The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Lament of the Bigfoot | Frankly 74

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

(Recorded October 7, 2024)   In a polarized and fractured society, those who draw attention to the ecological devastation wrought by human activities, and those who champion the importance of protecting non-human life, increasingly face the label of being 'anti-human.' In this Frankly, Nate reads a poem he wrote 20 years ago this month "The Lament of the Bigfoot" which highlights the disproportionate role humans have on the ecosystems they inhabit and reflects on how his attitudes have both changed and stayed the same 20 years on. Yes, the scale of the human enterprise has resulted in unprecedented harm to Earth's biosphere. But separate from - and indeed as a result of - our past decisions, it is our actions today that will steer the future. Imagine how different that future might look if humanity harnessed its ingenuity and innovation to become active contributors, embedded within the web of life. Is it possible to overcome 'the agenda of the gene'? And if so: how? And when? In what ways could humans actively enhance ecosystems by creating, rather than appropriating, biological productivity? And how might we reframe cultural and economic incentives to accelerate the shift towards an ecological civilization? Big open questions.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---  Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners

Hello, friends around the world. We live in an increasingly polarized and fractured society. There are lots of dualities and schisms. There's the left and the right and the global north and the global south. And the climate change or climate change is not real or not human caused. There's the mechanistic and the animistic. There's the technology and human cleverness versus ecology and non-renewable resources. There's also natalist and anti-natalist. And increasingly,

there are people that are anti-human or perceived to be anti-human. And there are people that are unabashedly pro-human. And what I'm going to do is read a poem that I wrote 20 years ago this month, right between when I left Wall Street and I started my PhD at the University of Vermont. I had been traveling for several months with my golden retriever in a backpack full of ecology, Herman Daly evolutionary biology books and deeply reflecting about the state of the world. So I was 38. I think much the same way today, but today I am more informed by the broader picture and by the constraints and momentum and metabolism of our system. So I want to use this poem as a launch off

for what I think and feel today and why that's relevant to our global polarization and upcoming challenges. Okay, this poem was written in September 2004 on the Elk River Trail in Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It's called the Lament of the Bigfoot. Up, up in the first growth furs. With ravens and jays, I make nest. In winter seldom touch the ground when white canopy is my friend. Alone with my thoughts, the silence, until a distant squeal disrupts, a human child is cold and wants to go home. I am the last Sasquatch, and I play hopscotch through the clear-cut forests of your world.

I cast the air north, then west, for that dank, smell of Dennings past, my mate for life we met near Bend, separated long ago in a glen. When loggers chanced upon us, warm, hairy, musty memories, ah, I cannot find her, and fear we will breed no more. I am the Tom Bombadil of this human generation, the infestation than larval bloom, on the backs of the carbon slaves. a three-second span of Earth's evolving. The salmon are fewer each year, yet humans grow fat and have young. I am so lonely and do not understand. Where is my mate and my kind? I am the last

Sasquatch, and I play hopscotch through the clear cuts of the human world. My daughter was hit by a tour bus near Saskatoon. I ate her body, as we all do, for the memories. She hadn't many. She She was 20. My sons I left long ago, I Ruiwaki and Zeke, with the clubbed left foot. I searched for them, away from the chainsaw, in the dwindling deep remaining earth shrines. I can't smell them.

I don't hear their wail. I feel they are gone, unnoticed casualties of Earth's civil war. If humans ever come to kill this tree, to take the wood for their nests. I will flee this place, deeper, darker, safer. But first fall on them in a fury and smash their heads with cedar limbs, then watch as their scarlet water nourishes the forest floor. Yeah, that was me 20 years ago.

By the way, for the record, my brother is kind of a Sasquatch nut. He has plaster cast and images. where the Patterson film was filmed on his wall. I do not believe there was actually another wild ape in North America. There would have been, you know, the Central Limit theorem, we would have seen one, and there would have been Native American legends and such. But I think it's one of those many things. I met Tosa Sultani from Brazil in New York last week, and she said she was talking about several of the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon that we know are there because things they leave around or we see on aerial images and we see evidence of them. And I think there's something about

the things and creatures and areas in the world that have so far repelled the economic superorganism and are untrammeled and untouched by global civilization. I think that sparks something in us that kindles this animist valuing of the sacred. And I think a lot of people resonate with that and feel that. So I've changed my views. I still deeply care about wild nature. yet I've concluded that smashing their limbs and, you know, a abrupt collapse of the human system for many reasons I've discussed

could be the worst case for the natural world with wars and the 2020, you know, the modern version of Jared Diamonds chopping down the last tree. And so I think there needs to be more of a holistic bend versus break, which is a large part of my work. So since 20 years ago, I still care about animals in nature the same amount, but I've looked at the answers are not so simple. The answers are beyond just a change in value in consciousness. The answers are beyond a lot of humans just agreeing that we've become takers and not

levers to use Daniel Quinn's framing. That is necessary. and a lot more people are feeling that and need to feel that, which I'm going to talk about in a second. But it's not sufficient. So a couple weeks ago, I did a frankly on, what if climate change was a hoax? And the point wasn't that climate change is a hoax.

