What Atwood’s “Everything Change” can mean for you
There’s been a fair amount of online buzz this week about a longform essay from Margaret Atwood, “It’s Not Climate Change—It’s Everything Change.” It begins with a short think piece she wrote in 2009, offering some semi-plausible visions of a post-oil world, but the real meat of the piece is what follows. For the bulk of the essay, Atwood explores how much our society’s engagement with climate, and with change itself, has shifted since 2009. Especially interesting are a couple of other writers that she summarizes, both of whom also posted companion pieces on Medium, where Atwood’s piece appeared. Taken as a whole, the essay and responses make for a rich reflection on our times, one that combines stark realism about the entrenched nature of the current system with a good dash of hope founded on the ways that human societies have evolved in the past. Here’s our distillation of what they have to say, and some thoughts on how these rich perspectives can inform your own approach to the life planning practice that we call resilient investing.
After offering up a familiar, if relatively engaging, run-through of the ways some powers-that-be are still trying to sweep climate change back under the rug, the last half of Atwood’s essay introduces several big-picture ideas that offer exciting paths forward, via the work of art historian Barry Lord and anthropologist and classical scholar Ian Morris, both of whom have focused on the evolution of society in response to the energy forms that are dominant at the time: “sexual energy, without which societies can’t continue; the energy of the body while hunting and foraging; wood for fire; slaves; wind and water; coal; oil; and renewables.” It’s liberating to be reminded of how fundamentally society changed with each transition to a new primary energy source; Lord and Morris offer some compelling hints of what an emerging social order built on renewable energy may look like:
What are the implications for the way we view both ourselves and the way we live? In brief: in the coal energy culture — a culture of workers and production — you are your job. “I am what I make.” In an oil and gas energy culture — a culture of consumption — you are your possessions. “I am what I buy.” But in a renewable energy culture—a culture of stewardship—you are what you conserve. “I am what I save and protect.”
In his response on Medium, Lord, whose book Art & Energy inspired Atwood, alludes to an aspect of his thesis that she didn’t get into:
From our beginnings, homo sapiens has been the only species that evolved by employing external sources of energy additional to the food we eat; we do so because we require those external energy sources to create our cultures, which are essential to us. … Our big-brain commitment to learning rather than instinct for our survival as a species meant from the beginning that we are always going to be totally dependent on the energy sources that make possible the cultures within which we can teach and learn.
Thus our current dependence on oil is not an aberration, it is the norm. Every energy source has brought certain cultural values with it — think of slavery and coal as two of the most obvious examples. Art & Energy traces the entire history of these transitions. In a world without oil, renewable energy will take the place of oil and gas, and we will eventually become as dependent on the culture of stewardship of the earth and the body as we are today on consumption. Undoubtedly there will be downsides to the new culture that we cannot yet anticipate. We are going to be learning how to see ourselves and others as mutually interested collaborative stewards rather than essentially competitive consumers. The stakes are high: as the planet’s only species committed to learning, in order to save our habitat we now have to learn sustainability.
Morris takes these ideas in some related and complementary directions. As summarized by Atwood:
Roughly, his argument runs that each form of energy capture favors values that maximize the chance of survival for those using both that energy system and that package of moral values. Hunter-gatherers show more social egalitarianism, wealth-sharing, and more gender equality than do farmer societies, which subordinate women — men are favored, as they must do the upper-body-strength heavy lifting — tend to practice some form of slavery, and support social hierarchies, with peasants at the low end and kings, religious leaders, and army commanders at the high end. Fossil fuel societies start leveling out gender inequalities — you don’t need upper body strength to operate keyboards or push machine buttons — and also social distinctions, though they retain differences in wealth.
“The 21st century, he says, “shows signs of producing shifts in energy capture and social organization that dwarf anything seen since the evolution of modern humans.”
Lord also took advantage of Medium’s dynamic platform to flesh out one of his central themes, the idea that societies at each stage of development eventually hit “hard ceilings” that force them to change or die. Hunting cultures run out of large animals, farming societies deplete the soil or fall prey to drought, and today’s fossil-fueled society is facing the ceiling of how much carbon our atmosphere can absorb without fundamentally changing the planetary climate system. He offers up some good new and some bad news while framing our challenge in an intriguing way:
The good news is that so far, when ways to break through a hard ceiling have existed, people have eventually found them. If solar, nuclear, nano, or any other kind of energy can solve the problems that we have created through our exploitation of fossil fuels, we can be optimistic that someone will work out how to do this.
