Willits and the problem of slow knowledge

This is the first of four parts in a series on Willits, California, one of the first communities in the United States to respond to peak oil.

All eyes in the peak oil movement are on Willits, a small town of about 5,000 in northern California's Mendocino County. Willits became an experiment station of sorts for peak oil preparedness when Ph.D. botanist Jason Bradford left the University of California-Davis in 2004, moved his family to Willits, and began preparations for an imminent, irreversible decline in world oil production.

As Bradford relates, he started by showing the film, The End of Suburbia, to his new fellow residents. The documentary traces the history of suburban development in North America and suggests that the collapse of the suburban way of life is inevitable during the coming permanent oil shortage. The local newspaper covered the events, often with front-page stories, documenting the standing room only crowds. Bradford said he had great hopes that the growing enthusiasm for peak oil preparedness generated by the events would lead to quick, decisive action by the community and its officials.

He and others formed a group called Willits Economic Localization (WELL) to pursue relocalization, a key strategy for adapting to a lower energy world. The strategy calls for sourcing as many of life's necessities as possible locally. This reduces the enormous energy costs of transporting goods and helps to provide the security that goes with self-sufficiency, especially in food.

But after three years, Willits, while still a clear leader in peak oil preparedness, has not achieved nearly the progress envisioned by Bradford and other organizers. While their sense of urgency still remains, they have begun to realize that municipal governments move at what seems like a glacial pace and that public awareness is not the same as public understanding.

Willits is dealing with what environmental educator David Orr might call the problem of slow knowledge. In our culture we are used to the rapid dissemination of the latest technological breakthrough or device. And, we are accustomed to a mass media that turbocharges the transfer of information. But there is a difference between the kind of knowledge which fosters change in our technological society and the kind that the shows humans their actual relationship to the natural world and the limits it imposes.

Teaching people how to use a chainsaw can take only a few minutes. That's fast knowledge. Teaching people the importance of trees in creating and protecting the soil, encouraging biodiversity, preventing runoff, storing carbon and influencing climate is a task that requires time, concentration and reflection. It assumes a body of knowledge about the natural world that most people simply don't have and therefore must acquire. And, it assumes an eye trained to look for subtleties in the natural landscape. Moreover, such learning does not yield the immediate and visible economic benefits of the chainsaw.

Even more challenging is teaching people to value the natural world right where they live. American culture, in particular, separates nature and civilization so completely that nature always seems far away. It is something one travels to get to. And, though most Americans appreciate the beauty of pristine wilderness, few care to plumb the secrets of their own yard or a nearby stream. So, the challenge is two-fold: 1) To lay the groundwork for understanding natural processes and 2) to make the case that understanding the local environment and how it can sustain us is going to become far more important in the future.

But there is another aspect to slow knowledge, and that is the social one. Just as knowledge of the local environment and its subtle interrelationships are difficult to gain and impart, so too is the social understanding about local relationships among people. Who are the influential people in my town? How can they be brought into the sustainability process? How can we rebuild the local commercial relationships between shop owner, farmer, and artisan that provide the living infrastructure for local economies?

We are accustomed to ordering from catalogs and the Internet or visiting chain stores for our needs. But we will be obliged to rediscover much of the knowledge we need to operate things locally. And, that too is slow knowledge since it involves building skills and trust.

Despite the arduous process of imparting slow knowledge, the activists in Willits have actually made considerable progress.

• Jason Bradford spearheaded the formation of a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm on the grounds of a local elementary with the encouragement of the school district and with volunteer and financial help from the community.

• The City of Willits, the local chamber of commerce and many nonprofit groups including the local Rotary Club have signed a joint statement with WELL explicitly acknowledging fossil fuel depletion and climate change as threats to the community and embracing relocalization as a key strategy for addressing these problems.

• The chamber has a "Local First" program complete with bookmarks, bumper stickers, and tote bags that encourages residents to shop in locally owned and operated businesses. A community festival organized by "Local First" was a huge success.

• The city has an aggressive program for providing grants to homeowners for energy efficiency improvements and solar energy installation.

• The city has joined the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign sponsored by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

• The County of Mendocino created an energy task force to advise it on energy policy for an update of its general plan. The written report explicitly cited fossil fuel depletion and climate change as major issues in county planning.

• The elected sheriff of Mendocino County has 1) initiated additional emergency planning measures in part due to the work of Willits' activists, 2) implemented measures to reduce driving and thus fuel consumption for his officers including video conferencing, steps that are especially meaningful in a county the size of Delaware, and 3) purchased a hybrid replacement for his current official vehicle to promote the idea that hybrids are viable for law enforcement.

