Plantations in the Jungle

Abstract

How can we modify our economic, political and belief systems to produce a healthy, desirable, and sustainable civilization in a world of limited natural resources? This book answers the question first by examining the underlying challenges to civilization’s survival, next by studying how natural systems solve similar challenges and then by adapting and applying natural methods to the systems of modern civilization. The author’s results are painfully realistic but offer the reader hope and a practical course of action.

For example, one challenge comes from economic systems that require unending growth in global population and consumption to provide full employment and balanced national budgets. At some point in the immediate future, economic growth must end since the earth has limited resources and limited space. Economic globalization only hastens the day of reckoning because it dramatically increases the rate of consumption and destruction of vital but limited natural resources merely to transport people, goods and pollution around the world.

Economic globalization is politically justified by temporary increases in employment and living standards for some people. It is economically driven by increased profits; as measured by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), distorted by cheap, heavily subsidized transportation and an economic presumption that nature is worthless.

However, as this book demonstrates, a global economy or a global political system are unsustainable objectives, regardless of cheap transportation, advances in science and improvements in human nature, unlimited resources or strict limits on human population. As any system becomes larger or more efficient it simultaneously becomes less adaptable, less manageable, less responsive and more fragile. As farmers used to say “never put all your eggs in one basket.” Our individual and collective economic systems lack the capacity to heal themselves from within while sustaining full employment and balanced budgets.

All systems are compromises resulting from design principles and design tradeoffs. Natural systems, including microbes, immune systems, brains, ecosystems and evolution itself, evolved from principles and tradeoffs that favored adaptability and robustness. Civilization’s systems, including economics, politics, agriculture, architecture, computers and business, have evolved from principles and tradeoffs that favor short term economic efficiency.

Natural systems have thrived for nearly 4 billion years, during which time the biosphere has endured millions of changes and random catastrophes any one of which would annihilate modern civilization and with it most of humanity. Modern civilization and its economic systems are less than 300 years old and have thus far thrived only in periods of expansion and growth.

This book compares the design principles and methods that produce sustainable and robust natural systems to the corresponding principles and methods of modern civilization. It highlights the comparative risk/benefit tradeoffs.

The author, who is an engineer, goes on to describe a practical, sustainable and robust civilization in which mankind has applied the lessons of nature. This modern civilization could fulfill human wants and needs, and it would be intrinsically sustainable in a healthy biosphere. However, it is not an ideal civilization in the classic sense because its structure requires us all to embrace imperfections, uncertainty and diversity rather than to seek perfection, certainty and a global symbiotic oneness.

Finally, the author suggests a handful of simple, but gutsy, economic and political modifications that would indirectly, but inexorably set us on a path of transformation to a robust civilization in sustainable harmony with nature.

Preface

“I’ve often wondered if everything we’re achieving in Science will make a difference in the long run.” That thoughtful comment, made by Susumu Tonegawa, Nobel Laureate and head of MIT’s Picower Center for Learning and Memory (PCLM), launched a journey that produced this book. He made the remark during a luncheon with a few MIT alums in February of 2001. The meal was hosted by Bob Silbey, MIT’s Dean of Science, to promote financial support for CLM.

Susumu’s question generated a 45 minute, energetic, free-wheeling discussion about science, nature and civilization. I was enthralled as Susumu described how our brains and immune systems operate. He stimulated my respect for nature and made me acutely aware that my perspective as an engineer, entrepreneur and business executive was decidedly lopsided.

During the discussion I got carried away and

Efficient or robust? Take your choice

To illustrate the relationship between an efficient system and a robust one, let’s consider the makeup and performance of a cost efficient basketball team. Since only five people play at any one time, the most efficient team would employ only five players so as to minimize the cost of salaries, equipment, training, travel, etc. This team might win a game or two, but has no chance for a winning season. It is too fragile. If a player gets sick or hurt, is mismatched with a competing player, gets into foul trouble, or merely has a bad day, the team’s performance collapses.

