Why things go wrong: emotional reasons

The theory

A commenter on the post about classifying asked: "How useful is it to classify carbon emissions separately from pollution?" That's a very good question, but I'm not going to give my own answer... yet. Instead, I'd like to say that it's a fine example of a question that can easily be answered wrong for all sorts of emotional reasons... one of those that shows why some problems are really difficult. Let's use it to go through a whole bunch of emotional reasons that lead to wrong answers:

• Clinging to the past: People cling to the past. We can't help it. If we first got involved in the environmental movement because we heard about pollution, the answer to that question is obvious. If we only got involved after we started worrying about climate change and we never cared much for pollution, the answer is also obvious. But different. One of my readers asked once: "How does one make a group forward-looking rather than backward-looking?" The truth is, people are naturally backward-looking. Which normally works quite well. Problem is, it's hard to tell that it's stopped working.
• Unpleasant associations: Pollution is dirty, who wants to talk about it? On the other hand, carbon dioxide is a transparent gas with no smell at all, and a normal part of the atmosphere anyway. Shouldn't this mean that they should be treated separately? On the other hand, if you want people to feel that this apparently clean and innocent gas is a very nasty thing, shouldn't this mean that they should be seen as the same?
• Crowd psychology: The crowd of old environmentalists and the crowd of new climate changers are not the same crowd. The answer to the question will depend a lot on which crowd you associate with.
• Wrong or irrelevant comparisons: Different chemical compounds are, well, different. How do you choose which ones to put in the "pollutant" bag? Is a division in just two categories (good stuff here, bad pollutants there) a good idea to start with? Whether you put carbon dioxide in or out the "pollutant" bag, wouldn't you be making some wrong or irrelevant comparisons?
• The wrong option is attractive: As you can see, I'm not being very clear about which option I think is best. I'd just like to point out that both options can seem immensely attractive. If carbon emissions are a different thing from pollution, it makes it easy to get a lot of attention if your activities are about carbon emissions only, and you don't have to worry about pollution in general or feel guilty about not looking at that. If they are a form of pollution, you can just use a lot of stuff that you already had for general pollution and make it fit.
• Habit and inertia: If you are used to deal with pollution in general, you want to classify carbon emissions as pollution because that's what you are used to do. If you are used to think of carbon emissions as something very different from anything that's been a problem before, you don't want to change your mental habits either.

Getting wrong answers to questions leads to wrong actions. As the commenter already noticed: "If we think about 'pollution' as a group of different types of substance emission, and consider the need to manage them in tandem, we would be developing a different set of solutions, than if we just try to address carbon emission on its own." Then, it may be that trying to make carbon emissions fit a model best suited for some types of traditional chemical pollution makes the problem worse.

Think about all these difficulties to give a good answer to the question, and then try to answer it. Is carbon dioxide a pollutant? To help you think, it's useful to list the five valid answers to every yes/no question:

1) Yes

2) No

3) I don't know

4) Yes and no (the answer depends on assumptions that haven't been specified - "is a chameleon green?")

5) Mu (the question has incorrect assumptions - the correct answer to "Are you still beating your wife?")

My own answer to the question, at the bottom of the post.

The practice

Experiment 1

It's easy to see other people's flawed reasoning, but much harder to recognize your own. To start getting a feel for your own limitations, it may be easier to watch pets. What are the limits of what you can expect of a dog? A cat? A hamster? For example, how many things can they remember for how long?

Once you have a fair idea of the limits for different animals, it's a lot easier to think about the limits for humans. You don't have unlimited memory or unlimited capacity to understand the consequences of everything. You can't analyze every issue in detail and come up with a good answer, you use shortcuts. What shortcuts do you personally use often?

Experiment 2

Can you think of other examples of questions that are easy to answer wrong? Go through the list above and try to describe the pitfalls. After that, try to give a good answer. My own answer below may give you inspiration... maybe as something rather flawed that you'd rather avoid.

MY ANSWER

Yes and no.

With the definition of an environmentalist, the answer is a resounding "yes". Pollution is anything that causes harm, instability or discomfort in an ecosystem. Carbon emissions cause climate change, and climate change causes plenty of harm to ecosystems all over the Earth.

The popular definition of pollution is more restrictive, though. An environmentalist may talk about light pollution or thermal pollution, a layman would never say that. Most people think that pollution means only chemical and radioactive pollution, toxic to animals or plants. Under that restrictive definition, carbon dioxide isn't pollution. It isn't toxic.

In situations like this, where the layman and the expert definition of a word are different, it can be much safer to abandon the word altogether. Instead of talking of pollution in general, one can use "harm to the ecosystem/the Earth". And when you mean chemical pollution specifically, it may be best to use the whole "chemical pollution" instead of saying just "pollution" for shorthand... or mention by name the specific chemicals.