There are other projects and activities which I did not include here. But even this abbreviated list is impressive given that the community began from a standing start in late 2004.

If the community of Willits has shown anything, it is that the problem of slow knowledge can be overcome with persistence, intelligence and good-heartedness. Even as the challenges of energy depletion and climate change bear down upon us, the knowledge we need to address these problems can be garnered and propagated by small groups of committed activists working in local communities. The only question is whether such groups will spread quickly enough around the globe to begin the needed work of creating sustainable communities before the worst is upon us.

The information society and its limits

The breathtaking expansion of the Internet and the sources of information now available on it have served to conjure a cybernetic vision of unlimited growth--growth that can never be slowed for long by lack of physical resources because it is mostly virtual. The Internet has undoubtedly allowed people to find information readily that would previously have taken hours of meticulous searching in a library or might not be found at all.

The vast quantities of information now available require some kind of filtering, and so various filtering services including news aggregators, weblogs, and specialty sites of all kinds have arisen. All of that is to the good. True, much of the information on the Internet is of questionable veracity. And, much of what passes for information not only on the Internet, but also in the broader media is nothing more than polemic dressed up as analysis. And, of course, the sheer volume of it all would be overwhelming were it not mitigated by the available filters or by simply turning away from the computer, the television and the radio.

But so many people cannot or will not turn away for any extended period of time. Instead, they believe they need to be "updated" on a regular basis. I put "updated" in quotes since to me the news seems more or less the same every day with a few widely spaced and prominent exceptions. It is these exceptions that I pay attention to. But most stories fit into rather predictable categories which I label as follows:

1. Prices are going up (or, more rarely, down).
2. There's corruption in government. (Who knew?)
3. The corporations are out to get us.
4. It's dangerous out there. (Crime stories)
5. Isn't that weird? (Human interest stories)
6. GI Joe. (War coverage)
7. How to lose 10 pounds without dieting. (Service stories)

Perhaps you can think of other categories. And, while stories in some of these categories are indeed important, those stories rarely provide the context or the intelligent analysis required to make them useful. On the other hand, crime stories are usually just sensationalism designed to attract subscribers and viewers.

Putting into the proper context what information we actually do need for something other than aiding and abetting our consumption--for, say, understanding public policy--requires conceptual training that can only come from reading well-written books and articles and engaging with other rigorous minds who challenge our own point of view. That is a much slower training process, and it will never occur at Internet speeds.

Environmental education giant David Orr likes to say that what we lack is "slow" knowledge. It is easy to learn how to take down a whole forest with a chainsaw. That's fast knowledge. But as I wrote in a previous post:

Teaching people the importance of trees in creating and protecting the soil, encouraging biodiversity, preventing runoff, storing carbon and influencing climate is a task that requires time, concentration and reflection. It assumes a body of knowledge about the natural world that most people simply don't have and therefore must acquire. And, it assumes an eye trained to look for subtleties in the natural landscape. Moreover, such learning does not yield the immediate and visible economic benefits of the chainsaw.

But even if we take the time to acquire the slow knowledge we need, we cannot solve the knowledge problem with more information. The world is too complex to comprehend by merely apprehending its parts. And, no human being can see all of the universe or even his or her part of it well enough to give anything but a very fragmentary account. We will always have huge areas of ignorance, particularly about the long-term consequences of the actions we take to reshape the ecosphere to our purposes.

And, even where we believe we have a lot of information--for example, the confident predictions about world oil and natural gas reserves or about the amount of uranium that can be extracted from the Earth's crust--we ought to look not to what we know for confirmation, but to what we don't know for guidance regarding the risks we face. Orr suggests that those lacunae in our knowledge should entreat us to employ wide margins of safety both in our daily actions and even more so in our collective policies.

It is possible, for example, that the optimistic estimates of the world's energy supplies are correct. The consequences of that would be that business as usual could proceed for a few more decades during which we could take a very leisurely attitude toward making the transition to a new energy economy. (I am, of course, setting aside the very serious risks related to climate change in this illustration.) The consequences of being wrong, however, could include catastrophic collapse. Hence, Orr's suggestion that we employ wide margins of safety when acting on what we think we know.