Robust basketball teams have 8 or more bench players, people who sit on their butts most of the game. This surplus of team members is essential, but not sufficient, for robust competition. The bench players must also be competent, well conditioned and well schooled. They must train, travel with the team and get minutes in most games to maintain the teamwork and skills that enable them to contribute when called upon. The coach must appropriately train and play specific combinations of players to adapt to game situations and to varying strategies employed by competing teams.

It doesn’t take much thought to see that bench players are essential to a robust basketball team, or to any other team sport. But, how does this apply to everyday life? One example is found in our efforts to improve the cost efficiency of our medical system by eliminating duplication and waste. The initial results, decades ago, were positive. Galloping cost increases were temporarily slowed and in some cases reversed. Now, however, we have a system on the brink of collapse: medical professionals are overworked, there are chronic shortages of doctors and nurses (only partially alleviated by luring skilled workers from third world countries who desperately need them) and service to patients is compromised and increasingly rationed.

The price of medical care is again galloping out of control due to the shortages, from massive administrative and legal costs imposed to whip the medical system into perfection, and from a chain of middlemen including employers, insurance companies and the government, who pay some of the bills, rake off a percentage of the money and try to control their own costs in ways that are not in the best interests of patients or health care professionals.

suggested an hypothesis: “Nature’s systems are designed to be robust, whereas civilization’s systems are designed to be cost efficient. Efficient systems are intrinsically fragile!” This hypothesis was treated kindly, which was encouraging. (See adjacent column.)

I left that lunch determined to examine Susumu’s question more thoroughly. Over the next few months I studied natural systems and considered these questions about our civilization: What causes us to blindly pursue cost efficiency and gross over-consumption? What enables us to ignore the risks? Are there critical systems of modern civilization in which we’ve probably gone too far in pursuing efficiency? How has nature successfully balanced efficiency and robustness for billions of years? What could we do to properly balance efficiency and robustness so that modern civilization might thrive for at least another 100 years? The 100 year period is comparable to our own lifetimes. It is personal. It gives our grandchildren time to make improvements we can’t foresee that will further extend the life expectancy of civilization.

The more I studied, the more I realized that we were in deep trouble and appeared to be blindly increasing the probability of disaster. Accepting this new perspective wasn’t easy. It involved a five phase, gut wrenching process that still grips me. The process is identical to the one experienced by a person who feels healthy, gets a routine physical and is then told by his doctor that he is terminally ill and has only a short time to live. It was first described by Kubler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. My first reaction was denial; comforting beliefs of a lifetime couldn’t be wrong. My next reaction was anger at our collective stupidity and blame directed at others: politicians, lawyers, global corporations, religious fanatics, SUV drivers, etc. That was followed by bargaining: a futile search for a quick engineering fix that would let me return to my former life. Periods of depression followed when I realized there were no quick fixes and no turning back. Finally, I accepted some basic facts: Modern civilization is increasingly fragile. I am part of the problem. We are living on borrowed resources and borrowed time. Life is uncertain and messy. I was finally ready to do something based on a new awareness of reality.

So, what could I do, if anything? After all, millions of other people have understood and have acted on our predicament decades before I came to the party. They changed their own lives, formed numerous organizations, and wrote insightful books. They fought hard to achieve limited political successes in reducing pollution, addressing global warming, cleaning waterways and preserving ecosystems. These modern prophets, such as Rachel Carson, Lester Brown and Herman Daly have, for decades, fought rearguard battles while desperately trying to inform the rest of us of the need to change our ways and our civilization. After years of being aware of these people and passively cheering on their actions, while ignoring their suggestions, I suddenly found in them a source of vital information, inspiration, hope and examples of success. [1] [1] [2] [ 3]

The first thing I should have done was to transform my own life to a more environmentally friendly one. This belated process of personal transformation, after six decades of self indulgent consumerism, is slow, painful and largely unfinished. It is akin to tearing down and rebuilding a home while living in it. I am still uncovering a personal infrastructure of myths and rationalizations that need to be disassembled, refurbished and rebuilt. However, this personal struggle makes me acutely aware of and sympathetic to the enormous individual and collective resistance to voluntarily sacrificing our own perks for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

The first thing I decided to do was to write a book about how nature produces sustainable systems and how nature’s engineering principles might be applied to improve the systems of modern civilization. At the time I had little idea what these improvements might be, but believed that they existed. Plantations in the Jungle is that book.

