canadians might not know exponential math, but we know hockey. however, ‘the hockey stick’ describes an exponential function, which in turn describes the impacts of population and consumption.

just cuz it’s math, don’t tune out. this could be the most important bit of math you’ll ever learn–more important even than your tv bill.

follow me. imagine the beginning of humanity. if you start out with two people,  and you double it, twenty years later you have four people, twenty years later eight, twenty years later sixteen, and so on. it takes a long time to reach a billion–which we did around 1800, even two billion, which we did around 1927.

so, graph-wise, with time on horizontal or y-axis and human population on the x-axis, things stay pretty flat, like the shaft of a horizontal hockey stick. even forty years ago, in 1972, the earth had room to spare.

or so it seemed.

oh, doomsayers like robert malthus started prophecizing the end in 1798, but it wasn’t until after ww2 that we started noticing: hibbert’s prediction of peak oil, in 1956, was bang on. the erlichs’ the population bomb came out in 1968, the club of rome’s the limits to growth in 1972, and more recently, al gore’s an inconvenient truth won an oscar in 2007 and a few months later, the ipcc won the nobel prize–all warning of danger if we don’t change our ways.

but instead of heeding the prophesies, our population in the last forty years has sky-rocketed. suddenly that flat, horizontal line–the shaft of the hockey stick–goes left, shooting almost straight up–the blade of the hockey stick. that’s how it is with exponential math–it’s NOT gradual; it’s flat, flat, flat, then boom! surprise!.

problem is, our consumption has kept pace with our population. almost everybody wants to live like an american–excessively. and so, population and consumption (also known as population, affluence, and technology, or IPAT) impact the earth. for all of us to live like americans it would take nine earths, but we only have one.

consumption takes energy. our energy is almost wholly dependent on oil, which is in decline and no longer cheap. we’re scrambling to develop renewable forms of energy, but they will take time to develop and will differ somewhat. and few are taking conservation–living more with less–seriously. what do we do in the meantime?

hockey sticks don’t go on forever, even zdeno chara’s. there are limits to growth. more and more of us see them, accept them.

recently i wondered how an electron can keep on ticking for billions of years, and my thinking, my consciousness, my self, my identity, for just an instant–after all, we’re made of electrons. what is the link between my thinking and my electrons? or have i got that backwards, from an electron’s p.o.v.? i think i’ll think on that and let you know.

but even just a few years–even a moment–can make a difference, regardless of the energy required or how far into the future we have to go. in some ways, all we have are moments. the energy of the moment doesn’t know about the energy of the future or the energy of the past. what you don’t know can’t hurt you. or help you. but we know-nothings feign omniscience, though none of us has succeeded going into the future (and returned to tell the rest or pick up our pets). nor can we go back, as far as we know, cuz entropy only goes one way: from more to less; somehow, life, tho mortal, goes the other way, seeming to make less into more.

but life comes at a cost: living requires energy. tho the universe is vast, eventually it and its electrons will run down. in our neck of the woods, most energy comes from the sun, which only expends energy; some energy–a little, tiny bit–comes from the earth (geothermal). but either way, whether from the sun or from the earth, energy is broken down. life, on the other hand, builds it up. life is special, hallowed even, but it only occurs when things are just right–goldilocks conditions, like the conditions for liquid water, which are found on neither mars nor venus but only here on earth (and possibly one of the moons of saturn).

we tamper with those conditions at our peril. misunderstanding and hubris breed misdirection. like a rocket when it goes haywire, everybody ducks. we don’t know where it’s going to land, but it won’t be on target, and that’s bad. in that case, for rocket engineers, in this case, for life in general.

so here’s my pitch: let’s go slow. we’ve got a few billion years, let’s use ‘em. forget pipelines. forget mining tar from sand or coal from mountain tops or natural gas from shale or uranium from ore. let’s go fishing instead. or berry picking.

david suzuki says ‘the negative costs of damaging the environment and the benefits that nature provides are rarely factored into economic equations.’

