The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Words of Our Lives | Earth Day 2023

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

For this year's Earth Day presentation, I highlight common terms in the English language - the meanings of which we've come to take for granted. These words semantically imbue our understanding, perspective, and even behavior but have become untethered from the systemic reality they attempt to describe. Words have power. What we call things and how we describe things matters.   This presentation is recommended to be viewed on Youtube with the accompanying visuals, but can still be listened to and understood in audio-only form.    Thanks to my team - Leslie Batt-Lutz, Lizzy Sirianni, Luke Robert Mason, and Jason Figueredo for putting this together. Also thanks (as always) to my friend DJ White for helpful input. Thanks to Joan Diamond, Kyle Saunders, Maia Nillson, Rex Weyler for helpful input. 

Greetings. Happy Earth Day. Another year, another day, April 22nd, where we kind of can tell the truth about the planetary situation without fear of social reprisal. It's kind of shocking to me that every day isn't Earth Day, but that is our education and our cultural situation. I have a podcast. One of my upcoming guests is a Native American of the Muskogee tribe, Marcus Cloud Breaks. And I was talking with him and he said there's like 22 people in the world that speak this Muskogee dialect. And he's teaching his two children. And I asked him why. And he's like, because our cultural concepts, our values can't be translated in the English language. That got me to thinking, what is the semantic influence of our words on our behavior, on our values, on our cultural permission for different things. So what I'd like to do here is kind of a whirlwind list of common cultural terms and their biophysical equivalents from my Earth Day perspective.

Here we go. So first, economy, very common word. The biophysical equivalent would be the human ecosystem. The economy takes money and technology and tells a story. about distributing the largesse of that system to all the humans. A human ecosystem not only includes money and technology, but energy, materials, pollution, externalities, why we pursue these things to get the same emotional states of our ancestors.

It looks in the parts and the processes, how the parts and processes fit together in a system. So that's quite a big, disparity between the two terms. Progress. We hear about progress all the time. Those following this podcast know that underpinning progress is the carbon pulse. Progress is the internet suburbs, the wealth and goods and services that we have. The carbon pulse in contrast is 500 billion human labor equivalents per year added to the human economy and we only pay for the cost of their extraction in all other technology and industrial progress is based on that foundation and the foundation

of the ecosystems underneath that. This is a one-time endowment for humans and of course it's going to be very correlated with our historical progress but it is the principle and we are treating it as if it were interest. Technology. Technology can solve every problem. From my perspective, I think technology largely serves as an energy vector. So technology is able to offset problems that humans face. And a lot of people hearing this story, well, humans are clever. We'll figure it out. Technology always comes up with a way. But in most cases, over 80s. to 90% of our technological inventions actually just create new devices that draw on future energy.

The average American has something like 65 devices plugged in in their houses. We have new innovations that give humans experiences that we didn't have before, like cell phones and televisions or replace tasks that humans used to do manually or with draft labor. All of this requires energy. We need energy, technology, and materials for every single thing in the global economy, but most people just look at the technology portion of that. Finance. I have a master's in finance from the University of Chicago, and so I understand it, but from

a biophysical perspective, I've come to believe that a better term is energy laundering. So finance greases the human system. It's a social construct that allows us to move around like a shell game. Who owns what and get the shells closer to the spigot using the cantalon effect to access more wealth and power? And money laundering is taking some ill-gotten gains and turning it into money that is socially acceptable. And the same thing is happening with finance and the carbon pulse. finance is like a magic wand that extracts resources and damages ecosystems from the earth faster and moves it towards a smaller portion of those humans alive today. Energy laundering.

Efficiency from a biophysical systems perspective, the real word would be fragility. So we have pursued efficiency in our global supply chains, outsourcing to the least cost country of production, making things, tweaking things to be a little bit better, creating new partnerships in different areas that combine to have the lowest cost product. This has all been on the backs of incredibly cheap liquid fuel that greases the global transportation system. But what we've been efficient on is monetary profits and time and capital. We have not been efficient on soil degradation, natural resource conservation, ecosystem protection, and we certainly have not been efficient on resilience. and resilience are kind of opposites.

And so the more efficient we've gotten, we've actually increased the fragility of the entire system. Actually, if we were much, much less efficient today, there would be a lot more slack and opportunity for error in the system on the sixth continent overnight supply chain that we've built. The American way of life, from a biophysical perspective, this is largely due to the special geology and the seniorage we get from the U.S. dollar being the global reserve currency. The United States has used more fossil hydrocarbons and carbon than any other country in history.