What happens when connectivity goes down?

The theory

One of my readers commented that things aren't as "black & white" as I put them in my last post on connectivity. Of course, reality is never, ever, ever, as neat as theory. I'd like to elaborate a bit more on what happens when we go from high to low connectivity, just because, from the point of view of most people, it's their idea of unmitigated disaster. A lot of connection is good, little connection is terrible.

In the first example I gave, I said the difference between a dead body and a living one is that a living body is highly connected. In that case, losing connectivity sounds like very, very bad. That is, until you realise how nightmarish would be a world if nothing could die. We couldn't eat, for a start: we animals can only eat other living things, and they must die, either before or while we eat them. So nobody would have any energy to move. There would be absolutely no space for anything new to be born, because soon all the available space would be taken up by living beings. Most changes would be impossible. It would be a crowded, stuffy, static, unchanging world. And that's exactly what tends to happen in highly connected environments where there are few ways of releasing connections. When it happens between people, this situation is called "bureaucracy"; when it happens in a forest, it's called a climax forest community, that will easily become something else as soon as something disturbs it. When it happens in a computer network, techies tend to call it "an expensive mess".

Going from high to low connectivity means that links are lost. As I explained in What's in a link?, links usually mean one or several of three things: time spent together, material flows, or information flows. If a link is broken, something is released: there's either more time or materials available (sending and receiving information also use up time). In ecosystems theory, the expressions "in collapse" and "in release phase" are often used interchangeably: an ecosystem that's losing connectivity is collapsing, but there are also plenty of resources being released that opportunists can use up. It's a necessary stage before renewal is possible.

Any time that a connection is lost, it's good to think: what is being released? It's a very common problem in an organization or group within an organization to try to keep it going even when everybody knows that it isn't doing very well and it isn't producing the results everybody hoped for. If you are involved in any group that is in this situation, it may be useful to describe the situation as resources that want to be released. What time and materials are people investing in this, that might be invested in something better if the group was disbanded?

Some people may have the attitude that it's better to do a little than nothing at all, and they may be correct. But this can be an even stronger argument for release. Some situations can be kept for long periods of time in a bad, but not bad enough state, because enough is being done to keep things going to a minimum, but not enough to get the results that are really needed. If all attempts to increase time or resources allocated to the task have failed, releasing can be the method that gets some alarm bells ringing. If the situation is really a lot worse if nobody does any work at all, somebody will notice that.

Going back to the question I asked myself on the previous post on connectivity: What effect is going to have peak oil, when transport becomes more and more costly? It's a fair bet that transport will reduce, and when those connections are lost, what is being released? Clearly, a lot of materials will stay where they were instead of zipping around the world. Instead of the rather uniform look that we have today in all the cities in the world, places will have to return to have their unique flavour. Different places will build houses with different materials, the same will go for furniture and most heavy things. Even wind turbines could be done with local materials and local techniques. Very light, expensive things will probably still trade round the world. In the old times, it was spices, in the future it will almost certainly be electronic gadgets. On the other hand, some heavy things will have to start looking very different. Cars, for example, may become something much more like boats: expensive and often highly customized. Not many people will have them, and those people will be divided among the rich and those that need it for their livelihood (imagine truckers living in their trucks).

On the other hand, if we stay just as connected when it comes to information flows, it means that all that busy time we spend trying to talk to hundreds of people will be still used up. Some people say that they expect post peak oil time to be slower and calmer, thinking it will be like pre-industrial times. I see no reason to think that. If we stay just as connected in terms of information, we'll keep rushing around madly trying to juggle a hundred things in our heads the same as before.

In my last post, I compared our possible future situation after peak oil seriously affects transport with an imaginary animal that had no proper circulatory system but had a nervous system. I said I didn't think there was such an animal. I was wrong: jellyfish don't have blood vessels, but they do have a nerve net. It helps a lot that they live in the sea, and seawater goes through all of their body and transports the oxygen and nutrients to all their cells. It's interesting that jellyfish have a rather impressive ability to regenerate, especially in their polyp form (the simplest stage of their lifecycle). I find jellyfish more interesting than most trees (that have a more complicated circulatory system but no nervous system); if my wild analogy has any use at all, future times will be more interesting than pre-industrial times. The individual cells of jellyfish are far more complex than the individual cells of trees, in fact, they have some of the most complex cells of any living creature. Maybe, and this is a wild guess, people will have to be as complex as they can be to cope with the future that's coming, and at the same time very resilient and able to re-create a human settlement starting from very little.

Wild speculations aside, it will be a good time for those that can think of a loss of a connection not so much as a loss, but as a release.

