This example illustrates the potential for an unintended consequence to move between categories and demonstrates that there are times when it is necessary to review and reflect. What is considered known and knowable changes over time: has the state of knowledge developed or an unintended consequence been identified?

Figure 2. Transitions of climate change throughout time.

As the United States Secretary of Defense once asserted “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know” (Rumsfeld, 2002)

‘socially biased individual learning’

the problems inherent in assuming any simple individual/social learning distinction are already well understood by some researchers working on cultural evolution.

We have already seen that thinkers from the humanities and social sciences have expressed doubt about the nature/culture distinction. They have also expressed doubt about the related distinction between that which is social and that which is individual. Christina Toren [27], again, remarks that the very distinction between individual and social learning is one that social anthropologists have long regarded as problematic.

The problem with this way of defining things is that we ignore the fact that, even when acting in a manner that appears to involve no direct interaction with other creatures, organisms nonetheless develop and learn in environments that have been affected by the prior actions of their conspecifics (and not just their conspecifics). This is precisely the sort of phenomenon stressed by the proponents of the niche-construction approach to evolution, and it is also stressed by developmental systems theorists [40,41]. Organisms grow in environments that have been constructed by the actions of previous generations: in that way, what an organism learns can be profoundly affected and enhanced by the collective activities of individuals it may never meet. In other words, we should not assume that there is any good distinction between individual learning and what we might call ‘social transmission’. The latter can be achieved via the former.

the best known example of this type of research concerns the co-evolution of pastoralism and lactose tolerance [30]. In rough terms, the basic hypothesis—which is widely accepted and well confirmed—is that the adoption of dairying set up a modified niche in which the ability to digest lactose into adulthood was at an advantage.

Tim Ingold [29] characterizes humans as ‘biosocial becomings’: once again in an effort to reject any separation of what is biological or genetic from what is cultural or social.

Our core criteria follow the definition of CCE provided in Tomasello's quotation above. We suggest that the minimum requirements for a population to exhibit CCE are (i) a change in behaviour (or product of behaviour, such as an artefact), typically due to asocial learning, followed by (ii) the transfer via social learning of that novel or modified behaviour to other individuals or groups, where (iii) the learned behaviour causes an improvement in performance, which is a proxy of genetic and/or cultural fitness, with (iv) the previous three steps repeated in a manner that generates sequential improvement over time.

In contrast [to non-human species' cultural traditions], human cultures do accumulate changes over many generations, resulting in culturally transmitted behaviors that no single human individual could invent on their own.

Why have we, alone in the animal kingdom, created art and literature, socio-political systems that permit large-scale cooperation, and the scientific and technological knowledge to colonize the whole planet and explore space?

‘the ratchet effect’

In recent years, the phenomenon of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has become the focus of major research interest in biology, psychology and anthropology. Some researchers argue that CCE is unique to humans and underlies our extraordinary evolutionary success as a species. Others claim to have found CCE in non-human species. Yet others remain sceptical that CCE is even important for explaining human behavioural diversity and complexity. These debates are hampered by multiple and often ambiguous definitions of CCE. Here, we review how researchers define, use and test CCE. We identify a core set of criteria for CCE which are both necessary and sufficient, and may be found in non-human species. We also identify a set of extended criteria that are observed in human CCE but not, to date, in other species. Different socio-cognitive mechanisms may underlie these different criteria. We reinterpret previous theoretical models and observational and experimental studies of both human and non-human species in light of these more fine-grained criteria. Finally, we discuss key issues surrounding information, fitness and cognition. We recommend that researchers are more explicit about what components of CCE they are testing and claiming to demonstrate.

While policies limiting the high emitters are thus unavoidable, such as progressive taxes on emissions, they are hampered by three consecutive barriers.

Our findings raise the issue of global policy choices, with this research confirming that targeting the high emitters will be key. Staying within temperature limits of 1.5 °C or 2.0 °C is difficult without addressing the consequences of wealth growth.

command-and-control policies are required to ban energy-intense premium class and private flights.

Fig. 3. Remaining carbon budget and millionaire emission growth, 2022–2050*.

In this estimate, US$2020 millionaires will deplete 72% of the 1.5 °C carbon budget (400 Gt CO2, 67% chance of staying within temperature range), or 25% of the 2 °C budget (1150 Gt CO2, 67% chance) over the next 30 years.

Fig. 4. Millionaire numbers (nominal) by region: 1990, 2020, 2050

1% of the world's population is responsible for an estimated 50% of emissions from commercial air transport, most of this associated with premium class air travel of affluent frequent fliers

5245 superyachts with lengths of 30–180 m in 2021, a five-fold increase from 1090 yachts in 1990

power law in emission inequality

Table 1. Interrelationship of wealth and emissions per capita.

Historical geometric growth revealed by this data suggests an average growth rate of 7.9% per year, which we extrapolate to 2050.

the top 1% now being responsible for 17% of total emissions, the top 10% for 48%, and the bottom half of the world population for only 12% (in 2019).