but that’s changing. jean vanier senses, ‘a yearning for solidarity …. For too long we’ve been walking on the road to independence. We’re beginning to feel our loneliness. We’re beginning to see that we can only live if we’re together. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.’

competition comes at a cost, richard heinberg reminds us. realistically, though, cooperation ‘is the only path going forward that doesn’t end in a global tragedy in which the fate of the “winners” is hardly preferable to that of the “losers.”’

there’s a paradigm shift going on. from good ol’ wikipedia:’ Social scientists have adopted the Kuhnian phrase “paradigm shift” to denote a change in how a given society goes about organizing and understanding reality.’

margaret laurence reminded us that the river flows both ways. heraclitus reminded us we can’t step in the same river, meaning, as mike nickerson put it, the pattern is there tho the elements change. are we just another dance for trillions and trillions of electrons? joni mitchell, who warned us ‘you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone’, advises us to ‘get back to the garden and set our souls free.’ if we have souls. or maybe just dancing patterns of energy we call electrons.

where am i theologically now? does it matter? well, for starters, if it’s all interrelated, is a quark really separate from the rest of the universe? is the dreamer separate from the dream? besides, i got mortal concerns. ahh, here she comes now. and i got my own stuff to worry about. still….

‘It is only by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.’ ~J Campbell–is this the same jc who said, ‘follow your bliss’? i remember that bliss doesn’t mean happiness. it’s closer to passion, and passion comes from suffering. to me, ‘follow your bliss’ means ‘what are you prepared to suffer?’ also, i believe fear too is a sign, guiding us to doors to pass thru. may you leave no doorknob unturned!

from wikipedia:

He saw this not merely as a mantra, but as a helpful guide to the individual along the hero journey that each of us walks through life:

‘If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.’

… During his later years, when some students took him to be encouraging hedonism, Campbell is reported to have grumbled, “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.’”

• the biggest story on the planet got buried in canada, unlike the tar sands, but you can read about here.
• locally, some folks don’t see anything wrong with cutting down trees.  that’s how i found out our town has no policy to replace trees. all this economic planning don’t mean a thing in a concrete jungle (and, if you’re keeping score, concrete and pavement generate carbon and add to water and soil degradation; trees sequester carbon, trap  water, and build-up fertile soil–all free! last i checked, free is good.). google ‘awenda ontario map’ (or go here)–make sure you have it on ‘Satellite’ view, not ‘Map’ view, and see for yourself. down here, at eye level, it looks like we got lots of trees, but the bird’s eye view says different. you’d think no self-respecting bird would land here, let alone try to raise a family here. but they do. and we’re all the better for it. to call it a ‘tweety bird’ is like calling an african-american a nigger. it denigrates, and literally paves the way for more exploitation, i mean, development. and it’s not just birds that benefit from the trees; whole ecosystems, and casual passers by like you and me, and gawrsh! the trees themselves benefit. every tree is precious. but you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone. and sometimes tipping points are sudden, not gradual. like the straw that broke the camel’s back. don’t think it can happen? where’s the passenger pidgeon? the cod? look how perilous we are with acid rain and dutch elm disease. do you know how tenuous things are with bananas? we decree that scrubby, second growth trees are not fit for living? when’s the last time you saw a mature chestnut? where would we be without the christmas tree, the maple tree, or oxygen? here are two posts from last week. the first one kind of summarizes some of my recent mind mappings, the second casts some heroes and villains in this local tree tempest, so watch out for flying shrapnel. and for dessert, some timbits. no, you don’t have to go through the drive-through or drink their coffee.

to a town planner friend–

yeah, i avoided urban planning 30 yrs ago cuz i read the job satisfaction was really low. for your sake, i hope it’s improved. but what i heard the other night wasn’t encouraging.

on the other hand, the world is changing; times of transition (there’s that word) are hard–nobody really knows what’s going on. mike nickerson says it’s a question of direction; thomas berry says we’re entering a new era, but do we choose the complicated, biodiverse ecozoic or the relatively simple monoculture of the technozoic?