We tell these stories that it's the American way of life, the American dream, but we happen to have found and moved into a country that had a lot of ancient oceans. here. There was more fossil hydrocarbons here than anywhere else in the world. We also have developed the petro dollar 50 years ago where other countries in the world have to use our currency to buy key commodities, including oil. And this has resulted in huge economic benefits where we can consume beyond our means. And that deficit is siphoned up by the rest of the world who need dollars. So the American dream, yes, we are empathic and creative and have helped the world since World War II, but a lot of our wealth and productivity is due to these unique and

potentially unsustainable tailwinds. Speaking of which, shale oil, we talk about the shale oil miracle, from a biophysical perspective, the reality is that shale oil is the bottom of the barrel. We've used the conventional oil as long ago peaked. We used the oil in the north slope of Alaska, which is part of the United States. We've used the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. And now over half of our oil is in the shale plays. All the shale plays have peaked except for the Permian, the Permian's expected to peak in the next couple years, there is nothing after shale oil, except perhaps oil shale, which is like carriage and rock that has the energy density of a baked potato. So shale oil drilling effectively created a larger straw to access oil that was

migrated from the source rock. And what it meant is we're that much closer to a slurping sound. And there's plenty of oil left in the United States. We'll probably be at some sort of plateau for a decade or so, a reduced plateau. But the issue is that it's not going to continue to grow, and that has massive implications. After shale oil is gone, there's nothing left. That also has massive implications for our children, our grandchildren, and our expectations, and our institutions, and our country. globalization, again, in contrast, the biophysical world might be dependency.

We have a six-continent supply chain that is completely dependent on liquid fuels. Many countries have pursued import substitution policies with a specialization, the whole economic comparative advantage argument of guns and butter, so that a lot of countries, including the United States are no longer self-sufficient on key goods. We have to import things like active pharmaceutical ingredients from India and China, lots of oil from Saudi Arabia and other places. So globalization has been growing for a long time, and we assume that this will just always be the case. But as oil gets more expensive, as complexity starts to not be affordable, the world is going to become a bigger place.

And we're not prepared for that because we just assume that globalization will continue as it has. Growth. Economic growth is a very common thing. It's expected. It is an anomaly in human history, except for the last couple of hundred years. the actual term that I think correctly represents this is metastatic cancer. If we continue to grow at 3% a year, which all institutions and governments expect, we will double the size of energy and materials in our society in the next 30 years or so,

and quadruple the energy and material use in the next 60 years. And this is not to mention all of the... ecosystem degradation, the accelerating population decline of insects, animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish. We are functioning as a global energy-hungry superorganism and no one wants cancer and but this is kind of a decent metaphor and I guess these Earth Day talks in a weird sort away are an attempt to imbue self-awareness to the individual cancer cells. But this is an apt metaphor. Profits, a biophysical unpacking of that term would rather be called optimal foraging

dynamic combined with energy surplus. Animals in nature invest a little to get a lot back in the calories they get from their prey. Humans have the same dynamic where we want to buy two for one cocktails or get a 70% sale on some shoes or get a discount on a house. We have these same animal instincts to invest a little and get a lot, but we're doing this in a time of a massive, massive bolus of fossil energy that is supporting human economies, 19 terawatts worth of energy surplus. And so this seeking of profits has become a cultural objective relative to humans in the past that didn't have access to a lot of energy surplus. So those options of growing your individual pie in society were much different than we have today.

Money. Well, biophysically, money could have two terms. One would be a claim on energy because every single thing of money, we see. spend on will then require energy to burn. But I think in our current global situation, a better term would be optionality. What that means is that even billionaires or middle income people, everyone recognizing what we face ahead of us, these times of uncertainty, global central bank printing, debasing of currencies, people want more money because it gives them more options for the future. And so we're not so much greedy as people neurochemically want more security,

and our brains are tricked by thinking more money will give us that. So money is a claim on energy, but really today we pursue it to have more options in the future because we're uncertain about the future. Marketing. Well, marketing is this optimal for foraging dynamic plus the fact that we're a social species and we compare ourselves to others. In my opinion, marketing is probably the single most deleterious invention of human history. We're constantly told on advertisements, you suck. If you buy this product, you'll be cool. And so it's combining our optimal foraging dynamic with social comparisons. and it's very, very powerful.

