Second sight

Why would an apex species, in pole position after millions of years of natural selection, set fire to its only home, and then continue to fan the flames?

As a thought experiment, what attributes, if we could conjure them into existence, might have helped us avert the climate and ecological emergency we created? Stronger will, steadfast commitment, political courage and more scientific breakthroughs? These we will need and may be able to muster up. For a crisis of this scale and consequence though we will need more. Perhaps a very different level of intelligence? Better sensory apparatus? Greater sensitivity, so the better sensory apparatus can pick up even weak signals?  Intuitive  awareness of  large systems, exponential growth, the interconnectedness of everything? May be something else, something more? Without these attributes, even if we roll back the clock and start again we will likely end up in the exactly same place.

 Cognitive Myopia

We evolved to respond to things in physical and temporal proximity, the immediate, the local, today’s dangers, instant gratification, imminent  pain. Short-termism and localized thinking dominates our lives. The instant rush of endorphins that TikTok scrolling generates, drives us effortlessly into addiction, until a stronger digital drug arrives, whereas the mind-boggling, endorphin depleting challenge of the climate problem stops us dead in our tracks. For the last seventy thousand years our survival did not require us to see distant time, or develop a feel for exponential change, intuit large systems, or sense slow change. This cognitive blindness is hardwired into the human operating system. We can't perceive complex systems, such as our climate and ecological systems. And worse, we don’t see our blindness. We are blind to our blindness. 

It’s easy to see, in hindsight, why we could not see the perils of fossil fuels when we dug our  first oil wells, or how social media would take loneliness to epidemic levels instead  of eradicating it. We don’t have the means to see the planet and society-destroying powers of our actions until long after we unleash them. And even as we attribute this to our cognitive blindness, we have known for a long time that we and all generations to follow have to pay the price.

All meaningful climate action must be preceded by an acknowledgement of our meta-blindness, with a serious lowering of our jingoistic claims of rationality. We are not rational beings.We would not be in this situation if we were. The overwhelming view continues to be that we can rationalize, organize and engineer our way out of anything, including this. Yet another example of our blindness, masked by a higher order blindness, blind faith in our capabilities.

We need to discover the means to directly see, feel, intuit distant time beyond our individual lifespans, intuit non-linear change caused by cascading and colliding S curves, large systems on a  planetary scale, as well as  slow change at a glacial pace. All at the same time. We need meta-cognition, second sight, insight. Most likely with non-biological assistance and technological interventions, possibly trustworthy versions of AI, to fill our evolutionary blindspots. Without that any action we take will be pointless, and likely create more harm than good.

Groping in the dark

There are at least four major areas of acute cognitive myopia, if not total blindness. These are in addition to the one hundred and eighty or so  cognitive biases listed on Wikipedia, each of which also affects our worldview towards our ecological emergency.

Interdependence Blindness. In our highly interconnected system of government, economics, thought, politics, emotions, beliefs, technology, embedded in one indivisible system, no change is just local. We are not biologically equipped to grasp interdependence, second and third order effects. Dust picked up from the Bodélé Depression in Chad, an ancient lakebed where rock minerals composed of dead microorganisms are loaded with phosphorus, is blown across the Atlantic, to provide essential phosphorus to the Amazon forest. Turns out the 22,000 tons of this natural fertilizer that is delivered via atmospheric currents is exactly the amount the forest loses every year, a perfect zero-waste trans-Atlantic agreement for a very specific reorder quantity. Without the Sahara desert and its history, there would be no Amazon forest. (https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants). Our atmosphere and biosphere are not separable into component parts. Reductionist analysis will not work here.  Our climate actions must  be interdisciplinary, intergovernmental, inter-earth-systems, interspecies, inter-everything,  all simultaneously. 

