immanence

… that might get humans to pull through the next few centuries relatively intact as a species (if not undiminished or unscathed): Decarbonization, Deplasticization, Demilitarization, Decolonization, and Demographic Transition.

The first, Decarbonization, entails a dramatic reduction in industrial production of atmospheric carbon (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. It will keep conditions for the flourishing of human life from getting too unstable and unreliable. As it’s mainly a technical task, it should be pretty doable, as long as the interests vested in maintaining current carbon-heavy systems can be overcome.

The second, Deplasticization, entails the dramatic reduction in industrial production of (relatively) nonbiodegradable polymers (including microplastics). It will keep us from choking on our own industrial puke. Like the first, it’s also a technical task, so in principle it’s pretty doable.

Those two are the easy ones.  

The third, Demilitarization, entails replacing military solutions with non-military solutions to disagreements and conflicts. This one’s a constant work in progress, and also something that may never happen in full. The key is, rather, to contain the risk of a massive military conflagration by whittling away at the tendencies to demonize others, arm oneself or one’s nation (or class), and ratchet up conflicts until they boil up. The reason to do this is not only to keep human armies from destroying human populations. (From the perspective of the Earth, some of that would be easily tolerated; it’s mainly the side effects — toxins spread through ecological systems — that are a problem. Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us is a good study of how the Earth will recover if humans somehow eliminated themselves from the scene.) More importantly, the reason is to rein in the globally dysfunctional incentives that military power (combined with economic power) grant to those who benefit from them. That’s complicated.

The fourth, Decolonization, is even more complicated. It entails a reversal, or at least a termination, of the habit of thought and practice that assumes that land, people, cultures, life, and other “resources” can be taken over, possessed, and consumed for one’s own benefit, and that the history of doing this is perfectly fine, with no destructive impacts on the human spirit.

Some would say that decolonization isn’t necessary at all, and that humans could continue without changing the nature of intra-human relations very much. Pragmatically speaking, it’s more a matter of incentives. The present system is kept locked in mainly because of the incentives that keep people from wanting to change it. Those who want to change it are mostly the ones who aren’t in power, and who aren’t the beneficiaries of centuries of colonial conquest. Transforming carbon-based industrial capitalism requires taking away some of those benefits, and the only way to do that is to convince at least some of the beneficiaries that they’re wrong, or at least that the benefits aren’t really sustainable or ethically viable.

“Decolonization” could be equated with another D, “decapitalization” — the two go hand in hand these days, in any case — but I’ve become convinced that the former underlies the latter in ways that makes it more foundational and causally significant, and that capitalist economics can be more easily molded into being a part of a larger, managed set of human-ecological relations than can colonialism in all its forms (including the destruction of indigenous cultures, whose traditional knowledges should have a significant role to play in the future). That’s all a rather more complicated argument than I can make in this blog post, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Finally, there’s Demographic Transition, by which I mean the transition from high-reproduction to low-reproduction societies. The need for this should be pretty obvious — we cannot feed and support ten or fifteen billion people on this planet without overstressing the biological systems that we depend on, and no amount of technological tweaking is going to change that anytime soon. Not only is it not obvious to many people, however, but it’s also very hard to think about clearly. Alan Weisman, whose book Countdown deals with the problem, convinced me yesterday (while visiting my class and delivering a lecture at my university) that there are ways of thinking about the human population “crisis” that are not non-starters for cultural and political reasons.

This fifth “D” is in fact not really all that difficult to accomplish: it mainly requires extending educational and economic opportunities, along with contraceptives and family planning options, to women and girls in countries where they don’t have them. And, connected to that, it requires spreading the idea that large families are neither necessary nor wise, but rather that a replacement rate (of two kids per couple) is more than sufficient. That will take overcoming some deeply held cultural values, and continuing to work on demilitarization in places where childbearing is a strategy for cultural superiority (like Israel-Palestine). But it’s doable, in part, because there are culturally adjacent examples (for instance, in Iran among Muslim countries) of these strategies having been tried and found effective.

How well will we do with these five D’s? Can we even get three or four of the five more or less accomplished in the coming century? And what are the more effective strategies for tackling them? (For instance, wouldn’t a lot of these become much easier if we simply allowed women to be in positions of power around the world?)

Students, have at it.