If I were benevolent dictator, I might outlaw advertising. Capitalism and communism, very loaded common terms. From a biophysical perspective, both of these are social methods that pursue and result in industrialism. You know, capitalism and communism are both growth-based, and they are both ecology-blind. capitalism has just been much more efficient because of finance and no holds barred on the rules. But all these isms are still growth-based, industrial-based philosophies. So I just wanted to make that suggestion.

Consumer, we hear in the news the consumer was strong this quarter. The vocabulary translation of this is actually. human. We're not consumers. We are human beings. We live in a culture that promotes consumption. But the reality is that we are biological creatures. Yes, there's the ecological definition of consumer, but an economic consumer labels us in such a way that consumption is expected and culturally approved. We are human beings. fuels. We have to get off fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are very powerful. The correct name is fossil carbon and hydrocarbon or flammable fossils. Once we give the name fuel, it automatically

gives us permission to burn it. Of course we're going to use it. Of course we're going to burn it. Of course we're going to develop cars and infrastructure to access this thing. It's a fuel. So this is where semantics become very important. They are not fossil fuels. They are flammable fossils, which we as a culture are choosing to burn. The environment. Here's the economy. The environment is out there.

The actual correct term would be the web of life. The environment is separate from the economy, but humans are embedded in a very intricate web of life with 10 million other species in complex, interacting, intricate, fragile systems. And so the environment is not out there. It's part of us and we are part of it. Fish stocks, another common phrase in our vocabulary. No, actually, they are fish populations. Many things in nature are labeled such as they're there for humans.

to use. Humans are using almost 40% of the net primary productivity of the planet in addition to all the stored fossil carbon. Fish are populations of species the same way that rats or armadillos or elephants or giraffes or dolphins are. So they're not stocks. They are populations. Apes. The true definition of apes is they are our family. There are five species of great apes. bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and human beings. We are one of 10 million other species, our nieces, nephews, cousins in nature that have all followed similar paths evolutionary to this moment. And again, we don't treat them as the incredibly precious relative that we have on this only

planet that we know of to house life and complex life. Apes are our extended family. Beef and pork. Well, the contrasting actual response to this is dead mammals who probably lived horrible lives. We go to Whole Foods or to our supermarket and we see these nice displays of meat and it's all clean and packaged. in plastic and we see advertisements on TV that these hamburgers are these steaks and it looks

delicious and it tastes delicious. The reality is that most of these animals lived in CAFO farms had crappy lives and we don't think about that. We compartmentalize the fact that these one billion cattle live on the planet, 700 million pigs. over a billion goats, almost as many sheep. Many of these live pretty terrible lives. And it's one of those out of sight, out of mind things in our vocabulary, beef and pork. Global warming. This is a new term.

Well, actually, the new term is climate change. But global warming itself is a more charged term than climate change. But the real term is global heating. We are adding heat to the earth from our burning of fossil carbon. It in turn is adding a blanket over Earth that is turning into a greenhouse effect that is warming the earth continually. 90% of the heat or so is going into the oceans. That is not sustainable.

is a euphemism. What we are doing is we are heating the earth. Global heating, and this will continue, likely for centuries, before the full Earth system equilibrium point is reached. You know, there will be a time hundreds of years from now, a thousand years from now, where if people are still alive, they can look back and see what might one day be called, the HETAM, the Holocene Anthropocene Thermal Maximum, which is the absolute peak in temperature that was reached on the planet due to human activities, very similar to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum that was one of the more extreme mass extinctions on our planet. We don't know what that is, but we're so focused on this year, this decade, even this century, that the halocene-an-anthropocene

Thermal Maximum will be a thing. Porn, gambling, junk food, etc. Well, all these things produce empty calories. We pursue supernormal stimuli that are very targeted rewards that mimic a real great experience that led to an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors. But we didn't have to do the work that our ancestors did to get that special reward. we can pick up our phone and check an email we can have a pizza or an ice cream or go on the internet and have mental sex with a stranger without the tenderness the intimacy and the real

act and there's so many things in our life that we get these empty calories for from and it's one of the reasons i think we're we're so unhappy and so unhealthy is because we don't have to do the work to get these powerful, emotional, emotionally salient rewards that match our ancestors. Renewables. Those of you follow the podcast know that a better term for them is rebuildables. An oak tree is renewable. A chicken is renewable. A solar panel and a wind turbine are rebuildable every 20 or 25 years.