people around us in comfortable huronia seem to think technology will save us. but even without the twin barbs of peak oil and climate change, we’re in over our heads technologically–plastic and less benign persistent chemicals, nuclear waste, overpopulation, to name but a few of the challenges we have in the years, decades, and centuries ahead.

but people don’t know. after all, for example our way of dealing with our waste is to not deal with it, but to put it on a barge or train and externalize it. but we can’t do that anymore in a global world, on a finite planet.

you write, ‘policy direction should go from the residents of the community directly to Council (and then to staff)’, and i agree, except that that takes time and we may be running out of time; also people in our culture tend to be anthropocentric, instead of biocentric–but impatience and hubris are my banes and sometimes i’ve been pleasantly surprised by being wrong!

for the future (which, as a planner, you know, both never comes and simultaneously is here now–in fact geneticist theodosius dobzhansky said our choices for the future are neither random nor determined, but are creative responses to past conditions; furthermore, there really is no future tense in english. futurity is signified by ‘will’ (or the semi-formal ‘going to’) which really is not a verb, it’s an aspect, it’s a modal–bottom line, the future doesn’t exist, at least not in the english language (where i do my thinking). but it does in the language of quantum mechanics, where it’s just a dimension, part of the space-time continuum. but i digress from the ordinary, everyday, garden-type of future), i’d put my money on less energy inputs, less technology, less complexity, and more what homer-dixon calls ‘shocks’, which i think means resource–energy, food, water–wars. time frame? tho coal and peak oil and nuclear may extend the horizon to the 23rd century, paul chefurka thinks it may come to pass in as little as 75 years, ie, 2087. better get cracking!

that’s what i find disheartening about cop17: even with our future in peril, we couldn’t set aide our differences and pull for the common good. as elizabeth may writes from durban, ‘the realization that we will leave here with something that is better than nothing but inadequate to the threat is sinking in.’ and things get harder, the more we delay (see ‘impatience’).

that’s why it’s so wonderful to go to the karma marketplace and the grounded coffee company where people get it, know something’s fundamentally wrong, and are determined to do something about it–not just throw up their hands, say ‘oh well’, and watch ‘wheel of fortune’. and people like you, in the town apparatus and leading transition town huronia (tth).

i’ve got my personal demons to fight, but who doesn’t and who cares? i wanna increase the joy in my heart and in my community, now and now and now. for starters, i guess i can read the sustainability plan. and the transition primer. it’s a slippery slope from there!

sue and i went to a town meeting tonight. we sat at the back. julie joined us. it was quiet for a while. good thing i brought my book. then it got really interesting when a councilor (pat file) and the deputy mayor (stephan kramp) opposed development without a site plan. i wrote them a letter. (other mentionables include councilor bob jeffreys; wes crown, chief town planner; and tim tully, naturalist and head of awenda prov pk; he wanted to speak tonight but had a prior engagement.)

dear pat and stephan,

thank you.

okay, i admit it. i’m a treehugger, i guess. i spent nearly twenty years in business, but deep down (and through and through) i’m a treehugger, really (surprise!)

however, i also know when due process needs to be followed. and you’re right: there’s no site plan. no site plan means poor decision. some thing could be missed. overlooked. under-valued.

and something’s being rushed, like the truth. no site plan speaks of a lack of planning. really, wes crown should know better.

it takes a long time to grow a tree, and in life and death it shelters and feeds birds and mosses and many other organisms. cut down a tree and it’s gone for generations. you can always pave paradise, if not this year, then next. what’s the rush?

meanwhile migratory birds might have one more flock to raise. that’s a bad thing? i’m more worried where they’re going to go after the trees are gone. is that in the site plan?

but i fear councilor jeffreys and the many who voted for him are myopic. they don’t see that the environment is not ‘out there’ to be commodotized. it’s everywhere, including councilor jeffreys. and i learned first-hand thru ‘out of the cold’ we’re all connected.

but he too and many others also fear. they fear sending the wrong message, that midland is not business-friendly (tho i fear that midland *is* business-friendly sends the wrong message).

i want to hear tim tully speak. probably, it won’t stop trees from being razed and birds fighting for a new nesting site and paradise being paved and humans losing out, this time, but it might change a few hearts. this time.