“Plantations” represents the systems of modern civilization with their rational, hierarchical structures and controls, and their specific benefits. They include agriculture, construction, business, transportation, communication, economic, educational and political systems as well as our personal and collective belief systems.

“The Jungle” represents the biosphere and its natural systems including evolution, ecosystems, immune systems, and the brains in which we construct our belief systems. The jungle metaphor deliberately panders to our prejudices about chaos, relentless competition and uncertainty. As I’ll demonstrate in this book, nature is far more awesome and far more supportive than our prejudices about a jungle. Furthermore, natural systems, unlike our economic and political systems, remain healthy and robust during periods of growth, periods of stagnation and periods of decline.

What I brought to the table was my engineering background, success as an innovator, 16 years as CEO of an industrial computer company that promoted and benefited from globalization, and a reasonable understanding of how modern economic and political systems work and interact with each other. What I lacked was a comparable understanding of natural systems including biology, immunology, neuroscience, ecology and evolution. A crash course was in order.

In the spring of 2001, I submitted a proposal to Bob Silbey and Susumu Tonegawa. In exchange for a year back at MIT as an unpaid visiting scholar, free to do research in the libraries, to attend lectures and discuss issues with interested faculty and students, I would donate to CLM the book’s royalties, if any. I made it clear that I didn’t have any answers then and wasn’t sure I’d ever find any. I estimated the odds of this proposal being seriously considered at less than 1 in 10, but thought it was worth a try.

To my surprise the proposal was accepted. Jo-Ellen and I sold our Condo in Moraga, stored our furniture, rented a small apartment in Boston and in October drove from California to Massachusetts. For the next 8 months I worked out of an office in CLM and experienced one of the most stimulating and intellectually challenging periods of my life.

The significance of September 11, 2001

In the midst of moving we witnessed on television the tragedy of 9/11 and deeply felt its impact. I shared the feelings and concerns of most Americans. We were suddenly far more vulnerable than we had realized. How could this have happened to us? Why didn’t we see it coming? Who was to blame? Something drastic had to be done. How could we fix it?

I saw in this tragedy a haunting congruence between the World Trade Center and modern civilization. The WTC buildings did not collapse as a direct result of the planes’ impacts, and modern civilization will not collapse as a direct result of terrorists, shortages or pathogens. The twin towers demolished themselves when heat from the fires on their upper floors critically weakened their infrastructures. The fires raged for more than 30 minutes before each of the two buildings collapsed. It was the buildings’ own centralized and hierarchical potential energies, systematically created from the energy of fossil fuels during their 10 year construction process, which became the chaotic kinetic energy that destroyed them and killed over 2700 people.

Another plane crashed into the Pentagon and produced a similar fire. But fewer than 200 people died and only a small part of the building collapsed. The Pentagon is a lower tech, less efficient, more sustainable structure. Its strucutre contains far less potential energy and what it has is distributed over a wider area. [4]

Modern civilization is being transformed into a structure like the World Trade Center. It is increasingly hierarchical and centralized. Its infrastructures are physical and mental. They include our political, legal, economic and belief systems. These infrastructures have been erected over the last four centuries, in part from the energy of fossil fuels, to contain and control the physical and mental energies that keep civilization working.

Since 9/11, we have seen the fires of fear burn and soften our beliefs about openness, trust and equality before the law. We have seen our political reaction take shape as a war to eliminate all terrorists at home and abroad and as a fight against an “axis of evil.” Public expectations and political reactions, particularly those of the Bush administration, have already weakened the social and personal infrastructures upon which our democracy rests. Enormous budget deficits, record trade deficits and massive borrowings by the federal government and by homeowners have likewise weakened our economic infrastructure.

We must respond effectively to terrorist threats and to economic problems, but in a way that doesn’t self-destruct our civilization. Nature has better, more creative and more sustainable ways of dealing with threats. Nature’s methods are readily applicable in a healthy civilization as we will explain in this book.