If we have the complexity, if we have the global infrastructure, if we have. We have the polysilicon wafers and the neodymium magnets and all the other rebar and cement and everything. So many of these items are repeatable and rebuildable, but they're not renewable. The sun and the wind are renewable. So I think this is a semantically powerful dichotomy. Decarbonization, as we decarbonize the global energy. supply or try to, this will lead to rematerialization. Many of our lower carbon devices will require lots more copper, lithium, cobalt, other

metals and minerals. We will shift the battle from the atmosphere to the land. It will be a land war where we try and mine and get like orders of magnitude more metal. and minerals to add to our economy. So in this sense, there is no decoupling. There might be a decoupling from carbon, but there will be a recoupling of our impacts on nature and the natural world. In the same sense, we use the word green, but most of the green things in today's world are actually brown. We've got a lot of talk. The Biden administration is talking about electric cars, but these electric cars use almost as much energy, have complex supply chains.

We still are burning the energy. And even at the same time, many of the things that we've done in the past, like Germany and California, have done green investments. But because of the natural gas situation in Russia and Ukraine, now Germany is having to reopen towns that have coal plants. So many of the things that we think are green would be green if they were part of a larger systemic strategy. But since they're at the margin in a current system optimizing economic growth, their impact

on society actually is brown. Sustainability. To be truly sustainable, we will need contraction of the human enterprise. I don't even like the word sustainability because, first of all, just like peak oil and fractional reserve banking system, it's kind of a burned term socially. But what we're really talking about when we say sustainability is we mean to be more sustainable than we are today. But if we really mean sustainability, if we really mean that term, it means a moderate to significant reduction in the size and the scale of the human enterprise, which isn't a popular thing to say,

which is why we just say sustainability. Need. The corollary there on the vocabulary for the future is want. Of course, we conflate needs and wants. And many of the things that we want might very well be desperate needs for people in the global south or different generations in the future. In the United States, we use 100 times more energy than our bodies need, 215,000 kilo calories a day per United States citizen versus around 2,000, 2,500 that our bodies need.

So many things in our world, we conflate between wants and needs. Peak demand is in the news because we won't need oil anymore because technology will obviate the need for any more oil. the biophysical equivalent of that is a simplification. So humans use technology to solve problems. The technology results in complexity. The complexity builds a higher metabolism. For the last couple centuries, every single year other than recessions, we have had more access to energy than the year before. And when oil starts to decline, due to depletion, ongoing depletion is around 6% a year on the existing wells in the world. This will be many fewer fossil workers to support the economy.

So peak demand is a real misnomer because, first of all, it assumes that oil is the, gasoline is the only product from oil. If we were somehow to miraculously not need internal combustion engines at all because of EVs, we would still need around the same amount of oil. So to say that peak demand is a real thing and we will continue to grow after that is akin to saying that the reindeer on St. Matthews Island didn't need lichen anymore like peak lichen. So we have enjoyed a couple centuries of complexification because of increasing total energy. Once energy starts to decline, there will be the converse of that, which is a simplification.

The name of my podcast and my work is the great simplification, because I think it's quite likely this could be the largest event that humans ever face. So I'm not a fan of the peak demand narrative. Governance. The government will figure it out. the government will have a plan. We will have Republicans and Democrats come together to come up with an answer. Really, today the government is in crisis management. There are a lot of very smart, very well-meaning people in government. They are overwhelmed with the needs and the challenges of the day. And I'm not sure that our current mode of governance can handle the systemic fragility and unexpected. emergence of some of these threads that are going on in the world.

So right now, people in government, and I know this because I talk to very senior people in Senate and Congress in 2020, and I got like seven minutes to meet with them or 10 minutes because they're so busy with the needs of the day that they can't think two or three steps down the road, we're going to need something other than crisis management to solve. what's ahead. We need foresight and scenario planning viewed from a system's perspective. The modern media, in contrast, the consensus trance or propaganda. I think the Ukraine war is one example where there's this public narrative that Ukraine is kicking butt and Putin is Hitler and some of that is certainly true, but anyone that speaks opposite to that gets cancelled or shouted down.