They also highlighted that high emitters live in all countries, but were concentrated in the USA (3.16 million), causing an average 318 t CO2-e per person, Luxemburg (10,000 individuals emitting 287 t CO2-e/year each), Singapore (50,000, 251 t CO2-e/year), Saudi Arabia (290,000, 247 t CO2-e/year), and Canada (350,000, 204 t CO2-e/year)

Key drivers of individual emissions include energy-intense transportation, especially private aircraft and yachts, and multiple real estate ownership, often in different continents

close to two thirds of the overall carbon footprint of those billionaires owning yachts is caused by yacht-ownership. This implies a contribution to climate change that is up to 6500 times greater for these individuals than the global average of 4.5 t CO2 per capita and year, or up to 300,000 times greater than the contribution of the poorest, at 0.1 t CO2 per person and year

the top 0.01% emitting in excess of 2300 t CO2-e per capita in 2019, compared to 6 t CO2-e on global average.

The wealthy thus have a significant influence on remaining carbon budgets.

Millionaires will burn through two-thirds of the world’s carbon budget by 2050, scientists warn

introduce professor quinn 00:01:13 sabodian he's the author of the book globalists the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism where he traces ideas unusual lesser examined ideas about the origins 00:01:26 of neoliberalism right back to the breakup of the austro-hungarian empire and to strands of thought that um maybe are slightly unexpected was published by 00:01:38 harvard university press in 2018 and offers an enormous amount of insight into the variety of ideas that we call neoliberalism in our current era

crack up capitalism that is a form of economic activity 00:04:47 propagated by people whose profit model and their kind of a normative vision of change and the social future relies on an idea of an accelerating process of social dissolution and an accelerating process of political 00:05:00 fragmentation this is a form of this is sort of a profit model and a kind of a political vision that sees an acceleration in the near future and the medium-term future 00:05:14 of processes of political crack-up

“A hundred years ago, the robber barons built libraries. Today, they build spaceships.”

This will not be the last terrifying scientific report on climate change. But the only path out of the dull repetitiveness of increasingly dire headlines is a politics that acknowledges that science and truth won’t automatically lead to change. The struggle for the planet is a struggle for political power.

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its “synthesis” report summarizing the findings of its sixth assessment (the last occurred in 2014). The findings are painfully familiar: the world is falling far short of its emission goals, and without rapid reductions this decade, the planet is likely to shoot to beyond 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century (we are at 1.1 degrees now). We seem to be stuck in a doom-loop news cycle where scientific reports create headlines, and earnest climate commentators insist the new report represents a true “wake-up call” for action, and then . . . emission keep rising. They hit a record once again in 2022. The world of climate politics appears to exist in two completely different worlds. There is a largely liberal and idealist world of climate technocrats where science informs policy, and there is the real, material capitalist world of power.

“I think we’re on the cusp of a massive transformation . . . ultimately, the market is going to make the decisions, not the government.”

Yet we shouldn’t act as if there is zero reason for Biden’s turnabout. He understands, like every president before him, that surging gasoline prices are an enormous political liability in a society where the vast majority of workers still require the dirty fuel to get to work. As long as Biden acts as if his administration is helpless in the face of fossil fuel price volatility — and only increased supply will bring the price down — political viability will continue to hinge on cheap fossil fuel prices.

He said he and Arkush “went through every possible objection” and found no legal barrier for prosecutors to raise criminal charges against companies that he said have lied about their knowledge of the danger of burning fossil fuels. “What’s really probably stopping them is that no one has done it before,” Braman said. “The level of culpability and the extent of the harm is so massive that it’s not the kind of thing that prosecutors are used to prosecuting.”

In addition, at least two justices have ties to the oil industry writ large. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a Shell attorney for nearly three decades and served in leadership positions with the American Petroleum Institute, and Justice Samuel Alito owns stock in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 (Alito recused himself from the Baltimore case but Barrett did not).

If the ego is mentally constituted by this dualistic way of thinking, the ego should be able to die without physical death.

it is a mental construct

The child wants to conquer death by becoming the creator and sustainer of its own life. To be one's own father is to be one's own origin. In Buddhist terms, we could say that the Oedipal project is the attempt of the developing sense of self to become autonomous. It is the quest to deny one's groundlessness by becoming one's own ground: the ground (socially conditioned and approved but nonetheless illusory) of being an independent person, a self-sufficient Cartesian ego.

the major sin is the sin of being born, as Samuel Beckett put it. It is the worm in the heart of the human condition, apparently an inescapable consequence of self-consciousness itself.

For Becker this is literally true: what we regard as normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the grim truth about the human condition.

do our fears cause us to perceive the world the way we do, and might someone experience the world differently if they were brave enough to face the thing we avoid most?

the fundamental insight of anatma, the denial of ego-self.

repressed intuition "returns to consciousness in distorted form" as the symbolic ways we compulsively try to ground ourselves and make ourselves real in the world: such as power, fame, and of course money.