The hubris of the information society is that it imagines that data matter more than understanding and that we are moving closer and closer every day to completing the book of knowledge. The truth is we are creating vast new areas of ignorance. Two examples, one domestic and one industrial, illustrate the problem. Our highly productive modern farming and food production system has allowed the vast majority of people to forego learning anything about plants in their immediate area which are edible. And, since public policy in the United States (but no longer in Europe) puts the onus on the public to prove that a new chemical is harmful before it is banned (rather than putting the onus on industry to prove it is safe), industry releases thousands of new chemicals each year into the environment ignorant of their possible negative effects on humans and on ecosystems.

The most important first step in countering this trend is to recognize it and to act with the heightened sense of attentiveness, care and prudence which that recognition demands.

Paul Feyerabend and the fight over 'truth'

I read philosopher Paul Feyerabend's book Against Method many years ago, and it has shaped my thinking ever since. Feyerabend has been wrongly criticized as anti-science. I would say that he felt that the modern definition of science was too narrow. He described true science as having methodological pluralism. There is no such thing as a unified science, only sciences plural, as French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour has said.

Feyerabend also championed something he called epistemological anarchism. Wikipedia actually gives what I think is a good two-sentence summary:

[T]here are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge. It holds that the idea of the operation of science by fixed, universal rules is unrealistic, pernicious, and detrimental to science itself.

It is worth noting that the word "science" comes from the Latin "scientia." That word does not denote a specific approach to understanding. It means more generally knowledge or skill. When we explore the world in search of competence in our living and being,we ought to be open to many sources of knowledge and many avenues to gain skills.

Is the slowdown in productivity growth a result of energy costs?

Slowing productivity growth in the United States has been in the news in recent months. It has become a concern to policymakers because they believe it is one of the primary contributors to a middle-class economic squeeze according to the annual report of the White House Council of Economic Advisors.

Simply put, productivity growth refers to the growth in economic output per worker or more precisely, per hour of work. When this growth slows, the potential for real wage increases diminishes since the growth in wages typically reflects the ability of workers to create more output per unit of time.

To the obstensibly naive observer the following idea may seem a plausible explanation: Higher-cost energy inputs into the production of goods and services reduce productivity growth because the economic output per dollar of energy consumed declines. And, though energy inputs aren't the only thing to consider, they are important. The high energy prices of the last decade or so may be, in part, responsible for low productivity growth. (Conversely, low energy costs would imply more output per dollar of energy consumed.)

The 'soft collapse': Will organic farmers become the most important people on earth?

Several pieces has been appearing on the Internet which eschew the apocalyptic visions of some peak oil bloggers and commentators and propose that a failure to find adequate new energy sources is more likely to lead to a slow decline in industrial civilization, a decline that might even be temporarily arrested and reversed by technological developments. This piece appearing on Energy Bulletin is the most thoughtful and complete I've seen. My main interest is a comment at the end, something which you also see in the writings of James Howard Kunstler.

Without cheap fossil fuels to produce the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides which drive industrial agriculture, we will be in grave need of the knowledge of how to farm the land without these. Organic farmers are the storehouse and guardians of this knowledge, and it is to them that we will likely increasingly turn to feed the world. Such farmers will be in double demand. First, they will be called upon to produce vastly much more food than they do today. Second, they will be called upon to teach organic techniques to the many more people we'll need to work the land both in the countryside and in urban gardens in order to adequately feed everyone.

Something like this has already happened in Cuba where an end to cheap oil shipments from the collapsing Soviet Union in the early 1990s forced a complete reorganization and vast expansion of agriculture in the country. Will we have enough organic farmers to do the job should the time come for the rest of us?

(Comments are open to all. See the list of environmental blogs on my sidebar.)

Why don't humans respond to extinction-level risks?

The perils that threaten the continuity of human civilization are so obvious that it is puzzling that so little is being done to counter these perils. In fact, much is being done to hasten their arrival. Climate change, nuclear war, toxic pollution leading to complete loss of human fertility, solar storms and electromagnetic pulse weapons that could take down the entire electric grid, designer viruses against which none of us have defenses, and energy and resource depletion are just some of the extinction-level risks that we face.

Now, none of these possibilities are certain to wipe out humanity altogether. But they might very well end modern technical civilization and leave behind only a few scattered groups of humans around the globe. And, then there is the recent hoopla about artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the world and extinguishing human beings or, at least making decisions without consideration for whether those decisions will lead to the demise of the human race. What the hoopla actually seems to be about is what people will do with AI, making this an all-too-human disaster rather than merely a technological one.

