We Need to Chart a New Course - Here's One Way to Navigate Climate Change
Posted on 08 February 2023
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~ How to Read the Map ~
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Unfortunately for us, our climate predicament is intersecting with several other impending unfortunate circumstances - namely resource depletion, ecological destruction, biodiversity loss, global insupportable debt...and the list goes on.
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There is no doubt we need to change course. But charting a new course can be overwhelming and fraught with uncertainty. In this new world of map-making, Nate Hagens can help us:
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Nate Hagens is the Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF), "an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers, ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles."
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His podcast, The Great Simplification, provides all sorts of road-maps and off-ramps. He makes the important point that we mistakenly rely on views toward the future from authorities that see the road ahead through their own respective financial, economic, or technological lenses.
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About these silo-lenses, Hagens says:
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"These lenses are all optimistic, but misguided.
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All these lenses are energy blind.
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The real paths ahead can only be seen by integrating energy awareness with biology, sociology, physics, and everything science has discovered. We need a “systems” lens to read the map."
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Hagens says that a systems lens "removes the blind spots created by any single-issue lens."
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He says that a "systems lens reveals that the road ahead is closed to our current cultural expectations - yet we continue to bear down on the accelerator."
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About transitioning from being Energy Blind, Hagens says that "in addition to using different energy, we’ll need to use energy differently."
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"Seeing our future through a systems lens - changes everything...There will always be energy on Earth as long as the Sun burns, but the amount of surplus energy available to human societies will soon be diminishing. As the extraction of geologically stored energy becomes more difficult, everything we’re used to in society will become more costly or less available. We are not planning for this because it’s never happened before."
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"The onset of the Great Simplification will be financial and economic turbulence, followed by contraction. When we can no longer grow fast enough to maintain all the increased financial claims, economies will recede to a scale that can again be supported by physical flows without credit. Complex global supply chains, the related high consumption lifestyles and many of the conveniences and freedoms we take for granted in this era of abundant energy surplus will diminish."
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Hagens' seminal The Great Simplification Animated Movie concludes with this key statement:
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"Nature has gifted us with a productive and beautiful home, the ability to understand how we got here, and the creativity to imagine which paths are possible. The future need not be dystopian, but cleverness alone will no longer suffice for the next leg of our journey. We will need imagination, foresight, empathy and above all wisdom to navigate the path to the future that is arriving - The Great Simplification."
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Now that's what we call Reading the Map!