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction.

the value-system of money is supplanting traditional religions, as part of a profound secular conversion we only dimly understand

Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today

our practical faith in 00:09:05 progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology a secular religion which like the religions that progress has challenged is blind to certain flaws in its credentials 00:09:18 progress therefore has become myth in the anthropological sense and by this i don't mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue successful myths are powerful and often partly true

gaga's third question where are we going is what i want to address in these talks 00:05:26 it may seem unanswerable who can foretell the human course through time but i think we can answer it in broad strokes by answering the other two questions first 00:05:40 if we see clearly what we are and what we've done we can recognize human behaviors that persist through many times and cultures and knowing these can tell us what we 00:05:52 are likely to do and where we are likely to go from here

the artist managed to harness his grief to produce a vast painting more a mural in conception than a canvas in which like the victorian age itself he demanded 00:04:31 new answers to the riddle of existence he wrote the title boldly on the image three childlike questions simple yet profound where do we come from 00:04:46 what are we where are we going the work is a sprawling panorama of enigmatic figures amid scenery

The Unintended Consequences of Technology: Solutions, Breakthroughs, and the Restart We Need

The Unanticipated Consequences of Technology

Micro-credentials may be the future of education

Representative democracy is a good example. It was set up in a time of bad roads and no telecommunication. So, find someone with a horse who was willing to ride to the capital to represent the local views. The roads were so bad that these riders returned only at lengthy intervals to check on local opinion. Over time, the riders became known as “politicians” and their return visits as “elections.” Today, we have perfect roads and high-tech communications — yet, the same centuries-old procedure.

The idea was to make a subterranean home that would originate from the rock bed, forming multiple whirls around the tree and adjoining to create a secure private space below for the residents and a space around the trees above that ensures that the thick vegetation and ecosystem continues to thrive undisturbed

Chuzhi as the meaning suggests in Malayalam, ”whirlpool” are swirls of precast poured debris earth composite bottle beams, fashioned from 4000 discarded plastic bottles designed around the three large Tamarind trees on site.

Finding huge quantities of small loose stones during the excavation process for the foundation led to an improvisation in the SHOBRI wall (Shuttered Debris Wall). These stones were utilised in the walls by inserting them into the Debris mix in the shutters as alternating bands.

The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises

patterns thought to be characteristic of an ETI, including the scale of our cooperation with non-kin, the prominence of human language and our complex, full-time division of labour.

The human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) [1–6]. The evolutionary transitions framework explains how new levels of biological organization (such as multicellularity, or eusociality) emerge from subsidiary units (such as cells or individuals) through the formation of cooperative groups [6–10]. First proposed by Maynard Smith & Szathmáry [3], evolutionary transitions are thought to unfold via a shift in the dominant level of selection from competitive individuals to well-integrated functional groups [8,11]. These transitions exhibit a common set of patterns, including new divisions of labour, the loss of full individual autonomy and reproductive control, and the rise of new routes of information transmission [6,7,10].

Long-term gene–culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition

we hypothesize that selection or cultural evolution will act to increase carrying capacity. Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution, then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.

Sustainability and a continuum of human unsustainability

human systems may have expanded beyond their ability to absorb energy and materials from the environment, and these resource constraints interacted with socio-political conflict to generate socio-ecological collapse.

Civilizations that may have experienced socio-ecological collapse in whole or part due to their over-extraction of resources include

"In the very long term, we suggest that humans are evolving from individual genetic organisms to cultural groups which function as superorganisms, similar to ant colonies and beehives,"

It’s possible, the researchers suggest, that the appearance of human culture represents a key evolutionary milestone.

Here's why: Culture is group-oriented, and people in those groups talk to, learn from and imitate one another. These group behaviors allow people to pass on adaptations they learned through culture faster than genes can transmit similar survival benefits. An individual can learn skills and information from a nearly unlimited number of people in a small amount of time and, in turn, spread that information to many others. And the more people available to learn from, the better. Large groups solve problems faster than smaller groups, and intergroup competition stimulates adaptations that might help those groups survive. As ideas spread, cultures develop new traits.In contrast, a person only inherits genetic information from two parents and racks up relatively few random mutations in their eggs or sperm, which takes about 20 years to be passed on to their small handful of children. That's just a much slower pace of change.

human culture may be driving evolution faster than genetic mutations can work.

Humans might be making genetic evolution obsolete

Figure 3.2 Consumption corridors changing over time

Figure 3.1 Why consumption minima and maxima are necessary.

Sustainable consumption scholars offer several explanations forwhy earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers falter when itcomes to translating their values into meaningful impact.

