MONDAY, NOV 5, 2018: NOTE TO FILE
What denial? If I knew, I wouldn't be in denial. Is my not knowing sustainable? I don't know. If I protest denial, will it end?
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: DENIALISM, FROM THE WIRES, OPPOSE, REMEMBER, REMEMBER
Abstract: Self-education by listening to the what-is (and maybe some humans), being 'the only education there is' [Isaac Asimov], the greatest threat to education is the educational system. The educational system is "broken" as the third pillar of the educated mind, per Garrett Hardin's [1] literacy, [2] numeracy, [3] ecolacy, is largely non-existent. Ecolacy refers to systems science literacy, or to the endeavor/ability to think in systems, per Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems: A Primer. As inecolacy could have the outcome of human extinction, protesting may be considered.
TUCSON (A-P) — To boil it down, I'm claiming that if humans were to go extinct in the next five hundred years or so (and not from a nearby gamma ray burst, so self-inflicted), that the inecolate (systems science illiterate) educational system supporting industrial society, formal and informal, would have to be judged a failure; an utter failure of educators and those seeking to be educated by self-accredited educators. The implication is that the educational system needs to do more than serve the short-term self interests of the moneyed (the 99+%) and so is a failure even if humans don't go extinct secondary to their Anthropocene enthusiasm, but merely collapse complex society again as usual. Yes, there are candles in the dark, but far too few, and they are not running the show (global empire-building) as they cannot serve what is understood to be not remotely sustainable.
Formal and informal education in industrial society is anthropocentric and alienates learners and learned from other life on Earth (except as gardened/farmed or kept a pets/livestock or in zoos/parks to amuse) with its narrative of human supremacy, domination, exceptionalism and success. We are schooled to be ignorant of our ignorance. We are 'educated' (schooled) to separate feeling from intellect, our complex society from our biology, the practical from the theoretical, self from system..., to fragment instead of unify, to dissociate rather than interconnect, but above all to overemphasize and celebrate our short-term personal (egoic) success/consumption and careers spent in service of SYSTEM as unsustainable economy/social system (the monetary culture, empire-as-usual).
We fossil-fueled ones have been eMpowered to rule the world, this our solar system and all others for the taking in this our galaxy, first of many galaxies to rule as we will continue to grow and prosper, for ours is the kingdom and the glory, for ever and ever (because for 300 years we have grown and prospered). Praise be Lord Man, for a time. And then what?
Ecolacy is properly understood to be the first (most essential) pillar of an educated mind, followed by numeracy and literacy. It is entirely possible to graduate with highest honors from a university, e.g. Stanford or Oxford, and be utterly inecolate, semi-numerate, and nearly science illiterate.
ecolacy
/ikolə.si/ n. the quality or state of being ecolate.
ecolate
/iko.let/ adj. 1. systems science literate. 2. the endeavor to iterate towards understanding the dynamics of the world system through the macroscope of systems ecology to account for the complex interdependencies that underpin the natural environment and to consider the unintended consequences, short term and long-term, of changing the system by asking, "And then what?," so that we may come to have enough humans on the planet that really do understand it and can live with it properly.
n. a regional management unit: Earth has seven global ecolates with 30 sub-regions or sub-ecolates/sublates that contain thousands of watershed management units or home ecolates (abbr. homlates, e.g. "I live in the Chetco coastal homlate in West Northern America in an area that used to be called Oregon.")
I was reading a hundred or so Eric Hoffer quotes. Many quotes are insightful, but then:
Says an early Anthopocene enthusiast: "One would like to see mankind spend the balance of the century in a total effort to clean up and groom the surface of the globe — wipe out the jungles, turn deserts and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whole land mass a fit habitation for Man. The globe should be our and not nature's home, and we no longer nature's guests." —Eric Hoffer 1967, nominee for title of 'Mr. Inecolate' of the Twentieth-century.
In 1967 a few would have differed, but very few. Even today, while fewer would enthusiastically and overtly agree, most would merely qualify their Anthropocene enthusiasm and sense of Self (and tribal identity): human supremacy and dominionism. And then what?
Original graphic from Ecocosm Dynamics, with one future envisioned
as cooperation among all humans (not nation-states) to replace economic globalization
with an acceptable (to Gaia), sustainable global socioeconomic-political system [i.e. a naturocracy].
Some claims may be true, but too true for most people and merely provoke them to want to kill the messenger (or ignore, ridicule, marginalize, obfuscate, deny, and if necessary to vilify, demonize, imprison, then kill in roughly that order). Alternative is to suggest that an individual's education may have failed them, and that they (and other humans) are not the center of the universe.
One more iteration: Electromagnetic emissions and reflections from Earth reach Ozyton, only 328 light-years away. Instruments detect signals beginning with the Great Acceleration in 1950. Other instruments soon focus on gathering all information possible, including images of the planet's changing surface which had been continuously observed for the past 679 thousand earth years. All information up to the last non-reflected bits were captured, enough that a likely story of what had happened emerged and was modeled. Some details, such as why humans loved Lucy, were indeterminate, but information intended to be non-fiction educational offerings told a coherent tale when matched to observable surface changes. When an Ozyton encounters words like "human intelligence" is it conceivable that their concept of "intelligent" could be applied?
When humans used the word, Ozytons might translate it as "clever ape." Our concept of intelligence, applied exclusively to modern humans as Anthropocene enthusiasts who differ "in kind" from all other organisms, would be viewed by the Ozytons as "cognitive-behavioral pathology," as how could it not? That humans were "educated" to serve the SYSTEM would be obvious, but how could the Ozyton concept of "educated" be applied? Any complex society that had been around for hundreds of thousands of years would be systems science literate if it possessed advanced technology. Otherwise, it too would have succumbed to short-termism to build ruins.
One iteration leads to another: Unknown to us, exobiologists on Ozyton have been remotely observing Gaia for 679k earth years. They are 328 light-years away so there is some delay in the flow of information. Professor Zyr, speaking to students at the wisdom grove, notes, "so while Klaatu went to deal with the infestation, she was too late. We looked back over the data stream to see what happened. It seems some apes started ambulating upright, which freed their prehensile forelimbs to carry resources to a base camp and make tools. A gender-based division of labor arose with some gathering most of the group's food energy near the camp while the more mobile ones foraged afar mostly for the higher energy mobile food sources. The stone-knappers prospered, eventual tapped into a planetary larder of fossil fuels and for a brief time even traveled off planet, suggesting some form of intelligence, but they seem to have wholly lacked the hallmark of true intelligence. This may seem impossible, but they lacked foresight intelligence. So of course they destroyed themselves. The Great Simplification was such that there is not time enough for life on Gaia to evolve enough for there to be another mass extinction event caused by another such lifeform nor to produce truly intelligent beings. It is a pity. The corvids were showing promise. There had been hope that soon we would be less alone."