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Clean technology, while a huge opportunity, will not go to scale in time to prevent a global economic and social crisis.
Considering all the comments on my talk, The Earth is Full, I would sum up by saying that everyone pretty much agrees we face some serious ecological and resource limits. The debate is will these naturally be dealt with in the normal course of technological and market processes, or will they result in a serious global economic crisis. My view is strongly that a crisis is inevitable and that it will be an economic crisis - but that will then trigger a war level of mobilisation that will drive massive technological change. So relying on technology to prevent the crisis is wrong.
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John Freestone 10+
One very important point you made was that it's a web of problems facing us. Each is easy for people to imagine they've found solutions to, while not noticing that it makes another problem worse. In my view, we problem-solve like this rather than facing fundamental facts of our biology. We are evolved animals. People talk about us as though we were rational, agreeable folk. They propose a solution: everyone will be on board. But there are very diverse warring factions, from the religious to the secular, the ultra-technologist to the neo-luddite.
We developed our modern civilisation through competition, not just co-operation, and I believe that is the simple hard-wired imperitive that will bring our current civilisation down. It will not be sufficiently profitable for those who might to do the right thing at any step along the way - that is how it has been for all of our history - in fact, since we left the forests that sustained us without our effort beyond reaching out to grasp fruit, the abundant past we innovated our way out of.
Right now, food, medicine and all sorts of technologies are being patented by the rich, so that we will be even more dependent on them for everything than we already are. Our democracies have been whisked away by plutocrats and they hold us to ransom. The Occupy Movement was perhaps just a rumble before an earthquake, as the 99% wakes up to reality and begins to demand/create wealth redistribution. Technology might have little to do with how it pans out.
Matt talks about humans learning to share ideas and work together as if it were just a good, but technology helps us compete with (kill) everything else on the planet while specialisation lets us relinquish responsibility to the cloud.
Paul Gilding 50+
Thanks for your thoughts and yes, people make the constant mistake of confusing what's possible with what will happen, allowing as you say for vested interest, resistance and so on. There's no doubt we have great potential but we must accept the crisis that will drive us there.
John Freestone 10+
You say "we must accept the crisis that will drive us there" - but where?
Paul Gilding 50+
Yes, we all have those days when it all seems impossible to imagine! "Where" can only now be a war like mobilisation in response, and that's why the crisis will have to be accepted first.
John Freestone 10+
If it were just a matter of mass change of attitude - if we stopped praising things like "working hard" and "innovating" and all the rest, which are part of that inexorable march towards domination/destruction of the biosphere and instead admired low-impact living - that would be a long shot, but perhaps imaginable after some deep catastrophe. However, I sense that the problem may be even deeper - a fundamental reality of evolution: those who work hard and innovate collect more resources and have evolutionary advantage over those who walk lightly on the earth. The pressure that replaced the eco-friendly nomad, first with the small farmer, then with Homo extravagans isn't a political fashion, but biological fact. I say this not to depress people, but because it may be vital to understand and accept, as much as the current crisis, in order to come up with wise responses.
Of course, I may be wrong to equate innovation and hard work with further destruction. It's a hunch I have with little solid evidence, but it seems to me that the green industries have turned out less green than expected, not just due to specific hidden environmental costs, but because they represent a raised threshold for human activity generally, which we can be expected to grow into. Do we need a new understanding of green? Currently, we'd be proud to clear areas of virgin "wasteland" to build an "eco-friendly city".
John Freestone 10+
Paul Gilding 50+