Given all that is known about these threats, what is stopping human societies from taking definitive action to prevent them? Let me offer a few ideas:

Attitude adjustment: Facing our ecological predicament

After a talk I gave last year on food and energy, one audience member remarked that it seemed to him that we face challenges so daunting that little can be done to stop a worldwide collapse of civilization. "What is the point in trying?" he seemed to be asking. As I prepare for guest lectures on peak oil and the consequences of overshoot at a local college this week, I'm asking myself: Is that person's attitude really all that unreasonable?

Attitudes, of course, flow from assumptions, and there is a wide assortment of assumptions regarding our ecological future. Those assumptions are widely debated and large bodies of evidence have been marshalled for various views. But, perhaps we also need to know something about the usefulness of certain attitudes. People maintain particular attitudes not merely because of the evidence available to them, but also because of the efficacy of the attitudes themselves.

For some people, of course, the problems of global warming, energy depletion, soil erosion and the whole gamut of ecological dangers aren't problems at all. These people simply deny the existence of any ecological problems. This attitude may seem foolhardy until we understand its advantages. First, those who deny our ecological problems are free from the anxieties about any potential bad effects. That leaves more emotional energy available to focus on day-to-day activities and immediate needs. Second, the denial itself serves to immunize these people against contrary evidence. This is a timesaver since contrary evidence has been ruled inadmissible ahead of time and therefore need not be considered. Third, the deniers may not necessarily be cocksure of their position. But, they may also believe that if they are wrong, the consequences of any gathering ecological calamity may be so far in the future so as not to matter to them or even to their children.

Strangely, my glum audience member arrives at almost the same place as the deniers just mentioned because he assumes that our problems are so immense that they cannot be addressed. Intellectually, our pessimist has accepted the premise of ecological peril and social collapse, so he is not freed from the anxieties bred by this knowledge. He does, however, gain time and emotional energy to focus on what is left of the "good life" before the worst hits. He doesn't need to spend time evaluating new evidence for or against the possibility of a collapse. And, if the consequences of the inevitable calamity do visit him, he will have the satisfaction of having made the most of his time prior to its arrival. If there turn out to be no severe adverse consequences in his lifetime, at least he will not have wasted much energy worrying about them. Yes, his children will likely be affected, but under his assumptions, there is nothing he can do about it anyway.

So far, I've detailed two opposing viewpoints that seem nothing more than a defense of apathy. But, there are two other slight variants that lead to only a little more activity though they may appear to be more "reasonable" to the casual observer.

First, there are those who believe we have potentially serious problems, but that technology guided by the marketplace will inevitably solve them. They may even allow for some government intervention, for example, through carbon taxes to help slow global warming. The advantages of this view are obvious. There is very little work for individuals to do. Corporations and even to a certain extent the government will take care of everything. (Some may regard this as a disadvantage, but that's another discussion.)

Second, there are those who share the aforementioned belief that we face potentially serious problems; however, they also believe that only the right kind of technology can address these problems, so-called "green" technology. This technology will not simply be introduced by the marketplace, but must be subsidized or mandated by the government. Other bad technology such as coal-fired power plants must be actively and severely regulated and ultimately replaced. While this view requires a little more action since citizens must pressure their governments to enact the various subsidies, standards and regulations needed for this bright green future, it still envisions a more or less business-as-usual world albeit one based on "green" technology.

Paradoxically, the hardest sell is not a view that would require the greatest change in belief. We've already covered that. It's actually quite easy to sell people on a deeply pessimistic view of the future. As we have seen, those who hold such a view may adopt an attitude of complete resignation that resembles in its results the attitude of those who deny any problems at all. (Compare, for example, the apparent resignation of those who believe in an imminent biblical apocalypse.)

The hardest sell to any audience is that there is a chance for us to chart a course to sustainability, but that it will take a lot of work at every level: individual, household, municipal, state, federal and even international. And, by the way, when we get there all of us will have considerably less material wealth than we do today.

Not surprisingly, the thought of working hard for a future with lowered expectations is not all that appealing to a public whose ever-expanding pursuits continue to float on a sea of seemingly endless fossil fuels. The advantages of the path to sustainability are actually quite numerous. One can point to many nonmaterial benefits such as closer communities and families, a closer relationship with nature, a slower pace, possibilities for a deeper spiritual life, and an ecologically sound human society for the generations to come. Unfortunately, all of these advantages have little appeal to an audience that would prefer something closer to business as usual.