This must change. The voting-with-your-purchases narrative, al-though constructed for us, has found fertile ground because of thecombination of (a) a growing sense of urgency among many thatsomething must be done about the environment, and (b) a deepen-ing confusion about how one productively engages in “politics” and“structural change.” Together, (a) + (b) enable the prevailing story thatthe checkout line at the market is where we can do the most good forthe planet, and for those treated unjustly. Recent developments in-dicate that individuals and groups are increasingly challenging thisstory, however. Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and otherinitiatives are once again making environmental and social policy aquestion of political engagement. Let us join them in re-appreciatingand regaining our political power and capacities

The resulting focus on saving the world as a consumer, onegreen-lifestyle action at a time, blocks inspirational avenues to work-ing collectively as citizens toward the good life.

People cannot reason and weigh every consumer decision every timethey act. Most of the hundreds of small decisions we make are basedon daily routines. We simply would not be able to function otherwise.And our routines, in turn, are strongly infuenced by their social andmaterial contexts. Time, societal norms of comfort and appropriatebehavior, and fnancial structures, all play a role here. Breaking rou-tines and practices requires far more than the provision of informationabout products and product use. It requires a change in the institu-tions and structures supporting them.

Another is strate-gic coordination: a great many consumers must make the same productchoices at the same time, with persistence. But this requires a level ofdiligence, focus, conviction, and resistance to greenwashing that doesnot emerge spontaneously. It comes from collective action, most oftenpromoted and organized by civil society organizations.

The starkest danger of the “consumer in charge” narrative is that itdepoliticizes the challenges before us, at a time when a citizen politicsis most called for. With consumers in charge, only the softest and mostbenevolent policy interventions are required from governments, likeproviding consumers with information on the environmental and so-cial characteristics of products, and information on how to use theseproducts in a better (especially more effcient) way. For these reasons,the consumer sovereignty narrative is attractive to politicians, as itshifts responsibility away from producers, retailers, and those taskedwith regulating commercial activity

The advent of a consumer sovereignty/individual control narrativeparallels the re-emergence, in the early 1980s, of neo-liberalism, a po-litical and social philosophy that emphasizes individual responsibilityfor larger social conditions.

hese challenges demand an ethos not of technologicalcleverness, but of social prudence, of acting with humility and cautionwhen confronted by risk and uncertainty. The French philosopherHans Jonas calls this the “imperative of responsibility.”

more research and development dollars focus, for example, onnew medications for the pets of the affuent than for all African trop-ical diseases. And monies spent on innovations in the packaging anddistribution of bottled water for rich-world consumers dwarfs researchand development investments in clean-water systems for the poor inAsia and Africa

Although these approaches may differ, all of them concur onthree essential points:

Instead of weighing the balance of pleasure and pain,individuals tend to think about a good life in terms of their life beingmeaningful to them

We can no longer ignore the fact that the pursuit of the goodlife can impact the chances of others to live a good life.

Confronting ques-tions of what a good life consists of, how it can be achieved, and howit can be guaranteed for everybody entails exploring what really mat-ters to humans, individually and collectively. These questions thus canlaunch new societal debate, helping us recognize similarities ratherthan differences and serve cohesion over polarization. Most funda-mentally, a focus on the vision of a good life allows us, individuallyand collectively, to devise ways to escape the trap of “the more, thebigger, the better,” and to examine how our personal understanding ofthe good life interacts with that of others.

At the same time, the vision of a good life for all integrates our in-dividual pursuit of this goal with an immediate concern for others.In other words, we can enjoy and exercise freedoms only to the extentthat doing so does not impinge on others. Achieving this vision under-lines both the crucial role of freedom but also the necessity of limitsfor this freedom to exist. Thereby, pursuing the vision of a good lifefor all has the potential of bridging current political divides, as it is avision that all people can adhere to.

Often, environmental and social analysts focus on threats, dangers,and damage. They highlight negatives, in terms of limited or non-renewable resources, or the impacts of excessive emissions or effuents.But what if one took the opposite approach and focused on the posi-tives that we want to strive for? We – the authors – believe that everyhuman being, that is you and us and everybody close and far away,wants to be able to live a good life, a life that is worth living. Giventhat the Earth’s resources are limited and distributed highly unevenly,the core objective has to be how everybody can live well within limits.

It requiresa deep and profound orientation toward the good life. It requires usto ponder what the good life is, what conditions must be fulflled forindividuals to live it, and what it takes to create these conditions.

By tying the question of limits to human needsand requirements for their satisfaction, they neither demand asceti-cism or renunciation, nor pursue unspecifed moral suasion in termsof “we should consume less.” Rather, they highlight the necessity –diffcult to pursue but rich in participatory rewards – to jointly defnethe conditions necessary to live a good life, and the subsequent stepsnecessary to make such a good life possible for all individuals. By pro-viding freedom to pursue the good life in an ecologically and sociallyfrayed world, these limits offer the beneft of ensuring that all otherindividuals living now and into the future can do so as well.

Can you imagine a world without limits? Having to navigate a citywithout any limits on how people drive, for example? Or no limits onwhat harm we may do to others? Societies need limits to allow thecommon pursuit of individual and societal wellbeing.