i bought a house on norene street, but by the time i moved in, my back yard neighbour, norman’s, had cut down trees. i see it again and again. mss. little lake. now this. do we have to grow economically just to stay alive? can’t we grow in other ways, in our hearts, in our compassion? or am i barking up the wrong tree?

i’m not a tree-hugger or even so much an environmentalist. i’m a realist, and the reality is what goes around comes around. nature, including humanity, moves in cycles. (it also appears to move linearally; put them together and what do you get? bippity-boppity-boo? no, a helix. now, where have i seen that before? but i digress. oh, that’s the end. almost.)

the cc’s? cuz sue and julie were with me; i won’t put words in their mouths, tho. my kids? cuz it’s their town, their future, too. and i’m their dad. also, cady’s worked for tim tully.

the end

peter

‘we don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.’–howard zinn

hey, it’s how mcdonalds, tim’s , wal-mart, and all the rest make their millions. it’s why i and many others choose fair trade and local.

knights in shining armour need not apply.

based on the successful montreal protocol and backed by all the nobel-winning scientists, the kyoto protocol has been ratified by 191 countries. only the usa has not signed. now, canada wants to walk away?

elizabeth may (who offers a powerful fact check on kyoto distortions) got wind of the federal government secret intentions from a ctv report and asked the speaker of the house of commons for an emergency debate (read the full letter here). in her request, she noted that, ‘the more severe risk is that the developing world will refuse to consider any agreement that is not built on the Kyoto framework….To be blunt, it’s Kyoto or nothing.’

she continued, ‘Canada is at this moment in a powerful position. We have a choice. On currently announced positions, we will go to Durban and, likely, be blamed for the catastrophic breakdown of negotiations on which our children’s future depends.’‘Or,’ she considered, ‘Canada could leave Durban with the praise of governments around the world. The power to create a favourable negotiating climate for talks that may be the last chance to avoid runaway global warming is not one to be exercised without democratic debate.’the speaker denied the motion.

bishop desmond tutu said as he welcomed the delegates to the 2011 climate change talks, ‘We have only one home. We destroy this home and we have had it.’

stay tuned! it’s gonna be a close one! anything is possible.