Design tradeoffs, such as those between efficiency and robustness, or between security and openness are a normal part of engineering. Engineers know that all good designs come from prudent compromises. There are no free lunches, no advantages gained without compensating costs and risks. The best products are balances of tradeoffs that produce intended results, under specified conditions, for specific but limited periods of time. The most enduring products don’t produce the optimum results for a single characteristic, such as cost efficiency, but involve a balance between competing characteristics.

James Utterback in his book “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” points out that those products which emerged as long lived industry standards were not the best in any one characteristic, but among second or third best in several characteristics. He cited the DC-3 airplane as an example of a long lived standard in commercial aviation (p. 87). It wasn’t the cheapest plane of its day. It wasn’t the fastest. It didn’t have the greatest range. It didn’t carry the biggest payload. But it provided the best combination of cost, speed, range and payload. [5]

Table 1, at the end of this chapter, compares nature’s design tradeoffs those of modern civilization. First, however, let’s briefly review the natural history and human history that brought us to this point.

In the beginning

Our known universe began about 14 billion years ago with a Big Bang. Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Less than a billion years later, life on earth began as simple microbes. These microbes lived in oxygen-free environments and remained the sole inhabitants of Earth until about one billion years ago. During that time they gave off most of the free oxygen we now have in our atmosphere. Oxygen was their waste, a poisonous (to them) byproduct of their metabolisms.

About one billion years ago a microbe mutated and acquired the ability to use free oxygen as a source of energy. It feasted on this accumulated waste of others, thrived and multiplied astronomically. Some of its progeny were ingested into other microbes and evolved a symbiotic relationship with them, eventually becoming the mitochondria which now enable our own cells to use free oxygen. Then, about 600 million years ago life exploded from simple microbes into fishes, plants insects and animals. Mammals appeared about 60 million years ago and about 2.5 million years ago Homo sapiens, our ancient ancestors, arrived on the scene. [6] [7] [8]

During its nearly 4 billion years of existence, life has repeatedly endured and recovered from massive extinctions caused by: global climate changes that ranged from snowball earths to hothouse earths, continental drift that created a single land mass at the equator then broke apart again, a 40 % increase in the energy output of the sun, meteor impacts, brief but intense gamma ray events, and volcanic eruptions over a thousand times more massive than the 1980 one of Mt. St. Helens. [9] [10]

Life’s vigor and stamina are not merely a matter of luck. They are a natural result of processes whose significant characteristics include: uncertainty, diversity, localization in space and time, modularity, layers with nearly balanced bi-directional coupling, rampant overproduction and vigorous pruning, relentless competition and intimate symbiosis.

The incredible history of life and the processes responsible for it have been systematically discovered over the last century by the meticulous detective work of thousands of scientists. Their discoveries about how life operates are critical to our continued survival. Among other things, they show us how we depend on other living creatures for our daily existence and for the continued health of civilization. They also demonstrate the design principles that sustained life and enabled it to flourish in a resource limited biosphere.

Brief history of mankind and of modern civilization

Our direct ancestors in the line of Homo sapiens appeared in Africa a mere 150 thousand years ago. Every human alive today is a descendant from a single male of that time period, our Adam. We also descended from a single female, our Eve, who was probably born millennia after Adam died. Thousands of other humans were alive when each of these two lived but, for unknown reasons, their progeny died out. We owe this newest understanding of our heritage to scientists who traced us back to common ancestors through analysis of our mitochondrial DNA (that oxygen processing symbiotic microbe mentioned earlier which is passed on solely through females) and the DNA of our Y (male) chromosomes![2] [11] [12]

Our ancestors had acquired a unique genetic characteristic that separated them from all other living creatures: a brain capable of complex thought. It gave individuals and small bands of humans the potential to adapt rapidly to new situations, new environments and new challenges. About 50 thousand years ago, a few hundred or so individuals with this unique potential migrated out of Africa. Within the next 40 thousand years their descendants had populated every other continent and many islands, and had adapted to climates ranging from tropical to polar. In so doing they developed isolated cultures that acquired and passed on local survival skills and accompanying beliefs.

Until about 12 thousand years ago humanity was entirely composed of small bands of hunter gatherers who lived off the land. Their diets varied with region and time of year. They were reasonably healthy, even by our standards. Then agriculture was invented, probably first in the Middle East, and with it began the cultural foundation of modern civilization. With agriculture came the domestication of a few species of animals.