The concept understands humans tobe social beings and assumes that living within societies is associatedwith collective responsibilities, which includes the acceptance of cer-tain limits on individual freedoms.

Justice in the context of consumption corridorsmeans that every person deserves access to a defned minimum level ofecological and social resources necessary to be able to live a good life,solely because they are a human being (what scholars call a natural-law-based perspective on justice).

Integrating a focus on minima andmaxima is the basis for addressing questions of justice in a moreprofound and comprehensive way than a sole focus on the neces-sity of minima. Indeed, maximum consumption standards enforce apowerful message about justice, which is a central goal of consump-tion corridors.

How to satisfy these needs can be a question of personalchoice, as long as maximum consumption standards are not violated.In other words, “satisfers” do not receive the same kind of protec-tion via consumption corridors that “needs” receive

Theconcept of consumption corridors combines notions of human needs,individual preferences, and freedom as the basis for a good life for all.

Minimum consumption standards will ensure that individualsliving now or in the future are able to satisfy their needs, safeguardingaccess to the necessary quality and quantity of ecological and socialresources. Maximum consumption standards, in turn, are needed toensure that consumption by some individuals does not threaten theopportunity for a good life for others. The space between the foor ofminimum consumption standards and the ceiling of maximum con-sumption standards produces a sustainable consumption corridor.

Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological declineand planetary boundaries, this compact book instead offers a spir-ited explication of what everyone desires: a good life. Fundamentalconcepts of the good life are explained and explored, as are forcesthat threaten the good life for all. The remedy, says the book’s seveninternational authors, lies with the concept of consumption corri-dors, enabled by mechanisms of citizen engagement and deliberativedemocracy.

As a consequence of sociocultural niche construction, humans have become a global force of nature – for better and for worse. It is only by embracing these sociocultural realities that we might shape better futures for both humans and non-human species alike.

There is reason to think that the effects of mortality salience are different in relational ontology. Contemporary Heathens are a particular sort of hybrid in living in modern society and emerging out of individualized ontologies, but forming incipient gift economies and expressing what I term a “gift ethic,” with an appreciation for what we receive from others, and desire to give in turn, sustaining social ecological systems as distributed networks of adaptive relations.

we also share an overarching and dominant individualized ontology that operates primarily in a logic of economization and consumerism. Economic metaphors and language dominate, and keep shifting our frame of reference back to economy. It is consumerism that is most often and consistently enacted in worldview defense when confronted with mortality salience in modern society.

“increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5)

unconscious motivations have not been eradicated by rational analysis.

Ritual practice embeds tacit knowledge. Its bodily actions enact meaning and operationalize values. The bodily motions of ritual actions, such as physically sharing drinks and food, and giving gifts, matters because of the reciprocal ideomotor effects of unconscious priming (Kahneman 2011:53). As Lakoff explains, there are connections between metaphoric meanings and bodily actions such that metaphoric associations are embedded in the structures of our brains. Compartmentalism, or “biconceptualism” in his terms, is physical in our brains, and frame shifts can be triggered through bodily movement with priming effects. “Going through the motions” of ritual will have some effects even for those who start off feeling silly for doing it.

interpretive drift is largely unconscious, not articulated, but brought on through practice (Luhrmann 1989:316). It involves more than a shift in the language people use (Luhrmann 1989:315, 321). It is not just cognitive, not just a new interpretive framework, but a shift in ontology and habitus, though Luhrmann uses the term “interpretive” drift. It is an acculturative process of change, but not an entirely passive internalization of culture. It is an interactive, though not necessarily conscious ongoing collaboration. We do this partly through imitation, but also growing skills in ourselves, as Michael Polanyi describes of tacit learning of personal knowledge.

Participation in ritual can change habitus and ontology through tacit learning. Luhrmann describes how “perception of [the practitioners’] world—what they noticed and experienced—altered, and the way they interpreted these perceptions altered …. They acquired the basic knowledge—common knowledge—and basic assumptions, sometimes explicitly articulated, other times implied, which affected the way they noticed and could observe the events around them” (Luhrmann 1989:11). Changes in practice generate changes in what people notice, pay attention to, their perception, sense of patterns, how they interpret events, and rationalize what they are doing. She observed that “Intellectual and experiential changes shift in tandem, a ragged co-evolution of intellectual habits and phenomenological involvement” (Luhrmann 1989:315). Interpretation and rationalization, through practice becomes personal knowledge, embodied knowledge acquired through tacit learning.

When entering an unfamiliar field we lack the knowledge of how to get along in it, but over time our perspective shifts to fit new parameters, recognizing new patterns, and we fit ourselves to the norms we find and begin to share in the shaping of them. Luhrmann describes this process as “interpretive drift,” and explains how the process can be initiated through ritual practice.

Sociologist Kari Norgaard, in her ethnographic study of climate change denial in Norway, indicates that people have “separate mental categories” (Norgaard 2011: loc 795)

Haluza-Delay’s description of informal and incidental learning sounds much like Michael Polanyi’s (1974) “practical knowledge.” Haluza-Delay discusses it as tacit learning, a term Polanyi introduced. From Polanyi’s description, much of tacit learning is initially conscious, but subsides into subsidiary awareness. People learn values in this fashion, but core values are picked up through imitation without conscious awareness.

If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled” (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

“increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5).

The knowledge deficit hypothesis is closely tied to the idea of Homo economicus, an ontological model of the human as rationally self-interested. Historically in Western philosophy “ontology” refers to the study of being, the nature of human being, subjectivity, or what it means to be a self, epitomized in Descartes cogito. This individualized ontology has been extensively critiqued in philosophy and anthropology, but people keep arguing against it because these critiques have had little impact on the material world of economics and politics in which people are still routinely assumed to be rationally self-interested individuals. Edmund Husserl, and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) developed a highly influential phenomenological critique of the Cartesian subject and the modern self, which influenced Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), and subsequent models of the self in deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology (see Roszak et al. 1995 for an overview). Phenomenology also inspired work in intersubjectivity such as Martin Buber’s (1970) I-Thou relations, and Emmanuel Levinas’ (1969, 1998) understanding of ethical subjectivity, as well as Bruno Latour’s (2005) development of actor network theory. Latour’s writings have stimulated fruitful dialogues with anthropologies of Indigenous ontologies. Much of this literature is well known within the environmental humanities, but has had little impact more broadly in environment studies and environmental science, and less still in in politics and economics.

Knowledge about problems on this scale brings paralyzing guilt, fear, and a sense of helplessness

Talking about climate change makes us aware of the fact that we are going to die, and social psychological research in the area known as “terror management theory” finds that this mortality salience prompts psychologically defensive strategies that are significantly counterproductive to environmentalism. However, rituals of giving thanks and the felt experience of gratitude they engender through tacit learning may be effective in generating pro-environmental behaviour.

the more we are presented with this information, the less likely we are to act on it

Abstract

Gene–culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality

The central question of the Anthropocene, why did behaviorally modern humans gain the unprecedented capacity to change an entire planet, cannot be answered by genetic changes in human behavior. To explain why human societies scaled up to become a global force capable of changing the Earth and why there are so many different forms of human societies and ecologies shaped by them, explanations must be sought beyond the theories of biology, chemistry or physics. Here I introduce a new evolutionary theory, sociocultural niche construction, aimed at explaining the origins of human capacity to transform the Earth 3. As will be seen, this theory also explains why behaviorally modern human societies came to transform ecology in so many different ways over the past 50,000 years as they expanded across the Earth.

Abstract

Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions

Ads, Andrew and James discuss where the the climate movement is right now, how deep time plays into the effects we are having on the planet, when good people do bad things because of poor systems and what happens next if 1.5C fails.

Although Virgil, MM and others like them certainly possess a rudimentary form of vision, decades of visual deprivation may never be completely redeemable. The human brain has an amazing capacity for plasticity, but there are some things that it cannot do. MM will likely never see the way that we see.

MM's visual capacities continue to improve, but he also remains somewhat uncomfortable with his new sense. As a blind person, MM became extremely proficient at skiing, with the help of a guide to give him oral directions. After his eyesight was restored, skiing frightened him. The trees, snow, slopes, people -- everything whizzed by him, chaotic and uninterpretable. After much practice, he is now a moderate sighted skiier -- but when he really wants to go fast and feel confident, he closes his eyes.

There is a window of opportunity in youth, often called a critical period, during which the brain can best form neural connections that correspond both to retinal images and to practical experience. During the critical period for the visual cortex, normal visual input is required to wire everything correctly. If input is missing during this period, the brain's links will probably not be built correctly. In fact, brain tissue ordinarily used in visual processing might even be taken over by other systems, perhaps tactile or olfactory systems. Some of MM's visual abilities lend further support to the theory that he missed a critical period of visual development. He is quite good at visual tasks that involve motion. Tasks that stumped him at first often became solvable if motion was incorporated into them. He became able to detect the circular patterns in random noise if the patterns were moving. And he began to see the "square with lines" as a cube if the lines moved, and the cube appeared to be rotating. At the end of their evaluations, the researchers saw some patterns emerging in MM's visual abilities and deficiencies. His ability to detect and identify simple form, color, and motion is essentially normal. His ability to detect and identify complex, three-dimensional forms, objects, and faces is severely impaired. The researchers have a tentative explanation for these variations in visual skill. Motion processing develops very early in infancy compared with form processing. By the time MM lost his eyesight in the accident, the motion centers in his brain were probably nearly complete. So when he regained some eyesight in his forties, those connections in the brain were ready to go. The parts of the brain that process complex shapes, however, do not develop until later in childhood, so MM's brain likely missed its chance to establish those particular brain connections. The authors also propose that our brains may retain the ability to modify and refine complex form identifications throughout life, not just throughout childhood. New objects and faces are continually encountered throughout life, and our visual processing centers must be able to adapt and learn to see new shapes and forms. MM's brain never had the chance to learn.

