What is the future for humans and the environment? Will average global
temperature continue to rise? Have we passed the tipping point? There are now more
body mass of humans and domestic vertebrates than all wild vertebrate animals
on earth! In a few years there will be more plastic than fish in oceans and
most coral reefs could be gone! Is it “natural” that a handful of billionaires
own more wealth than the bottom half of humanity (i.e. more than 3.6 billion
people)? What hope is left a sustainable earth ecosystem? What does it take to
actually change things? Please share you views after you read these and other
questions below.
Will the newly elected President of Brazil help dismantle the last “lung
of our earth” (the Amazon rain forest)? With rampant capitalism and human drive
for survival, has the world increasingly become dog-eat-dog world? The
technology does prevent massive starvation that used to kill 20-40% of people in
any one region over a short period of time (as used to happen in in the Middle
Ages in Europe). And what of technology that is now so advanced that even a
student at the level of my master students in Biotechnology can engineer a
human, a deadly disease that can kill millions, or a cure for a certain cancer?
Rapidly improving healthcare and biotechnology allows us to quickly deal with
epidemic viruses and bacteria before they start. But is this compensated for by
environmental maladies leading to skyrocketing suicide rates, depression, learning
deficits, congenital birth defects and cancers?
I am over 60 years old and have spent all my life learning, helping
others to learn (I do not say teaching), writing, doing charity etc. I have met
over 100,000 people and my views and activism reached hundreds of thousands more
via writings, media appearances, public lectures etc. Yet I still feel like I
know so little about how the world works now let alone how it should work. I do
strongly believe in cooperative revolutionary thinking so I offer here a short
list of the above questions and others below to prompt a collective
brainstorming.
In my travels around the world (so far 48 countries), I see so much
injustice and so much suffering. I see democracy actually on the retreat as
increasingly those with money can hire the best minds and media to engineer
public opinions and voting. Fear has been the biggest weapon which allowed
elites to get massive growth in security to keep the masses down. The masses
are agitated but the elites think they can manage that like they did with the “occupy
movement” and the “black lives matter movement” in the US. The French
government is now “dealing” with the massive protests and the Israeli elites
and security services hope to deal with mass demonstrations of hungry refugees
seeking to return to their homes and lands. Increasingly billions of people are
becoming superfluous to the systems: they just do not need these masses. What
will people do when 99% of jobs today (of carpenters, doctors, nurses, shop
keepers, teachers, lab technicians, service personnel, taxi drivers) are
eliminated as automation takes over? People like Tom Friedman and Yuval Noah Harari
wrote books articulating how things are now and their views of some issues but I
believe they suffer from two main flaws:
They are guided by the notion of superior smart humans who “deserve” to
be in charge of human development. They still suffer from notions of “orientalism”
(see Edward Said’s book by that name): identifying with the dominant European
history they fail to connect to times when civilization came from places like
Ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, China, and Egypt. Elitist authors offer no recipes
for sustainable environment/ecosystems other than orientalist views. Should we
not listen to the native people and take nature into account?
While believing in social Darwinism, they forget that biological
Darwinism had a transformation with the modern synthesis and beyond. For
example we understand now things like jumping evolutionary change which can
create novel complex structures with minimal genetic changes (this is called punctuated
equilibrium or macroevolution). This results genetically from creation of new pathway
using existing genes. In social evolution we also see punctuated equilibrium as
change can be slow for a long time and then something revolutionary happens. See
for example (Guastello 2013. Chaos, catastrophe, and human affairs:
Applications of nonlinear dynamics to work, organizations, and social evolution.
Psychology Press; Somit, A. and Peterson, S.A. eds., 1992. The dynamics of
evolution: the punctuated equilibrium debate in the natural and social sciences.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.; Gould, S.J., 2002. The structure of
evolutionary theory. Harvard University Press).Are ideas like Marxism,
Darwinism, Relativity, Internet, and amplifying DNA by PCR causes of punctuated
social evolution in the same way as genetic “macro” mutations causes of
punctuated biological evolution?
Can few people change the world? The Cuban revolution started with 82
individuals and the computer and biotechnology revolution with even fewer! We
are always in awe of human creativity and ingenuity. But as the world has
become globalized, what will new (intellectual) revolutions look like and can
they happen in time to save the planet from the impending catastrophes like
nuclear war or global irretrievable climate change? While we think local groups
such as our nascent Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (palestinenature.org)
and thousands of others around the world are good, what organizational
structures are needed to start to foster such new more radical revolutions?
Amnesty International and Greenpeace and the International Union for
Conservation of Nature do very good work globally but will they be the source
of the needed new revolutionary ideology that transforms the trajectory we see
whether on human rights (witness Yemen) or the environment? Asking these
questions may prompt a discussion and further questions that can lead us to map
and work well or at least more efficiently for a sustainable future instead of
a dog-eat-dog world that leaves the last dog/human to wonder “what happened”? Please
give your thoughts on this blog: