Cultural Luddism and the Coming Global Reality

Today's posting follows from a seemingly endless series of articles, recently filling newspapers across Canada and the United States, bemoaning and remonstrating against the need for change in one ethic group or another, one definable subsection of society or another, in this changing society (changing world) of ours.  My native Albertans have had decades of strong economy based of raping the land of a limited supply of burnable carbon.  The same is true of many of the eastern United States with coal and the central and western United States with oil.  Many First Nations groups have continued to follow a subsistence pattern largely based on hunting and fishing declining herds and fish stocks.  Canada's Inuit state their opposition to global warming primarily in terms of their perceived need to preserve their traditional way of life.  The cries from all are long, loud and increasing in frequency, demanding that whatever is necessary be done to allow them to continue living the same life their parents and grandparents lived.

I am well aware that this posting will shock and anger many.  Many will accuse me of an utter lack of empathy for those who see their traditional ways of life threatened.  Many will even accuse me of racism in my comments against the First Nations and Inuit groups who demand to be allowed to continue their traditional ways without change.  My position, however, is that all such groups, no matter their region, nation or ethic group, should take a long hard look at reality, stop whining about having to change their ways and start working on new and better ways to live in a rapidly changing world.

Let me begin by reminding the reader that I am one of those Albertans who has benefitted, both directly and indirectly, from those decades of hydrocarbon extraction.  Much of my work as an archaeologist and palaeo-environmentalist was done in the tar sands area of northern Alberta, directly paid for, largely, by the oil companies and consortiums who intended to tear up the land.  Let me address potential accusations of racism by pointing out that I have lived among both the Dené of the Mackenzie Valley and the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, have worked with both peoples, for months at a time, many times over a career spanning decades.  I have even spent decades studying first hand the archaeological reconstruction of their traditional cultures and prehistoric ways of life and the palaeoenvironmental reconstructions of their traditional environments.  I have the very highest respect for these people, finding them to have been and to continue to be brilliant technologically, innovative culturally, and extremely warm and giving, even to strangers, as social beings.

I would add to this a reminder that I am not simply a member of an industrialized Canadian society.  As someone who, since childhood, has had a strong connection with my own ethnicity (Scottish/Irish) and with history in general, I have lived my entire life very much aware that it was only a short time ago (as an archaeologist views time) that my ancestors were hunters and gatherers.  Although I am sure many resisted the change, they had little choice but to adapt to a farming, cattle herding and/or shepherding way of life over time (sometimes over very little time) no doubt with much accompanying complaint.  Shift forward in time just a little and see the drastic lifestyle changes my more recent ancestors had to engage in adapting to the industrial revolution, accomplished haphazardly with poor planning and much suffering. Alvin Toffler, in 1970, wrote a book entitled Future Shock, in which he described the pain anxiety and disorientation which people can experience when they are forced to change their accustomed ways and in which he predicted increasing occurrences of this socially disruptive effect as the world becomes more globally unified into what he termed a "super-industrial society."

Now we all, of every region, nation and ethic group, are facing another great time of change; only it is now evident that we won't even have as much time to adapt as Alvin Toffler thought.  I speak here, again, of global warming.  Within decades, not centuries, we will not only see but we will be immersed in global changes in water availability, animal, plant and mineral resource availability and socio-economic diversification requirements such as has never been seen before in the history of human society.  We can not, in this situation, afford the luxury of letting the change-deniers and those who wish to cling forever to the comfortable and customary past hold us back from making the economic and societal changes required to not just survive but to thrive in the coming new reality.

Contrary to the warnings of doom by the conservatives and global warming deniers, this does not mean we in Alberta, and elsewhere, have to give up prosperity.  It means we have to quickly get up off our duffs and use this very limited time of prosperity to diversify our economy, including diversification of our energy usage away from our current hydrocarbon-based  monoculture.  It means we have to quickly get more rational about recognizing the changes we are facing in water availability and must start planning now for how to deal with it.  It means that First Nations and Inuit peoples will have to stop looking at the hunting of particular, traditional target herds as their right and start diversifying into more sustainable socio-economic practices in a much changed physical environment.  I am not saying they should have to, in a perfect world. I am saying that global warming has already advanced to the point where, in this world, they do have to.  It is only if we fail to take these steps that we face serious economic stresses, recessions and potential regional economic collapses.  Keep in mind that those regions, nations, cultures who first make the necessary changes to take advantage of the new environmental and global/cultural reality will have a substantial economic/power advantage over those who are laggards, and they may care a great deal less about your particular culture than you do.

   

Making the necessary changes also does not mean we have to give up all of the cherished parts of our past or our ethnicities.  Far from it, we need to work hard to preserve those aspects of our ancient ways which can be preserved and cherished.  These include languages, traditional clothing, games, recipes, ceremonies, and other cultural practices which can be continued no matter what the environment or socio-economic base of the society becomes.

There is a wonderful future available to southern industrialized societies and to the Dené, Inuit and other more traditional peoples, if we all accept this challenge now and start making the necessary cultural changes.  There simply is not time, this time, to be very tolerant of the untra-conservatives and nay-sayers who are constantly trying to hold us back.  Any of us, globally, who try to freeze our culture as a sort of museum piece are likely to see that culture falter, fail and disappear, with a great deal more concomitant cultural stress and "future shock" than is involved in making the necessary cultural changes to preserve the best and most future-viable parts of our respective cultures in the first place.

We are all, more rapidly than ever and more rapidly than most understand, heading into a very different world.  It is already too late to avoid that even if the world governments immediately switched to greener energy sources, and they show no signs at all of making any great move in that direction.  The greatest factor holding us back, and therefore the greatest danger to our making a relatively smooth transition into the future, lies with the ultra-conservatives in all cultures who are poorly informed scientifically and are philosophically blind to anything but their own particular version of the past.  If you care about reducing the future shock experienced by people of your particular culture, start now to get more vocal and more argumentatively forceful in stopping these cultural Luddites from holding us back from making the changes we must now make.

Collapse of the Global Warming "Conspiracy"?!?!?

    I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that so many people, including many influential journalists, are coming to such disastrously wrong conclusions about the meaning of recent revelations regarding mistakes made, sloppy data gathering done and even alleged wrong-doings committed by certain UN scientists.  The scientists in question have been prominently vocal in warning about the potentially harmful and expensive ramifications, for nations around the world, of the increasingly rapid climatic warming that is occurring globally.  The reason I should not be surprised is that the vast majority of people, regrettably, have little or no understanding of science or of scientific method.

    Most people, even atheists and agnostics, are people of faith in their way of thinking.  They do not think scientifically.  You do not have to have faith in any particular God, religion or  book to be a 'faith-thinker.'  You simply have to be a person who tends to base your opinions and conclusions on faith in a person or group relaying information to you, and by extension the conclusions that person or group has come to, rather than on review and scientific consideration of the evidence that person or those persons based their conclusions on.  This is not the same as trust.  We all might, justifiably, come to trust a certain source of information based on past performance.  If it can be reliably demonstrated later that this source has made serious mistakes or even lied or falsified data in some way, then we will, justifiably, lose our trust in that source and perhaps cease to listen to them.  The difference here between the scientific-thinker and the faith-thinker is that the faith-thinker will frequently tend to throw out everything that disgraced source has said whereas the scientific thinker will review the evidence to determine what conclusion to come to, not just about the guilt or innocence of the source mentioned, but about what they were claiming that he was tempted to believe.

    Take, for example, Margaret Wente's recent submission in the Globe and mail: (www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-great-global-warming-collapse/article1458206/).  The very title,  "The great global warming collapse." suggests that we can all now relax about global warming as if it has been shown to have all been a great conspiracy, a fraud.  This is only one example.  There are many others of its ilk readily available not only in news articles but in myriad blogs across the net.  The problem with this conclusion is that these people are trying to throw out decades of replicated and verified data gathered by literally thousands of independent scientists from all over the world based on their new found lack of trust in someone they probably had never heard of before.  Some talk as if belief in global warming was based on the work of a handful of scientists or on one or two studies which might be flawed, or even falsified, instead of on thousands of independent studies by thousands of independent scientists over many decades.  As for those who suggest it is all a great scientific conspiracy: how could you possibly organize and run such an enormous conspiracy even if you wanted to?  What would the motivation be to be part of such a conspiracy?  There would be far, far, FAR more money in being on the anti-global warming side with merry buckets of cash and huge honours gratefully proffered by the vastly wealthy and powerful oil and coal companies as well as those corporations that depend on ready and cheap supplies of oil and coal and the petro-State governments (such as Alberta's) if you could only demonstrate scientifically that global warming was not occurring.