his problems didn't seem to be vision deficiencies so much as visual interpretation deficiencies. And deficiencies of this sort lie not with the retina's ability to perceive light and color, but with the brain's ability to process the retina's signals correctly. We usually do not think of the above problems as involving interpretation, because we have performed these interpretations so many times, and from such a young age. But since MM lost his sight at an early stage of development, since he had no visual input into his brain after age three, the researchers suspect that the visual centers in his brain did not develop normally -- and now, they likely never will.

Scientists and surgeons are slowly learning how to remove constraints on the eye's ability to see; unleashing the brain's ability to see is another story.

By far the most difficult tasks for MM involve three-dimensional interpretation of his environment. When an image is projected onto the retina, it is two dimensional, because the retina is essentially flat. When we are very young, our brains learn to use depth cues, such as shadows and line perspective, to see the three-dimensional world. Eventually, incorporating these cues into a coherent picture of the world becomes involuntary. Our ability to judge size correctly is one example of the brain's reinterpretation of two-dimensonal images. When a person walks away from us, the image of her becomes smaller and smaller on our retina. We know that people do not actually shrink as they move away, however. The brain combines the shrinking retinal image with perspective and depth cues from the surroundings, and we "decide" that the person is moving away. When MM lost his sight when he was three years old, his brain probably had not yet constructed the connections that incorporate separate perceptions into one combined perception. When a person walks away from MM, he has to remind himself that the person is not actually shrinking in size!

solve infoglut/FOMO, nothing could, but for a while, for me,

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the flip side of infoglut. We expect that we should be able to sanely monitor more than we actually can

Information overload, once called infoglut, remains a challenge. We’re all flooded with more channels than we can handle, more conversations happening in more places than we can keep track of.

Abstract Environmentalists have long warned of a coming shock to the system. COVID-19 exposed fragility in the system and has the potential to result in radical social change. With socioeconomic interruptions cascading through tightly intertwined economic, social, environmental, and political systems, many are not working to find the opportunities for change. Prefigurative politics in communities have demonstrated rapid and successful responses to the pandemic. These successes, and others throughout history, demonstrate that prefigurative politics are important for response to crisis. Given the failure of mainstream environmentalism, we use systemic transformation literature to suggest novel strategies to strengthen cooperative prefigurative politics. In this paper, we look at ways in which COVID-19 shock is leveraged in local and global economic contexts. We also explore how the pandemic has exposed paradoxes of global connectivity and interdependence. While responses shed light on potential lessons for ecological sustainability governance, COVID-19 has also demonstrated the importance of local resilience strategies. We use local manufacturing as an example of a possible localized, yet globally connected, resilience strategy and explore some preliminary data that highlight possible tradeoffs of economic contraction.

We adopt the ‘3 Is of justice’: interspecies justice and Earth system stability; intergenerational justice (between past and present, and present and future); and intragenerational justice (between countries, communities and individuals). These principles derive from the seminal work of Weiss on intergenerational and intragenerational equity64, with additional focus on interspecies justice. In interspecies justice, we include justice that promotes Earth system stability to prevent the collapse of conditions of life for all species. We fold intercommunity, interstate and interindividual justice into a broad category of intragenerational justice, which includes concern for intersectional justice.

Within the Earth Commission, we aim to propose ‘safe and just Earth system boundaries’ (ESBs) that go beyond planetary boundaries as they also include a justice perspective and suggest transformations to achieve them3.

Our concept of ESJ assumes fair sharing of responsibilities among different actors, ensuring that those who are most responsible and capable do the most. For example, the Earth Commission has developed principles for sharing responsibilities for cities and companie

Just transformations challenge power politics, which are often based on vested interests, cost-effectiveness and cost-recovery principles. Addressing deforestation through forest policy may not be adequate to counter agricultural policies that promote land use change to ensure more production and higher gross domestic product (GDP). Carbon markets may be captured by entrepreneurs seeking profit and may not be equitable or effective and can allow pollution to continue. In ‘allocating policy responsibilities’, it is important to not only understand and challenge dominant discourses on increasing GDP at all costs, but also ensure that solutions do not reproduce, redistribute or increase injustices.

The above proposals for just ends need to be subject to wide discussion to further refine our proposals and better meet principles of procedural justice and to analyse the transformations that will achieve this. Just means include ensuring that different knowledge systems are represented in assessments and collective action that challenges dominant sociocultural norms and assumptions about misrecognized groups.

Since minimum access levels for the poor cannot be met within the ESBs without substantial reallocation of resources, we propose minimum access levels for all people. These levels provide the floor or foundation of a corridor, while the ESBs constitute the ceiling (Fig. 6). If resources, responsibilities and risks are allocated in a just manner (Fig. 1), we consider this a ‘safe and just corridor’.