The bad news, though, is that word “eventually.” Every time a society runs up against the hard ceiling that constrains it, a natural experiment is played out, with the forces of human ingenuity running a race against those of mounting catastrophe. Most of the time, catastrophe wins. Thousands of foraging bands ran up against the limits of what their environments could support. Almost all of these bands failed to find a way through, and paid the price in starvation, disease, and extinction. Only a tiny handful found the path toward farming.
We know of just half a dozen farming societies that subsequently reached the limits of what the agrarian age could support — the Roman Empire in the first two centuries AD, Song China in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and Qing China in the eighteenth. Only one area — eighteenth-century England — figured out fossil fuels.
There is a trend here: the bigger and more developed societies become, the fewer of them there are, and the fewer chances humanity gets to work through its problems. In our own age, we effectively have just one global fossil-fuel society, and we only get one chance to shatter the ceiling over it. Failure is not an option.
Yes, that final thought is eerily similar to Lord’s, isn’t it? Atwood lands in a similar place, coming at it from a concretely hopeful direction:
We’ve committed some very stupid acts over the course of our history, but our stupidity isn’t inevitable. Here are three smart things we’ve managed to do:
First, despite all those fallout shelters built in suburban backyards during the Cold War, we haven’t yet blown ourselves up with nuclear bombs. Second, thanks to Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book on pesticides, Silent Spring, not all the birds were killed by DDT in the ’50s and ’60s. And, third, we managed to stop the lethal hole in the protective ozone layer that was being caused by the chlorofluorocarbons in refrigerants and spray cans, thus keeping ourselves from being radiated to death. As we head towards the third decade of the 21st century, it’s hopeful to bear in mind that we don’t always act in our own worst interests.
In particular, she notes that our key challenge, carbon loading in the atmosphere, has a couple of viable solutions: to come up with more efficient ways of getting energy out of sunlight, and to reshape our relationship with carbon into a cyclical one, rather than a linear one. The former is well underway, and on the latter, she is encouraged by the array of approaches being developed to remove carbon from the atmosphere:
On my desk right now is a list of 15 of them. Some take carbon directly out of the air and turn it into other materials, such as cement. Others capture carbon by regenerating degraded tropical rainforests — a fast and cheap method — or sequestering carbon in the soil by means of biochar, which has the added benefit of increasing soil fertility. Some use algae, which can also be used to make biofuel. One makes a carbon-sequestering asphalt. Carbon has been recycled ever since plant life emerged on earth; these technologies and enterprises are enhancing that process.
Meanwhile, courage: homo sapiens sapiens sometimes deserves his double plus for intelligence. Let’s hope we are about to start living in one of those times.
Resilient investors have the opportunity to support the full spectrum of solutions, and to engage with bright new ideas as they arise. Much of what Atwood is referring to in her conclusion is taking place within our “Evolutionary” investment strategy, while the transition to renewable energy is becoming ever more firmly entrenched in our “Sustainable Global Economy” strategy as well. Meanwhile, our “Close to Home” strategy is increasingly rich with groups that are bringing these sustainable, evolutionary ideas to bear at the local level.
Resilient investing’s emphasis on tangible assets and personal/social assets, in addition to the traditional focus on financial assets, similarly provides ample avenues for being part of the societal evolution that Lord, Morris, and Atwood all see coming. One of the many other responses to Atwood’s essay on Medium introduces an idea that we heartily support, one that speaks directly to your personal approach to tangible assets:
It’s time to replace the concept of efficiency with the concept of sufficiency. … It’s not all “you have to be vegan, or you should never watch TV, or you should avoid all fast food.” Instead, it’s about knowing what is sufficient for you, and acting on that instead of on the signals you get from the imperfect world around you. Sufficiency is about having a real understanding of why you’re doing the things you do, and how the things you do contribute to your overall well-being. … What’s enough for you? You’re the only one who knows that. There’s no right or wrong answer; I’m not talking about whether it’s good or bad to have stuff. I’m just asking what it is that you’re after.
This is the essence of investing in your personal assets, and indeed of resilient investing as a whole: doing enough reflection to know yourself (including your highest ideals and your limiting habits) and then shaping your life based on what you find there. Resilient investors step outside the easy currents that sweep us all along, and learn how to make clear, conscious choices about how we spend our time, energy, and money.
Resilient investing has no quick-and-easy “formula”—in addition to the time you take making concrete decisions about the many aspects of your life on the Resilient Investing Map, it asks you to take some time to ponder big-picture thinking such as that offered here by Atwood and her cohorts is key to building the strong—and flexible—worldview within which you’ll continue to forge your life path.
Tags: climate, evolutionary strategy, future