It's that even if it were, there's lots of other ecological environmental impacts. So let me ask another hypothetical question. What if humans are, bad eggs. I mean, we're one of nine hominids. All the other eight are gone. Now we're our only rival. And we have unarguably destroyed what was once a paradise in Eden, ecologically speaking, on the stability of the Holocene from which we evolved. It's still amazing in the breadth of biodiversity and the number of species we have, but we're slowly leaving the stability of the

last 10,000 years. What if humans were a bad egg and the anti-humans are correct? I think also that wouldn't totally matter because what brought us here does not mean what we have to do going forward. we can be different than we have been in the past. My friend Pellateel is an ecoc psychologist, and she told me a story about one of Joanna Macy's tools for discussion called the Council of All Beings. And you can pick an animal or something in the natural world and have a conversation about what gifts you bring.

For example, you speak on the behalf of a bee who pollinates flowers that end up having fruit for humans and other animals. Or you're a tree that provides shadow and shade and home for birds and you produce oxygen and help with the hydrological cycle. In the birds, they sing in the mornings and the evenings. And then if you're a human, you listen to this and you feel sadder and sadder because what are you contributing? And Pella recounted in her latest class, a mouse came and said, humans rejoice about all the natural world. They write songs and they sing and they write poetry and you celebrate the beauty.

And I think this is right. This is what we have done. But it's also not sufficient. And I think humans writ large are going to have to change our role, not only to be stewards, but to be deeply embedded in the web of life. And let me explain how I can envision that happening. Our human systems run on productivity. Of course, many economists will just say it's capital and labor, but the vast majority is how capital and labor combine with technology and fossil carbon and drawing down the non-ruable inputs of the natural world. We have ancient productivity in the form of hydrocarbons. We have the current annual production. productivity, the net primary productivity of the sun and the hydrological cycle, of which humans appropriate

around 40%. There are things that humans can do that creates biological productivity. There is the regenerative farming where we have animals that graze. They feed the microorganisms with their poop, the microorganisms grow the grass, and this. cycle that supports the regenerative soil and agriculture. This is not part of our system right now. We don't incentivize that. We don't have taxes or prices that reflect that. There's retaining water in systems, storing carbon and water in the soil and maintaining the connectivity of water, which would, of course, imply changing in the dams around the world and restoring the wetlands, which is the most biodiverse places in the world

and the most carbon-intensive sinks. And we can restore forests. Forests around the world grow at 2.6% per year. That is the productivity that they throw off. And we're, of course, the scale of all the things I just mentioned is very important because the scale of our global 8 billion person 1.9 or 19 terawatt metabolism is way higher than the actual productivity of our current sun, water, and soil can provide. But if humans change our cultural incentives, change our prices, for instance, there could be

all humans have to pay taxes to their government. if the government only allowed those taxes to be paid in some currency that could be gained only by doing some of those four things I just mentioned, growing forest, retaining water, retaining the connectivity of water and regenerative farming and protection of ecosystems so that we're growing habitat for species. These things are not prioritized in our world. So I do believe that we have at this 11th hour come to, to the precipice of all kinds of tipping points,

thresholds, six out of 11 planetary boundaries are being exceeded. This is the wake up call. This is the time for a species level conversation. So all the things that brought us here, the maximum power principle, the quest for status, the hierarchy, the economic superorganism, the metabolism of an energy hungry,

global, out of control, economic system. All these things are true and are happening. But we also recognize why and how these things are happening. And there's an emergence, there's a knowledge, there's a change in consciousness that's happening. And just like backcasting some ideology on the past, it doesn't matter in some ways what happened 10,000 years ago. What happened right now is, in theory, our choice. The same dynamic that some of you have chosen to be vegetarian because you know cognitively the impacts

and your cognitive understanding has trumped your emotional choice to have a tasty BLT sandwich or whatever. That same suppression of the agenda of the gene. can happen in others and it can potentially happen at scale. The problem is, as followers of this show are aware, is that this is all happening at a time when our economy and we actually are heading for a world of more material scarcity. And so here's my work in the context of this. First of all, it's to describe the human predicament and the system science of

what we face in a politically neutral, non-judgmental, just descriptive way, even without recommendations of where to go. Second is the bend, not break categories of interventions. And there's a lot of them, and I will be talking about those a lot soon. And third is a change in values, change in consciousness, a recognition of our stakes at this time on this blue-green planet. And then there's a recursiveness between the second and the third categories. Hopefully we have more people in that third category who have a change in values and change in consciousness get to work on the bend, not break scenarios. However, with the wars and the financial overshoot and the nuclear risk and all the other

complexity risks that we face, we're going to have to do that in a crisis situation. So I don't know whether it's five years or five months or one month, depending on who wins the election, when it's okay for people like me to voice these things openly on the internet because it's possible that this change in consciousness may have to happen underground and not while we're headed into the economic great simplification. So this is to say that I think it's really important to have a life ethic during these times. But I also think it's important to maintain a tether to the system science. We're going to have to use less, possibly substantially less. All the rest is kind of details. And as we navigate the coming decades, some of the first. us are going to have to champion the natural world.

And it's possible that 50 years from now we do have more of an ecological civilization that treats the productivity and the success of the economic system based on how much in service to life and the biosphere on this planet our actions have. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but that is the vision and the carrot that I'm working towards. I'm going to leave you with another poem, not mine, but one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. I do not live happily or comfortably with the cleverness of our times. The talk is all about computers. The news is all about bombs and blood. This morning, in the fresh field, I came upon a hidden nest.

It held four warm speckled eggs. I touched them. Then went softly away, having felt something more wonderful than all the electricity in New York City. Talk to you next week.