Agriculture dramatically increased the supply of a few grains, primarily wheat, rice and corn. The resulting population explosion left mankind in a symbiotic relationship with a handful of crops. It was a Faustian bargain. Agriculture triggered cultural changes: wanderers became sedentary, acquisition and control of goods created specialization and classes of people. It produced chronic poverty and starvation in the lowest class, which usually included the farmers. Diets became unbalanced and unhealthy which, along with increasing density of genetically similar grains, animals and people, attracted and nourished pathogens which produced plagues, famines and chronic diseases. Life expectancies plummeted, people got shorter and infant mortality skyrocketed. When agriculture failed, people no longer moved but stayed in place and starved. War and slaughter became a way to rapidly acquire goods, cheap labor and territory. Complex societies and belief systems evolved to manage and to explain these never ending inequalities and chronic sufferings. [13, 14]

Modern civilization began in England less than 300 years ago with the industrial revolution. That revolution initiated an unprecedented wave of adaptations and scientific learning that still thrive today. The pivotal physical invention was arguably James Watt’s version of the steam engine, a machine that converted thermal energy (initially supplied by burning wood or coal) into mechanical actions that could replace human and animal labor. It was first used to pump water out of coal mines. [15]

In 1775, when Watt’s steam engine was in its infancy, the earth’s population was 700 million. Europe was emerging from a population decline brought on by the Black Death and periodic crop failures of the Little Ice Age. Life was excruciatingly difficult for the average person. Starvation, disease and an early death were still the common lot in England. Nearly everyone lived and died within a radius of a few miles.

The invention of the engine changed all that. Engines, and the subsequent development of transportation infrastructures, enabled fast and inexpensive trade and travel between more places and over greater and greater distances; first by trains, then by steamships, then by trucks and automobiles, and finally by airplanes. Engines also enhanced food production and clothing manufacture. They brought disparate regions and cultures together and facilitated the ongoing development of our modern civilization. Surpluses of food and improvements in housing and sanitation lowered death rates from disease and starvation which uncorked a worldwide population explosion. By 1900 the world’s population had grown to 1.7 billion. On the whole these people lived longer and better lives than their civilized predecessors, but probably not longer or better than the early hunter gatherers.

Our Current Predicament

Today we number more than 6 billion people and are forecasted to become 9 billion or more by 2050, barring a great disaster. Thus far it seems to be that our rapid population growth has been matched by our growing ability to feed, house and care for one another.[3] We believe, or hope, that science and engineering have steadily produced innovations and improved efficiencies that keep us ahead of the curve. Those of us in the bosom of modern civilization live better and longer lives than at any time in the last 10 thousand years. But for us and our progeny, our very existence depends on civilization’s continued health and reliable workings. It is the only ecosystem to which we are adapted. Our skills to survive outside it have atrophied.

Unfortunately, science has not kept pace with either our standard of living or our global population. We have gotten where we are by borrowing heavily, and at an ever increasing rate, from a limited wealth of resources freely provided by nature. We are draining oil fields to power our engines and draining aquifers to water our farms. We are emptying oceans to feed ourselves. We are polluting our soil, air and water in order to maintain full employment or make a quarterly profit as measured by GAAP. [16]

Earth is a closed system. Her resources are vast but limited. Most of the surpluses upon which we depend took other living creatures millions, and sometimes billions of years to produce. We are borrowing from nature. We are, in effect, beggaring our children and our grandchildren. They will have fewer and fewer natural resources to draw from. At some point in this century, our debts will come due unless we learn how to halt our net consumption of limited resources and begin to replenish our biosphere.

Ironically, one of several major obstacles is a seemingly innocuous set of measuring tools based on “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” or GAAP. These are the tools by which we measure the cost efficiency of our businesses and determine their profits. These tools are neither good nor bad; they are just how we keep score. They define the economic rules of the game for civilization, just as the rules of basketball define that game. They are arbitrary rules derived from methods used by European shopkeepers several centuries ago. Because of this ancestry, they justify and reward short term decisions by businesses, by individuals and by politicians, as we shall demonstrate later. They also tacitly assume that natural resources are free and that dumping and pollution have no costs. These rules, and other obstacles, are not evil or malicious. They are merely principles, methods and systems which appear to have worked. We rely on them. We don’t know how to change them or what might happen if we did change them.