• reinhold niebhur wrote the serenity prayer, which serves as a template of threes–the way things are, the way things could be, and watcha gonna do about it? you know it (at least the first stanza–there is an extended version)–god grant me / the serenity to accept that which cannot be changed, / the courage to change that which can be changed, / and the wisdom to know the difference.
• three is a very popular number. we can force-fit this to apply to several ideas, and in so doing discover, or invent, sets of relationships.
• rodolfo llinas says motricity requires ability (what you can do–serenity to accept), prediction (what you could do–courage to change), intention (what you wanna do–wisdom to know the difference)
• the triune brain (proposed by American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean in the 1960s, and detailed in his 1990 book, The Triune Brain in Evolution) posits we have a reptilian complex (‘instinctual behaviors involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays’), a paleomammalian complex (‘the motivation and emotion involved in feeding, reproductive behavior, and parental behavior’), and a neomammalian complex (‘language, abstraction, planning, and perception’) (‘Subsequent findings have invalidated the traditional neuroanatomical ideas upon which MacLean based his hypothesis  [' Patton, Paul (December, 2008). "One World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom". Scientific American. Retrieved 29 December 2008. "The traditional ideas about sequential brain evolution appeared, for example, in the late neuroscientist and psychiatrist Paul D. MacLean's triune brain model, formulated in the 1960s. MacLean's model promoted the belief that the human brain contains a “reptilian complex” inherited from reptilian ancestors. Beginning in the 1980s, the field of comparative neuroanatomy experienced a renaissance. In the intervening decades evolutionary biologists had learned a great deal about vertebrate evolutionary history, and they developed new and effective methods of applying Darwin's concept of the tree of life to analyze and interpret their findings. It is now apparent that a simple linear hierarchy cannot adequately account for the evolution of brains or of intelligence." ' and 'Hodos, William. "Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy: Evolution and Adaptation". "The extensive body of work in comparative neurobiology over the past three decades unequivocally contradicts this theory. First, homologs of the limbic cortical areas that MacLean considers to have been first present in early mammals have been found in non-mammalian vertebrates. Second, homologs of neocortical structures and of dorsal thalamic nuclei have also been found in nonmammals. Third, MacLean's observations on the behavioral differences between mammals and nonmammals are oversimplified and ignore the elaborate social and parental behaviors of some non-mammalian vertebrates, including birds and a variety of ray-finned fishes" '--footnotes]…. Scientifically, the triune brain hypothesis was based on what is now recognized as a faulty interpretation of the anatomical organization and evolution of the vertebrate brain. The idea holds little favor in current neuroscience.’ however, there is ‘continuing popular interest in the model … because of its focus on the recognizable differences between most reptiles, early mammals, and late mammals. Reasons for the success are its simplicity; [what are the other reasons? none are given; i suspect wrong grammar, tho i wonder if 'Carl Sagan's Pulitzer prize winning 1977 book The Dragons of Eden', helped to popularize the notion--pkl.] the theory in this form recognizes three major evolutionary periods in the development of the brain that are characterized by three recognizably distinct ways of solving adaptive challenges. Under this model, the “neocortex” represents that cluster of brain structures involved in advanced cognition, including planning, modeling and simulation; the “reptilian brain” refers to those brain structures related to territoriality, ritual behavior and other “reptile” behaviors; and “limbic brain” refers those brain structures, wherever located, associated with social and nurturing behaviors, mutual reciprocity, and other behaviors and affects that arose during the age of the mammals…. The popularity of the model can also be seen in the way it parallels recurring themes in popular culture and the arts. For example, some languages have phrases which refer to speaking from the “head“, “heart“, or “gut” [i learned head, heart, hands, which assonates, from jill grose of the ctlet--pkl], or philosophically of the three virtues of “wisdom, benevolence and courage“–or psychologically of “thinking“, “feeling“, and “willing“. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, the quest for “a brain“, “a heart“, and “courage” play a central role. The three elements of the triune model map comfortably onto these more abstract conceptions…. In this sense, the triune brain (more properly, perhaps, the “triune mind”) is seen as a highly simplified but powerful organizing theme…. The statistician George E. P. Box once quipped: “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”‘ paul chefurkas refer to this model.
• as i recovered from a brain injury, my psychologist introduced me to a.c.t. by dr stephen hayes, which stands for acceptance and commitment therapy–we accept that which cannot be changed; we commit to change that which can be changed; and therapy is the wisdom to know the difference; in it we are asked to know our values and direction and make choices. our values are what we are and we have to accept that; our direction is where we ought to go if we commit; and we’ll make the right choices if we act wisely in accepting our values, yet committing to new or expansive directions.
• in psychology, in the 1920s, freud presented the id (‘the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends’), the ego (‘the organized, realistic part’), and the superego (‘the critical and moralizing role’), which are like elements of the triune model (quotes are from wikipedia, 2011-11-20)
• since childhood i have wondered about the difference between is (‘the way things are’) and ought (‘the way things could/should be’), lacking the wisdom sometimes to know the difference and thereby feeling frustrated; lacking patience perhaps and feeling impatient for is to become ought
• in logic, your thesis and its antithesis combine to form a synthesis; also, a syllogism is formed from a major premise and a minor premise.
• we think of time as a threesome: past, present, and future, but in linguistics, in the english language, there is no future tense (it’s  a modal auxiliary verb). the past is past, and tomorrow never comes, we only have now, yet we both busy ourselves with plans (‘life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,’ sang john lennon) and at the same time deny what’s happening (climate-change, for example); moreover, we must either trust in providence or plan for seven generations, but some of us childishly want our cake and eat it too and live for today without a thought for tomorrow. still, there is no reason in physics that time–where it’s just a dimension–one of four or 11 or 48–can’t go backwards. but us mere humans, with minds larger than sense, can only go forwards, and what is yet to come comes and then is gone. how precious above all, then, is this one moment?