The practice

Experiment 1

If you have ever noticed anything about gardens, you'll have seen that one of the main differences between a garden an a patch of land that's been left to grow wild is that people create a lot of barriers in their gardens: walls, paths, clearly demarcated patches, seeds put carefully in some places, fertilizers and other additions to soil put selectively in some places but not others, areas that are watered and areas that aren't, weeds and insects more or less selectively eliminated. A lot of what gardeners do creates barriers and removes connectivity in the garden ecosystem.

The experiment is the following: see what happens when you don't do that. On a corner of a garden or allotment, plant seeds of your favourite flowers or vegetables all mixed up. It's more interesting if you do this under a tree. You can keep the area disconnected from the rest of the garden, but inside that area, let everything be as connected and mixed up as they like. What happens? Ideally, keep this running for two years. Do you understand better some of the things you've been told to do with certain plants? Which kinds of barriers make sense and are useful?

Experiment 2

Most of us have been told that keeping connections alive is very good. What this actually means is that many of us are overconnected.

Do this experiment to find out if you are overconnected:

1. List your usual commitments over a month, and how much time you dedicate on average to them. This should include work, family, time spent with friends, and time spent with specific hobbies or other activities you think are worthwhile.

2. Next to it, list how much time you would like to dedicate to each of them over a month, in an ideal universe where days had as many hours as you need. After this, calculate how many waking hours your ideal day would have. If it's more than 16, you know that you are overconnected.

3. Decide which ones of these connections to release, until your day only needs 16 waking hours.

Experiment 3

Are you involved in any group that is in the situation described in the theory section, still going but not really producing much results? In that case, it may be good to get all the people in the group to answer the following questions:

1. How much time and what resources are used to keep the group going?

2. What would the time and resources be used for if they weren't captured by the activities of this group?

3. What would happen if nobody did any of the things that the group does? Would it ring any alarm bells?

Then, try to decide collectively if there is a good argument to release.

Connectivity

The theory

When I wrote the post about death I had a good old rant about what I was feeling like ranting about at the time. Quite understandable rant under the circumstances, I hope you'll agree. But I've been thinking about it since, and I realised, I missed a great chance to describe one of the fundamental differences between a living body and a dead one. Again, sorry if you find the subject unpleasant, but old-fashioned analytical thinking misses a lot of the important stuff here, and systems thinking can say plenty that is useful.

The old way of telling if a body was dead or alive was to check if the heart was beating. Nowadays, we have machines that can keep the heart beating forever. The new way of telling if a body is dead or alive is to check if the brain is still active. The first method tells us if the circulatory system, that keeps blood flowing throughout our body, is still active. The second method tells us if the nervous system, that keeps information flowing inside our body, is still active. Both methods are testing a fundamental property of a system: connectivity. Blood and nerve impulses are the two flows that keep all the cells in our body heavily interconnected. Eliminate one or the other, and the body isn't a person any more, but a collection of cells. And once they stop being well connected, individual cells can't manage to stay alive on their own for very long.

Connectivity means how much each part is connected to other parts, or more accurately, the strength of the relationships between different parts. In other words, how much changes in one part of the system affects other parts of the system. For example, the transport system of rich countries and the different organs inside the body have high connectivity; beachgoers and tiger communities have low connectivity.

People who worry about oil depletion (peak oil), worry because they know that oil is essential for transport in the world. And less oil means that the world will go from being highly connected and globalized, to less connected. The burning question is whether this is going to happen in the way of a catastrophic collapse (as it happens when an animal dies) or the change can be reasonably gentle (like people losing touch with their friends in college as they get older).

To make the question even more interesting and difficult to answer, the world has recently increased enormously in connectivity in terms of information, and soon will have to reduce connectivity in terms of flow of materials. Imagine that in the early days of the evolution of animals, when they first developed a nervous system, nerves had developed incredibly fast, but shortly afterwards animals were forced to reduce the flow of blood dramatically. Is this even possible? I don't know of any example of an animal with a highly developed nervous system and a very simple circulatory system, but then, the analogy may not be useful at all.

The only thing we know for sure is that highly connected and poorly connected systems are quite different. Many people fall in the trap of thinking that one kind is fundamentally better than the other (nowadays, the "highly connected" fans are quite loud) but there isn't a better kind: it all depends on the situation.

A good way of understanding the differences between highly connected and poorly connected systems is to think about how people behave in groups when they are constanly keeping in touch with each other, in comparison with situations where people behave independently and don't communicate a lot.

Highly connected groups produce great collaboration and coordination. They produce big solutions to big problems. Decision-making is often pretty good, because different points of view have their say. They can also produce big, visible actions. That's the plus side.

The minus side is that usually some people get excluded, and some individuals may feel threatened or forced by the group to do things they didn't really want to do. They often have a poor analysis of different options ("group think" only happens in groups!). And they aren't very good at watching their surroundings, highly connected groups are often inward-looking.