Another obstacle is a common set of myths and myth systems we’ve developed and maintain about nature, about ourselves and about our relationship to nature. Myths are our internal, simplified models of the complex reality in which we exist. We inherit these myths from our families and our culture and modify them from personal experience. However, what we actually perceive from our experiences is also limited, or focused, by these myths and what we do is motivated by them. We hope that our individual and collective mythologies embody profound truths and reasonably accurate representations of an objective reality. Too often, they don’t.

We also assume that we adapt our collective mythologies as our knowledge of reality improves. Usually, we don’t. For example, despite a torrent of scientific revelations about the natural world, our public, political and religious perceptions of it are still shaped by erroneous, homo-centric myths of the 19^th century or earlier. We dismiss nature as a jungle, inefficient, chaotic, amoral and somewhat threatening. We relegate the history of evolution to a simplistic and grossly incorrect “survival of the fittest.”[4] We esteem ourselves as the fittest by virtue of our intelligence and our modern civilization, or by virtue of our selection by a Creator. We believe that we humans rightfully have dominion over the earth and must subjugate it to our ends.

We also believe in and rely on systems of control to produce a safe and stable world. We establish hierarchies with top-down, management from kings, presidents, CEO’s and Popes as the way to insure dependable, efficient results and correct answers. We establish order. We bring things under control. We pacify the jungle of nature with the plantations of man while we simultaneously create and teach ourselves supporting myths and skills.

Our myths about the future of civilization seem to be virtuous and rational. We anticipate and work for a peaceful world in which modern civilization will embrace us all within a rationally managed, global village; united by communication, trade, and common interests. Within this village we expect to eliminate wars, disease, hunger and poverty.

For most of my adult life I shared these myths and actively promoted globalization. I don’t entirely regret what I did or believed, but I now realize that these well intentioned ideals are naïve in dangerous ways. One of the first things we must do to rescue civilization is to bring our collective mythologies more in line with reality. Without such an update we will lack the “will” to make the necessary personal, economic and political changes.

Overview of nature’s tradeoffs and those of modern civilization

A set of natural tradeoffs produced life on earth and nourish its robust existence. I’ve listed these tradeoffs and the corresponding ones of modern civilization in Table 1. Natural tradeoffs are embedded in the process of evolution, the dynamics of the rain forest, the functioning of our immune systems and the structure and operation of our brains. They are in sharp contrast to many of our social and religious ideals and to the beliefs which drive economic and political globalization. We will explain them in detail in later chapters. [3, 17]

Immediate Challenges

The challenges we face are enormous and complex. Among the least of them is terrorism. Overcoming them can be boiled down to successfully answering three questions:

1. How can we modify civilization within the next 30 years so that it has a healthy and sustainable relationship with nature? In this relationship, we humans would consistently invest slightly more into the natural system than we extract from it. Right now we freely extract limited resources and dump un-recyclable waste to prop up civilization.

2. How can we modify civilization (and its economic system in particular) so that it is robust with growing, stable or declining populations and with growing, stable or declining standards of living? Our economic system now requires an unending growth in demand (fueled by increasing population and/or increasing expectations) to remain healthy and to provide full employment. Since earth is ultimately a closed system, we can’t keep growing indefinitely.

3. How can we transition from our present situation to a civilization that answers the first two challenges in the context of: a) reasonable living conditions for everyone, a) free and open societies, b) the current economic system (including Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), c) a headlong migration towards globalization, d) current legal and political systems, e) the current array of cultures and beliefs, f) without wrecking civilization in the process?

There is no going back to simpler times. They couldn’t support even 1 billion people. Achieving a sustainable relationship with nature will probably result in an average human population of far fewer than 6 billion, but only “natural” population limits are politically viable, morally acceptable or humanly sustainable. [18]

In effect, we must successfully redesign and rebuild the vehicle of modern civilization and with it our personal and collective myths while driving it down a crowded freeway at 70 mph and steering it by watching a rearview mirror!

