Facing the Future Our Moment in History Jim Fournier January 14, 2008 Tipping Points

A new meta-narrative, an attempt to radically reframe the story that we tell ourselves about reality.

In Most Arguments Both Sides Are Right in What They Affirm and Wrong in What They Deny John Stuart Mill

The Global Trajectory?

Long-Term Population Growth Global Population: Milestones, Hopes, and Concerns Vaclav Smil, PhD http://www.ippnw.org/MGS/V5N2Smil.html

Peak Population? http://hydro.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/GW/data/global/ciesin-sres/

Population S-Curve http://www.gcrio.org/CONSEQUENCES/summer95/fig1.html

Population J-Curve? http://www.beyondpeak.com/scenarios/stanton3.gif

Peak Oil http://www.peakoil.org

The Green Party View

Global Energy Use Per Person Has Actually Stopped Growing http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/03-04/biomass/ background%20info.html

But the Population has Not, and thus CO 2 is Still Growing http://www.climatechange.gc.ca/english/publications/ap2000/Action_Plan_2000.htm

1000 years of Atmospheric CO 2 level and Temperature http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/millenniumCO2.htm

CO 2 , Methane and Temperature over the last 160,000 years http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/chem/gases/images/meth_temp.gif

Actual Arctic Sea Ice http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2007/seaice.shtml

Overall Consumption Is Still Growing http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/kerr_02.htm Natural Resources

All Represent Absolute Limits to Population http://www.millenniuminstitute.net/publications/images/G2R.html_img_10.jpg

All Put Biodiversity At Risk http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org/xp/Hotspots

What Are We to Make of the Current Global Situation? http://www.maa.org/devlin/GordianKnot.jpg

One Biological Metaphor Is Cancer

If we do not curtail our destruction of the biosphere, and halt our population growth very soon, not only will we face a die-off of most of the human population, we will foreclose the possibility of a viable world for all future generations.

Will Humanity Turn Out to Be Like a Colony of Mold in a Petri Dish?

Or Like An Embryo

Using The White of the Egg to Grow

A New Form of Complexity? © James L. Fournier

Virtually all cultures have some tradition wherein it is understood that for an individual to arrive at a state of greater integration and spiritual realization, that person must first undergo a process of psycho-spiritual death and rebirth.

At the same time, numerous cultures all have prophesies that seem to foretell either, The End of the World , or The Birth of a New World , or both.

Australian Aboriginal

African Dogon

Native American

The Mayan Calendar

The Kali Yuga

The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

The Christian Apocalypse, Rapture & Second Coming

Even Karl Marx with his dictum, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, seems more like a prophetic mystic visionary than an economic theorist.

Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere? © James L. Fournier

It would seem plausible that whatever event is being foretold would at once validate all of the prophesies in retrospect, and yet therefore also necessarily turn out to be different than any of their culturally bound interpretations.

What could happen that would at once be sufficient to fulfill our collective psychic experience of the End of the World , while at the same time allowing a New World to be born?

One event that could fulfill both conditions would be an economic collapse and subsequent transformation of the global monetary system.

But everything we can see suggests that economics will be but one among a multi-dimensional set of discontinuities.

The Shift Point in Time © James L. Fournier

For the meta-narrative to be compelling it must at once include the mythic dimension, but it must also embrace and transcend the material and scientific dimensions – for a culture trapped in materialism nothing less will be sufficient.

Reframing the Evolution of Technology In the Context of Biological Evolution Roger Dean

Life First Derived Energy from Chemicals in the Primordial Soup

Until it had Eaten All of the Soup and had to Invent Photosynthesis http://fig.cox.miami.edu/~tkoop/spring00/blnphotosyn.html

Only After the Oxygen Released had Rusted All of the Iron in the Earth’s Crust

The Oxygen Level Finally Spiked Causing Spontaneous Combustion, and the First Climate Crisis

Respiration Took Advantage of All the New High-Energy Oxygen http://bioweb.wku.edu/courses/BIOL115/Wyatt/Metabolism/Glycolysis2.htm

Resulting in the Carbon Cycle http://www.energex.com.au/switched_on/energy_environment/energy_s_html_carboncycle.html

The Carbon Cycle Has Remained in Balance Ever Since – Up Until Now http://www.bom.gov.au/info/climate/change/gallery/images/9.jpg

Thus, Peak Oil can actually be seen as at least the second energy crisis, and Global Warming as the second atmospheric crisis, in the history of life on Earth.

