple minded sense of good bad, because to transcend means to build on so we’re taking modernity as given fact and giving thanks for and building on it, but moving beyond it, which means that one of the things we need is our public wakes for the industrial age.
32:46
We need to gather in places like our football stadiums, 50,000 at a time, and grieve the passing of modernity and as at a good weight, we will celebrate its gifts, and we will state and probably overstate the quality of them, but it’s what you do at awake as you mourn and grieve the passing of something you have loved and live by, but you also let it go, and on the right hand side, you see that a process that in history up to now has been optional, unconscious over very long periods of time and local regional is now required of us as a conscious exercise, rapid by any historical standard.
33:35
And ultimately, it doesn’t mean we have to do it all at once, but it has to be scalable to all of us on the planet.
And the view of Foresight Canada is that this hypothesis is worth investing in, developing and testing. And then you read to rinse and repeat, having invested in it, developed it to some extent and tested it, you find that it’s incomplete, and so you invest further, develop further, and test further. And it turns out that that may go on forever. Over to you, the future is in our hands, hearts, minds, heads and spirits.
34:18
We are co creating our future, whether we like it or not, and our view is that we should be co creating a future that we are far more deeply conscious of and far more honest about the situation we’re in, but that in fact, there is a way out of the fly bottle. It may be a thin thread, but there is a way out, and if we don’t know that, then we will be more depressed and hopeless than in fact is needed, and that would just add to the tragedy. Thank you.
The End
And have a nice Anthropocene.