On the other hand, poorly connected groups have the advantage that anyone can easily join (not many connections to make!). They easily adapt to specific needs of specific individuals. They are also good at analysis and observation, that's why we speak positively of independent analysis and independent observation.

On the other, negative hand, poorly connected groups can only produce small scale solutions. There is little coordination, which makes a whole lot of plans impossible. They aren't good for making decisions, because there isn't enough deliberation among their members. And any actions are in a small scale.

All these considerations may be very handy when you are trying to find solutions to specific problems. Is it better resolved by a highly or poorly connected group?

The practice

Experiment 1

Think of an organization you are part of (it could be your place of work or a voluntary organization you take part in). What are the main aims of the organization? How well connected are the people within it? Is the level of connection well suited to what the organization is trying to do? If not, how could you increase or reduce the level of connection?

Experiment 2

Go to the nearest garden to where you live. It could be a park or a vegetable garden, it doesn't matter. How much interaction do you think there is between different plants? Does it look highly or poorly connected? (Hint: Plants can't move, so the connections between them are often done by animals. Does it look like there are many or few species of animals living there?)

What do you think it would look like if it was more or less connected? (Another hint: as a rule of thumb, the taller the plants - trees - in an ecosystem, the more connected it is. This may not apply in highly artificial environments. Can you imagine why this rule of thumb works? Interestingly, this also applies to human habitats, highly connected cities usually have the tallest buildings. Again, can you imagine why?)

The hierarchy of life

The theory

In my last post, I broke my own rule of trying not to mention in a post a technical term that I haven't explained in previous posts. OK, I had excellent reasons to break the rules, but still, I'd like to compensate for it by explaining immediately afterwards.

The term I used was the hierarchy of life. This is a very useful concept when you are trying to understand how living systems operate at different scales. Small living systems organize into bigger living systems, all the way up to the whole Earth (to use the technical word, the whole biosphere). To make it easier to understand, I'll use human beings as an example, and I'll skip some of the levels that are less interesting.

• Cells: At the lowest level, or bodies are made up of cells. (Well, this isn't really the lowest level, but the things that happen at a smaller scale than this aren't fascinating unless you like peering into electron microscopes). Cells are nothing but tiny living things, that live their little independent lives, and can happily survive on their own if the conditions around them match exactly what they find inside our bodies. Cells are constantly dying and renewing inside our bodies. Most of the cells that make up your body now didn't exist seven years ago.
• Organs: Cells make up all your organs: the heart, the brain, the stomach, etc. Each organ is a relatively independent system: if you hurt badly your leg, your heart will continue beating without any trouble.
• Human bodies: Your body is made up of all your organs working together in a beautifully orchestrated system. Human beings are quite independent of each other and can survive on their own for long periods, but without each other's help their physical and mental wellbeing is in danger.
• Villages, towns and cities and their bioregions: People live together in populations of different sizes. Some living creatures create their own ecosystems around them, and humans are particularly impressive in that respect. They bring all sorts of materials from long distances to build their refuges, and they eliminate most other living creatures except a few that they like (grass, park trees and pigeons) and a few that have become extremely good at adapting to the conditions they create (cockroaches and rats). Cities need agricultural land around them to support them, and together they can be called a bioregion, that can exist relatively independent of the surrounding land.
• The Earth: There is a rather fancy, long and complicated word to describe all the bits of the Earth that have been touched by human presence: the anthroposphere. By now, this is pretty much the whole Earth, so we'd better call a spade a spade. Life on Earth depends on the Sun to continue existing, but apart from that, it exists quite independently. James Lovelock is famous for his theory that the whole Earth is a self-controlling system, though some people have their doubts, and they ask: and how did it become self-controlling? I'm agnostic on the question of whether the Earth has been a self-controlling system for millions of years (though the evidence is compelling). But I'm pretty certain that by now, when humans are controlling just about all the ecosystems, the Earth is definitely self-controlling. Whether the Earth is currently doing a great job of controlling itself is a matter of debate, the latest news on climate change suggest it's doing quite poorly.

This is a useful overview of all the scales in the bigger picture, and I won't repeat this again. From now on, most of the posts are going to focus on scales somewhere in between individuals and cities, with the occasional jump to the whole Earth.

The practice

Experiment 1

Watch Powers of Ten. Just watch it. It should be required at schools. I never figured out how anybody is supposed to understand their place in the Universe without this.

Experiment 2

The hierarchy of life, as I described it, is done in a few big jumps. There are actually a lot of smaller intermediate levels. Try to think all the intermediate levels between an individual and a whole city.

There isn't a single correct answer to this one. Try to discover several possible ladders. How much influence do you have at each of those levels? Which ladder makes you look more important? Does any ladder make you think you need to learn more about something?