And, yet the approach which is hardest to sell seems like the safest. It relies on the concrete, concerted actions of people everywhere doing things that require no miracles of technology, no rosy assumptions about the future availability of critical resources, and only limited faith in the marketplace (a marketplace that has consistently given us the illusion of decreasing scarcity.) It is an approach that one can get started on today without the enactment of any big government program. To that extent it empowers individuals and small groups.

So, why does this approach which some are calling Plan C get the cold shoulder? I think in part this is because it requires people to hold in their minds two simultaneously troubling ideas: 1) the terrible ecological dangers that we face and 2) the difficult truth that we can only surmount them through efforts that have grown deeply unfamiliar to many of us. It puts the burden for reaching sustainability squarely on the shoulders of every community member. Given our atrophied community-building skills and our vast ignorance of nature, we may be forgiven for wondering if we are up to the task. It is more comfortable to think we can rely on experts in government and industry whom many of us assume (perhaps wrongly) know what they are doing.

If Plan C is to become the main focus of action, as I believe it must, then people will ultimately need to accept two critical notions: 1) that technology will not save us and so we must save ourselves and 2) that we can save ourselves and our children because we are still capable of learning and executing the things we need to do to build a sustainable society.

William James in his essay, "Is Life Worth Living?", wrote:

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case...the part of wisdom as well as courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled.

Let us not hesitate and let us believe what is in the line of our needs so that we may succeed.

Could AI lead to the destruction of civilization?

When it comes to the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and now artificial superintelligence (ASI) (sometimes called artificial general intelligence), I feel as if we've been transported onto the set of the 1983 film "WarGames."

In the film teenage hacker David Lightman stumbles onto the military's most sensitive war scenario planning computer while believing he has simply found a soon-to-be-released game called "Global Thermonuclear War" on the server of a computer game company.  Lightman activates the game which ultimately makes personnel at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) mistakenly believe that the Soviet Union is preparing for an attack. On big screens throughout the war room, Soviet movements and preparations become ever more threatening by the hour. As we are told later, the object of the game is to win and so the computer sets out to win a thermonuclear war.

When Lightman realizes what he's done, he seeks out the one person he believes can stop the madness. (I'm skipping a lot of steps here.) He catches up with the architect of that war planning computer system, Stephen Falken. Falken is living a solitary, anonymous existence (under a different name) in a home that Falken says is near a primary nuclear target. He explains to the young hacker: "A millisecond of brilliant light and we're vaporized. Much more fortunate than the millions who'll wander sightless through the smouldering aftermath. We'll be spared the horror of survival."

AI: Storytelling, communication and B.S.

A scene from the 1992 film "The Player" seems to foretell a current dispute over the role of artificial intelligence between studios and production companies and the writers who feed them content. The dispute is one among many that have led to an ongoing strike by the writers. In "The Player" a studio executive while in a meeting with other colleagues says:

I've yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine and we have a tendency to treat them like that.

Then, the executive asks for headlines from a newspaper lying on the conference table and shows how those headlines can instantly be fashioned into recognized Hollywood movie formulas.

When another executive who reviews script submissions from writers finally comments, he says:

I was thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we can just get rid of the actors and directors, maybe we've got something.

What was a thought experiment in 1992 has become a reality today. Here is a short science fiction film written by AI. Here is one both written and directed by AI; ironically, it's about AI taking over the world. AI is now simulating actors' voices. And, at some point virtual actors (NOT digital copies of real actors) could make film and television acting obsolete...or will it?

Can we create a durable future?

It is hard to imagine anyone today building something as durable as the Roman Colosseum. Most of the damage we see to the 2,000 year-old stadium comes from two earthquakes and the persistent looting of its marble, stone and brass infrastructure by humans using them for other building projects. Were it not for these unfortunate depredations, the Colosseum might be largely intact today.

We pen fantasies about the durability of our culture in science fiction novels, television programs and movies set hundreds and even thousands of years from now. By then we humans will supposedly be moving with magical ease at speeds greater than light, zipping through the known universe aided by voice-command convenience (or maybe even thought-comand convenience).

But our age seems to be populated by buildings and cultural artifacts that are designed for impermanence. It's not that we are technically incapable of making things that are durable when we want to, especially when it feeds our desire to turn science fiction into fact. NASA's Mars Rovers launched in 2003 were designed for a mission of 90 Martian solar days. The Spirit rover operated until 2010. The Opportunity rover is still operating.