Believe it or not, I think we can do it. I don’t know whether we will humbly study nature, learn from her and adopt essential changes in time. That is a challenge for us all. This book does the easy part. It proposes a quantifiable picture of success and outlines a practical program for getting there.

Overview of this Book

There are three major sections to this book. The first section, “Where we are, what we face and Natures helpful examples,” explains the elements of Table 1 and the tradeoffs related to each element. It documents the key challenges to Civilization’s survival and shows how natural processes deal with these or comparable challenges. It describes discuss the relationships between our mental infrastructures (including beliefs, attitudes and skills) and the external infrastructures of civilization. It examines how we make decisions, and lays the groundwork for applying this knowledge in Section 3.

A take-away of this section is that there is real hope and numerous examples of success, but we have to make dramatic changes in our beliefs and actions soon; within the next 30 years at the most. Perhaps the most challenging belief change is to “embrace uncertainty.”

The second section, “A robust and sustainable civilization,” describes quantifiable characteristics of a sustainable civilization and related measurements that will tell us whether or not we’re moving in that direction. Many of these characteristics have already been documented; others are counterintuitive lessons from nature that I’ve yet to find in the literature. Among other things this section demonstrates why; in a healthy, sustainable system, failure is not an option, it is essential. Everything and everyone must be allowed to fail and suffer the consequences from time to time. This lesson is contrary to the entitlement philosophy that now guides civilization’s direction towards universal entitlements, globalization and top-down controls.

The third section, “A Plan of Action: where the rubber meets the road,” outlines a 30 year plan for initiating and instituting the changes we need. It is a plan of education and indirect, differential actions that will relentlessly move us from our current direction to a path towards a sustainable civilization. It builds on the work done by those who’ve toiled for decades and moves us through a tipping point where the bulk of mankind in the developed world naturally produce a sustainable civilization through everyday life.

[1] For an outstanding example: The Worldwatch Institute at 1776 Massachusetts Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036-1904 USA. You can visit their website at www.worldwatch.org

[2] We now have overwhelming scientific evidence that we are all one race, we are all cousins! Our racial classifications and the baggage that goes with them are a crock. There are more genetic differences between a sister and brother than between any two males or any two females on earth.

[3] However, there are many more people suffering and dying from hunger and disease today than there were 50 or 300 years ago. This is one of many paradoxes of modern civilization.

[4] Survival depends on three things: reasonable fitness, sufficient adaptability and luck. Fitness and adaptability are inversely related. That which is too fit for a specific ecosystem perishes when that system changes.

[5] Control processes, get the right answers, sue the bastards

[6] Eliminate borders and barriers to efficiency and the free movement of people, goods and ideas. Standardize products, methods, languages… reduce diversity. Globalize economy, government, business. Put all your eggs in one basket, it’s the most efficient way to carry eggs.

[7] Create companies, nations, power grids and economies that are too big to fail; stay in power; eliminate economic boom-bust cycles; stabilize human births and minimize human deaths.

[8] Live forever, stay in power, save the whales, preserve species, prevent forest fires

[9] Deplete natural resources, beggar our grandchildren. Refinance your home and go shopping for the sake of full employment.

	Nature	Civilization
1	Embrace uncertainty: use stochastic processes, produce dynamic results	Eliminate uncertainty: use deterministic processes,[5] produce static results
2	Influence through layered, distributed, redundant, differential processes	Control with seamless, hierarchical, single-ended processes
3	Isolate, decentralize and diversify	Globalize, centralize and standardize[6]
4	Rampantly overproduce and relentlessly prune	Build and maintain[7]
5	Promote symbiosis and relentless competition	Promote cooperation and interdependence, but eliminate adversity
6	Build-in term limits	Preserve as long as possible[8]
7	Systematically increase robustness and adaptability	Systematically increase cost efficiency according to GAAP
8	Recycle everything, 100.01%	Use and dump
9	Use solar and geothermal energy, produce fossil fuels and oxygen	Consume fossil fuels and oxygen, produce pollution
10	Invest in the future	Borrow from the future[9]