Renewables are on track to replace fossil fuel within 50 years or less, even at current growth rates. Solar Wind Biomass

But the atmospheric CO 2 level is already so high that it is driving an accelerating loss of Arctic Sea ice. This could set off an irrecoverable feedback loop long before then, even if we could reduce all CO 2 emissions to zero today.

Actual Arctic Sea Ice http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2007/seaice.shtml

Both geologic storage of CO 2 , and seeding the ocean with iron to promote algae bloom to remove CO 2 , are proving unsuccessful in recent scientific tests. However, there are two little known methods of addressing Climate Change that could allow us to first temporarily reverse the warming, and then gradually remove net CO 2 from the atmosphere over decades.

Global Cooling is a geo-engineering scheme wherein a fine mist of sea water would be sprayed up into low-lying ocean clouds to increase their reflectivity. Initial modeling indicates that this could counteract as much as twice the warming so far, and do so by means of small robotic wind powered ships at a total global cost of less than $100M/year.

Biochar is perhaps the only beneficial method of removing net carbon from the atmosphere. By making a portion of waste biomass into agricultural charcoal the process removes net carbon from the atmosphere while increasing soil fertility. If fully deployed globally, biochar might remove all of the net carbon released from burning fossil fuels, within about 50 years.

http://www.biomassec.com

This allows us to imagine a scenario where Climate Change could prove to be an acute emergency, one that comes to a head within a few years, but one which must be dealt with by implementing both short-term mitigation and long-term solutions that will continue to be deployed over a period of many decades.

What if the crises we see on the horizon are not the beginning of a protracted dark age? What if the current model of infinitely accelerating growth is also incorrect? Many events that will be frightening to us may be exactly what must happen to make the leap to a truly sustainable long-term future, but what would that look like?

Buckminster Fuller First Described Humanity’s Option for Success

If Global Trends Decelerate, What Looked Like Log Curves and J-Curves May Turn Out to be Bell Curves and S-Curves

An S-Curve Implies a Future Plateau Characterized by Climax Technology © James L. Fournier

The Shift Point in Time © James L. Fournier

The Family Tree of Life is the True Measure of Wealth Tree of Life Web Project http://tolweb.org/tree

For all of human evolution Nature was something with teeth and claws that could jump out of the dark and eat you. Now, in a single generation that situation has been inverted. Nature is suddenly something fragile that we must protect lest we perish.

We are undergoing a point of inversion in matter and culture. From this point on our technological evolution in matter may be guided by the recognition of the potential for a climax technology, a state of Meta-Nature. A state as harmonious as nature in the coherence of its design, which, like nature, is the realization of a potential already inherent in the puzzle that is matter. Meta-Nature

GEOMAN © James L. Fournier

Silicon is Like the Next Octave of Carbon © James L. Fournier

Photovoltaics Capture Photons in Silicon Just as Photosynthesis Does with Carbon

From Wood to Hydrogen http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/energytransition.html

The Shift Point in Time © James L. Fournier

The Shift must reframe the perception of society, to at once validate everything that has happened to bring us to this point, while at the same time making it self-evident to everyone that we must each now radically change course in the light of this new found perspective.

What can we do that would hasten the most positive outcome? Where would we find the growing tip of the Noosphere? The obvious answer is – online.

Facebook & MySpace http://www.facebook.com http://www.myspace.com

LinkedIn Tribe http://www.linkedin.com http://www.tribe.com

Google Maps & Google Earth http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com

The confluence of online social networks and geospatial mapping offers a unique moment of opportunity for the emergence of a purposeful global social network; the wikipedia philosophy embodied in a truly distributed, decentralized, index, map and matrix based on self-descriptions of all entities engaged in global civil society.

care2.com avazz.org http://www.care2.com http://www.avazz.org

WiserEarth.org www.wiserearth.org

Each is at best an island, or at worst a walled castle. Each keeps your identity data (and relationship data) inside its own proprietary database. Like the Internet itself, a truly inter-operable digital identity system must be based on open standards.

To empower those holding various pieces of the solution to see how they can be most effective, we might create conditions to catalyze a self-organizing online map. There are, and have been, many efforts to do this that we might partner with, but to be effective one must walk a fine line of supporting, without claiming, the center.

© James L. Fournier