The black line in Fig. 5 shows that redistribution is not enough; if everyone’s emissions are equalized at escape from poverty levels, then we would still overshoot the climate boundaries

intragenerational justice

We find that meeting such access needs for the billions in poverty may lead to crossing ESBs unless resources are reallocated from the rich to the poor28, in line with limitarian and sufficientarian justice37,73.

Preserving ecosystem area is sometimes critiqued as ‘fortress conservation’ by environmental justice scholars, limiting access for poor or Indigenous people68. An ecosystem area boundary therefore requires careful consideration and involvement of the local communities, for example by not demanding that intact areas preclude human inhabitation and sustainable use and/or recognizing the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in already protecting these areas.

the SDGs provide a mandate to address issues of access to water, food and other basic needs and for reducing inequality, but the large number of targets and lack of detail on justice and social drivers hamper their implementation

Safe and just ESBs aim to stabilize the Earth system, protect species and ecosystems and avoid tipping points, as well as minimize ‘significant harm’ to people while ensuring access to resources for a dignified life and escape from poverty. If justice is not considered, the biophysical limits may not be adequate to protect current generations from significant harm. However, strict biophysical limits, such as reducing emissions or setting aside land for nature, can, for example, reduce access to food and land for vulnerable people, and should be complemented by fair sharing and management of the remaining ecological space on Earth4.

joint knowledge to identify safe and just ESBs

Raworth and colleagues have pushed for social issues and equity to underpin the planetary boundaries by highlighting the social foundations in ‘doughnut economics’27. We build on these ideas (Fig. 1) to propose the concept of Earth system justice

Planetary justice scholarship goes further than global justice to call for radical or profound changes to justice understandings in the Anthropocene, critiques anthropocentricism and calls for greater engagement with the non-human world1

Rawls’ conception of justice

Some scholars argue that in the Global North, the view tends to be ‘no humanity without nature’, while in the Global South, the focus is on ‘no nature without social justice’

It provides a discursive shift to reframe environmental science and policy to pay attention to distributive justice6.

Cape Town’s notorious unfinished freeway finally gives way to Foreshore development

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans.

Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx'--and his followers'--links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others.

The process began much earlier.

When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song.

Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated.

But rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior. After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science.

When I use the term European, I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture.

there is a peculiar behavior among most Caucasians. As soon as I become critical of Europe and its impact on other cultures, they become defensive. They begin to defend themselves. But I'm not attacking them personally; I'm attacking Europe. In personalizing my observations on Europe they are personalizing European culture, identifying themselves with it. By defending themselves in this context, they are ultimately defending the death culture. This is a confusion which must be overcome, and it must be overcome in a hurry. None of us has energy to waste in such false struggles.  Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture--alongside the rest of humanity--to see Europe for what it is and what it does.  To cling to capitalism and Marxism and all other "isms" is simply to remain within European culture. There is no avoiding this basic fact. As a fact, this constitutes a choice. Understand that the choice is based on culture, not race. Understand that to choose European culture and industrialism is to choose to be my enemy. And understand that the choice is yours, not mine.  This leads me back to address those American Indians who are drifting through the universities, the city slums, and other European institutions. If you are there to resist the oppressor in accordance with your traditional ways, so be it. I don't know how you manage to combine the two, but perhaps you will succeed. But retain your sense of reality. Beware of coming to believe the white world now offers solutions to the problems it confronts us with. Beware, too, of allowing the words of native people to be twisted to the advantages of our enemies. Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.  A culture which regularly confuses revolt with resistance, has nothing helpful to teach you and nothing to offer you as a way of life. Europeans have long since lost all touch with reality, if ever they were in touch with who you are as American Indians.  So, I suppose to conclude this, I should state clearly that leading anyone toward Marxism is the last thing on my mind. Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity are. In fact, I can say I don't think I'm trying to lead anyone toward anything. To some extent I tried to be a "leader," in the sense that the white media like to use that term, when the American Indian Movement was a young organization. This was a result of a confusion I no longer have. You cannot be everything to everyone. I do not propose to be used in such a fashion by my enemies. I am not a leader. I am an Oglala Lakota patriot. That is all I want and all I need to be. 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Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture--alongside the rest of humanity--to see Europe for what it is and what it does.

Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

In the new collection, The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does, activists and scholars address the deeper problems that EA poses to social justice efforts. Even when EA is pursued with what appears to be integrity, it damages social movements by asserting that it has top-down answers to complex, local problems, and promises to fund grass-roots organizations only if they can prove that they are effective on EA’s terms.

Despite the liberating intentions of many of its advocates, EA is, irredeemably conservative.  It favors welfare-oriented interventions that increase countable measures of well-being and both neglects and diverts funds from social movements that address injustices and agitate for social change, particularly in marginalized communities both in the US and in the Global South.