 Non-linearity Blindness. We struggle to comprehend exponential change and the effects of positive feedback. While the Holocene lasted over twenty thousand years, the next ice age can set in in just a few decades, soon after we cross a cascading set of tipping points. An instant ice age may be a counterintuitive but likely outcome of global warming, as a result of shifting ocean currents and other factors. We can’t intuitively grasp non-linear change.  Covid spread through the world in sixty days. If you fold a A4 sheet of paper in half and repeat that fifty times, you will have the tiniest stack of paper that reaches all the way to the moon. One cent a day, doubled every day will yield five million dollars in a month! By expanding training parameters to 175 billion in GPT 3 up from a few thousand in GPT 2, the trajectory of AI capability instantly hit the steep slope of a S-curve.  The exponential progress in chip technology that Moore’s law predicted changed the world forever, for better or for worse. These are just a few examples and they are difficult if not impossible for us to intuit, even if we can mathematically work them out. We are perilously close to several climate tipping points but we are blissfully unaware of them, since everything looks relatively calm on the surface today. Any one of these tipping points could get spaceship earth into a positive oceanic and atmospheric feedback loop, triggering exponential and rapid changes beyond our imagination.

Distant Time Blindness.  We can’t see the long-term effects of our actions. Our blink-and-it’s-over mayfly-like life duration is the biggest expanse of time we have  access to. Eighty, may be ninety years, may be even a little more. Timescales of a million, thousand or even a hundred years are not palpable, making us distant-time myopic. Just as geological or evolutionary time scales are beyond our direct perception, so is the lasting effect of our  daily actions on the biosphere. It will take hundreds of years to rid the atmosphere of the CO2 we just emitted today on the trip to the grocery store in our SUVs, directly impacting twenty generations to come. We are not able to connect the dots. If we could, we would make very different choices. There is not a single parent who wouldn’t immediately make those different choices for their children's future. Instead we continue to exacerbate the problem every day.   Even if like the average human you put out only your quota of 4.8 tons of CO2 equivalent last year (you probably did many multiples of that if you live in the US), the little footprint you just left in our ever so thin and fragile atmosphere will be there until 2123 or even a thousand years, until 3023. We can’t see the connection between our trip to the grocery today and its effect over the next  thousand years. To avoid dangerous positive feedback loops and some really bad things happening at speeds we can’t imagine, our individual CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas emission has to go down to the target global average of 2.1 tons of CO2 equivalent annually. Very soon. That will require sacrifices, voluntary and legislated, beyond what most of us can contemplate. But if we could see far we would all naturally do the right thing and live well within the carrying capacity of earth would have come to us naturally.

Scale Blindness. Take a large system like our economy. It’s set in the larger system of our ecology where we have assumed infinite resources, infinite room, continuing dynamic balance. We built an economy around the idea of forever growth and planted it in our psyche as a universal truth. We didn’t need to earlier, but now we need to intuitively see  that a forever growing economy doesn’t make sense, it is not feasible. Not just rationally but more viscerally in our bones. At a conservative 2% annual growth the global economy will be three hundred million times bigger in a thousand years. That economy won’t fit in a hundred earths. And a thousand years is a very short time span, just 30 generations. Green growth is inadequate and the idea of de-growth will be political suicide for any Government.  Nothing grows forever, not even cancer. The uncontrolled growth of cancer cells eventually kills both the host and the cancer cells. We haven't adopted attributes of proven successful large systems surrounding us that have lasted millions of years, such as old growth forests, oceanic reef systems or even the Holocene that provided the stability for our civilizations to flourish. Dynamic balance, circularity, zero waste don’t feature in our lives and economies. There are success stories everywhere, where humans are not. If only we could "see".

Then what?

The solutions we devise today to tackle climate and biodiversity breakdown will contain the seeds of bigger future challenges if we are not cognizant of the built-in cognitive myopia we will be bringing to these solutions.

Sustainability leaders need to recognize we are, everyone is, missing critical sensing apparatus to grasp exponents, expansive time horizons, large systems, the total entanglement of every process and system on earth, all at the heart of any long-term sustainability decision. Systems theory is a good starting point, but it is only an intellectual construct. The intellect does not drive us, our feelings and emotions do. They are the generative force that makes us act. Without at least acknowledging this, and figuring out how to somehow mitigate for this blindness, it stands to reason that we do not have any shot at a sustainable future.