Winning the Great Wager by Alex Steffen

“Some demographers think there are now more people alive than have ever lived, that for the first time since we came down out of the trees, the living outnumber the dead . . . And more folks keep showing up at the party. Our population is still growing . . . Small planet. Many people.” (Alex Steffen)

“There is no escape from the conclusion that the world’s growing population cannot attain a Western standard of living by following conventional paths to development. The resources required are too vast, too expensive, and too damaging to local and global ecosystems.” (2002 Jo’berg Memo)

“How long before we’re locked into that spiral and off to the ecological poor-house? No one knows for sure, but the scientific consensus seems to be converging on a figure somewhere around 25 years: if we haven’t stopped hemorrhaging natural capital by 2030, we may not have enough left to choose a different path. Everyone studying the issue seems to agree that if we haven’t made deep and profound changes to our impact on the planet by 2050, we’re almost certainly screwed. As Dana Meadows said, in an era where we seem to be running hard up against the limits of so many natural systems, the ultimate limit turns out to be time.” (Alex Steffen)

“When troubles come, they are not as single spies but in battalions.” (Shakespeare)

Planet’s shrinking, clock’s ticking: what to do?

This is the big question Alex Steffen is trying to answer in his draft paper he calls “the WorldChanging problem statement.”

He points to the following “four usual answers” that’s being put forward and argued comprehensively why they’re not the answer we’re all seeking.

• The first is “that we ought to let nature take care of the problem.” To which he said “There are, unfortunately, still people out there who think those of us in the wealthy part of the world ought to hunker down, arm ourselves and let everyone else die off.”
• The second usual answer is to go back. Some say that the answer to our looming problems can be found in a return to traditional ways of life. They believe that since modern, industrialized society is clearly unsustainable, the obvious answer is to go back to the way we lived before the steam engine and the coal pit had even been imagined.
• The third usual answer is that we ought to be going without. To be more fair, some say that in order to live more sustainably, we simply must consume less. We need to choose a path of voluntary simplicity. The root of all our ills is that we’re using too much in our effort to live more prosperously. Therefore, we need to scale back a bit, give up some prosperity, if we want to have a chance at reaching some sort of equilibrium with nature. Looking at our dilemma, it’s the pretty clear and simple answer.
• The fourth usual answer to our predicament is to barrel ahead and grow our way out of trouble. To this way of thinking — unfortunately still the default response to ecological problems among most of the world’s bankers, politicians and journalists — green follows gold. That is, the way to achieve sustainability is to first grow rich. Growing rich gives you the money to invest in more efficient and less environmentally damaging technologies, which in turn gives you a cleaner environment. There’s even a technical description of this process, known as the environmental Kuznets curve.

In trying to find the ultimate and extremely difficult answer–after dismissing most of the above “answers”, other than the need to consume less–he tells a whole range of problems confounding that effort.

What we need, then, is a new model. We need a new model which allows unprecedented prosperity on a sustainable basis. We need a new model which will let everyone on the planet get rich and stay rich, while healing the planet’s ecosystems. We need to create what some Brits call “one-planet livelihoods” which are so prosperous, so dynamic, so enticing that the alternative of chasing the old model of green follows gold seems simply moronic.

Both chaos and corruption make our work more difficult: so much so that any new model of sustainable prosperity needs not only to take them into account, but actually work to mitigate them. If the answer to our ecological crisis does not also lead to greater security for all, and help spread democracy and open government and business practices, it is in fact no answer at all.

So there we are. We need, in the next twenty-five years or so, to do something never before done. We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization. The model we replace it with must be dramatically more ecologically sustainable, offer large increases in prosperity for everyone on the planet, and not only work in areas of chaos and corruption, but help transform them.

“That alone”, he said, “is a task of heroic magnitude, but there’s an additional complication: we only get one shot . . . Change takes time, and time is what we don’t have.” He adds:

All of this means we have to come up with an answer which takes as a given not the natural capital we currently have, but the smaller pool of natural capital we’ll likely have when any proposed change actually happens. What’s more, any transition will require us to continue doing things as we are for a certain period of time, while we retool and redesign, and then spend a great deal of resources actually rebuilding. As we are already in ecological deficit spending, and that deficit is getting bigger, there is absolutely no reason to believe that we can try one thing for a couple decades, and then, if that doesn’t work, try something else. The living fabric of the planet, once converted to our uses, will never come back, at least not for millennia. There are no do-overs on a finite planet.

At the end of his article, he straightforwardly laid the great challenge before us:

We don’t say it in public, but we’ve placed a giant wager here on the future of the human race. The terms of the bet are this: we can move to a new model, a model based on a standard of sustainability higher even than that which we’d need today to fit within our [sustainable ecological footprint of] 1.9 hectares per person, but which provides prosperity to billions more, a prosperity equal to or greater than what today costs 10 hectares per person. And we need to do it in 25 years. And we need to get it right the first time. And the cost of failure is the planet.

. . . whether you or I like it or not . . . [w]e’ve already put all our chips on the table. We’ve bet the planet. And the cards are dealt. We’ve got to play our hand as best we can. We need, immediately and without reservation, to become the smartest, best and boldest gamblers in human history.

If we win that wager, we win everything: a future of endless potential and a planet worth living on. If we win that wager, there is reason to believe that H.G. Wells was right and that “All of the past is but the beginning of a beginning, all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.”

Hell of a deal.

Change your thinking

Lucky for us Alex and over fifty writers in his team is committed and working hard at presenting us with crucial solving pieces of the great puzzle day by day by presenting us with tools, models, and ideas for building a better future. Here’s their upbeat mission statement:

WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.

Informed by that premise, we do our best to bring you links to (and analysis of) those tools, models and ideas in a timely and concise manner. We don’t do negative reviews - why waste your time with what doesn’t work? We don’t offer critiques or exposes, except to the extent that such information may be necessary for the general reader to apprehend the usefulness of a particular tool or resource. We don’t generally offer links to resources which are about problems and not solutions, unless the resource is so insightful that its very existence is a step towards a solution. We pay special attention to tools, ideas and models that may have been overlooked in the mass media. We make a point of showing ways in which seemingly unconnected resources link together to form a toolkit for changing the world.

Every link we post is informed by technology, but the new possibilities we cover aren’t just high-tech. Sure, we all need to understand the uses (and dangers) of advances like biotechnology, the Internet, ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligences, “open source” software and nano-materials. But we also need to know how best to collaborate, how to build coalitions and movements, how to grow communities, how to make our businesses live up to their highest potential and how to make the promise of democracy into a reality. We need to understand techniques as well as technologies, ideas as well as innovations. How we work together is as important as the tools we use.

This is a conversation, not a sermon. We encourage not just feedback, but active participation, and, yes, challenge. Got a great idea for a resource we’ve missed? Let us know - better yet, write your own recommendation and send it to us. Think we’re off-base with a recommendation we’ve made? Let us know that, too, and what resource you think we should have covered instead. Changing the world is a team sport.

Let’s help them, help ourselves and help each other in winning this great wager.