   The problem for those who insist that global warming is a fraud and a conspiracy is that the scientific evidence for it is overwhelming and no one has been able to demonstrate that it is not occurring.  In fact, we have reached the point where anyone who examines the evidence for global warming, rather than depending on "he said/she said" arguments, can see that global warming is a fact.  It does not take a scientific degree to be certain of this.  It simply takes scientific thinking coupled with EXAMINATION OF THE EVIDENCE.  The glaciers of the Alps may not be gone by 2035, but they are unquestionable receding at an astonishing rate.  North American and Australian glaciers are similarly retreating at a great rate.  A quick search of the internet will reveal comparative photographs, taken over decades, of numerous glaciers that demonstrate this retreat. The Greenland Ice cap is thinning at a historically unprecedented rate.  Huge ice shelves are breaking up both in the Arctic and Antarctic.  The Arctic Ocean shows more open water every year.  Weather stations around the world evidence increased temperatures.    This can readily be verified even by non-scientists with little or no formal scientific training.  I can assure you that the Inuit all across Canada's north can testify that the Arctic is warming without reference to a single scientific report.

    Even if you feel that the jury should be out still on the question of the amount or degree of anthropogenically caused global warming, there can no longer be any valid, scientific denial that global warming is occurring and this warming will cause huge and expensive problems for people all over the world.  I live in Alberta and, while global warming may bring a benefit or two such as warmer winters, it will also bring increased incidence of tornados and greatly reduced fresh water supplies.  People who live in the Arctic, on many small Pacific islands, in many coastal cities and in areas already marginal because of drought, will face even greater problems.  As for anyone who claims that there is no significant anthropogenic contribution to the observed global warming, I will ask again here, as I did in my posting of December 31, 2009, how can we possibly add billions of tons of carbon-dioxide and methane to the atmosphere year after year and not contribute significantly to global warming?  That is a question perennially avoided by those who argue that warnings by scientists of global warming are due to some sort of conspiracy.

    Not everyone can be a trained scientist.  Not everyone should be.  But everyone should be willing to take a scientific look at the evidence for global warming before making up his or her mind about it.  Trust in particular experts can be comforting and nice, but it is not necessary when looking for truth in a matter so eminently open to materialistic examination as global warming.  Only the willingness to examine the material evidence objectively and logically is necessary. For anyone interested in learning more about how scientists approach the evidence in forming their opinions I would, at a bare minimum, recommend reading the following:

    Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1962. 2nd edition 1970. 3rd edition 1996

    Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1959

    Suppe, Frederick (Editor), The Structure of Scientific Theories, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL, 2nd edition 1977. 

Ignorance is Fun?

    This posting is based on a comment I felt compelled to make on someone else's blog.  That blog brought to my attention something I have thought about and discussed with others many times over the years.  Few people would disagree that science is to be praised for doing us many favours in terms of revealing how the universe really works and allowing us to discover, thereby, new ways of improving our lives.  Many people, however, perhaps even most people, feel that science has a regrettable side in that, for every discovery made, there is one less mystery to make our lives exciting and fun.

    For myself, having been science oriented since childhood and involved directly in a number of scientific disciplines during my adult life, I find it difficult to understand how people can hold this opinion and I certainly have never felt that way myself.  Not knowing what something is or how it works (another word for this is ignorance), replacing the scientific search for knowledge with ancient religious dogma or fairy tales, adds no more mystery to our lives than would throwing a blanket over something and wondering what's under it, or wearing blinders and wondering what it is that we can't see.

    The real universe, and in fact each discoverable part of the universe, holds so much more mystery than any mere human being could possibly imagine. Each discovery made always leads to several more mysteries that we never even suspected were there. Every discovery in astronomy has only served to expand our universe as we understand it, not shrink it.  Every discovery in biology has raised new mysteries about the incredible variety and versatility of DNA, RNA and biological cells.


    There was a time when, taught by dogma, we "knew" that the universe consisted only of our solar system surrounded by a few stars, sterile of life, and that surrounded, only a few miles away, by the abodes of the gods.  Now we find ourselves living in a visible universe, over 27 billion light years across, containing potentially uncountable trillions of inhabitable planets.  This visible universe is perhaps held within an infinite universe, or even an infinite number of universes, potentially with different basic physical laws.  Even something as familiar, predictable and understandable on the surface as the movement of billiard balls has become mysterious when we examine it in the light of our developing understanding of quantum mechanics plus the fact that billiard balls and tables are made up of unpredictable subatomic particles.  What scientists do, simultaneously with adding to our understanding of how things work, is add to our store of mysteries; and that is nothing if not exciting and fun.