The same thing with this story, the same thing with maybe climate change is being publicly discussed because the answer to climate change is building renewables and efficiency. So that's an answer. But it seems like the journalistic, truth and integrity that existed 40, 50 years ago has dissipated. And now there is a path dependence nature to what we read in the conventional media. And certainly this complex systems story that I'm unfolding in this presentation is not going to be on the evening news ever. So we are kind of that the general public is part of the consensus trance, that it's really

a intellectual opposite of bread and circuses, that we can't, unless we look at alternative media on Twitter or podcasts or things like that, we can't really ascertain what's going on from the fourth estate the way that we used to. Investments. Well, the corollary to that is real capital. Real capital, you know, investments traditionally have been finance into stocks and bonds. Real capital is social capital, our networks, our friends, our relationships, natural capital, our trees, our ecosystems, our rivers, our clean air, our soil, human capital, which is our knowledge, our skills, our health, and built capital, which is the camera doing this Earth Day talk and a chainsaw and an alivara plant and a house and a solar panel. So we're going to have to increasingly

change how we think about investments to be more diversified among these four areas, because finance as a marker for these things is going to be increasingly unrelated. me versus we. Our culture has lauded rugged individualism and promoted people rising above. I think this is natural that during a period of steep, steep, steep energy surplus and economic growth, that naturally those opportunities arose. But in our ancestral times, many times, it was those. cooperative units, those tribes that shared, sacrifice, and cooperated, outcompeted those tribes that had primarily competitive individuals in them. So all of us have the shared genome of

cooperation and competition. But our culture has been me, me, me. And what we face now is a series of collective action problems. And we is the operative term. I think there are people that take ayahuasca or mushrooms or other things and they quickly have a shift in perspective that sees that their individual body is part of a grander hole. But most people are still in this me, me, me dynamic in this country. And I think we is the operative word for the future. not only we as a community and as a culture, but we as a web of life, how we relate to the other creatures on this planet and in the future. Success.

Well, similarly, this has a corollary in the word meaning. I think many people, of course, want to achieve success. Success during this one-time carbon pulse has been linked to having more money, which gets more bling and more social status, but people are now starved for meaning. They feel like just pursuing this rat race of dopamine and supernormal stimuli and gadgets is interesting and fun, but leaves a hollow feeling in your soul. The good news is, given the synthesis that I've laid out here and in my podcast, is we can make a difference. We can live a life of meaning now. Just pick any one of the multiple challenges

that we face and dive into it and dedicate your life and be a champion for that task. But people want meaning, not economic growth or religion per se, but some value and directive in their lives because economic growth is not going to give us meaning for too much longer. People We come across a lot of people in our daily lives. We see people at the grocery store, the gas station, or the airport. The real word, I think, is relationships. We don't have time in this busy, wealthy society to actually have relationships with other humans, the way that our ancestors did.

And I expect this is going to be important again. There's a difference between people and relationships. Development. This is getting close to. to the core theme of Earth Day, I think development really means wherever you are listening to this, watching this, it is an encroachment on your home, on your little place on this this blue-green planet that is the ecosystems, the insects, the animals, the trees, the weeds that are part of your place where you, your family, your friends spend your life.

And at some point, the metastatic growth dynamic of the superorganism is going to lay this planet bare and we're going to have to have champions that draw the line on development where they live and protect the natural systems, the ecosystems in their home. development and damaging our home. Homo sapiens, in contrast, homo collides, which is clever man. Homo sapiens is the ninth, perhaps last, perhaps not, of the homo line. There was ergaster, Habilis, Florensis, Neanderthalus, forget the other two. But we are wise man. We have been anything but wise.

We have been incredibly clever. It's an open question whether we can live up to our moniker. Heaven, and in contrast, Earth. We have lots of stories in our society about the unexpected reward that awaits us after we die. It has been a cultural objective for a long time. From a biophysical perspective, I think Earth is heaven. life everlasting is not something we need to gain, it's something we need to not lose. There should probably be around 500 million years remaining the age of complex life on Earth.

That's time for us to exist, discover, and thrive for a time greater than any of us can really imagine. And before the carbon pulse, before our economic superorganism took control of the world, those hundreds of millions of years were stretched out before us essentially indefinitely. But our current economic system and aspirations and, you know, doubling down on what we plan to do the next 30 to 50 years has hit the Earth like a rogue asteroid and create a change that is essentially instantaneous on geologic timescales. humans will not transcend life we are life and damn fragile life at that once our toys run out if it were our primary goal to sterilize the earth of large life of conscious life and the diversity of this planet we could find few ways more direct than what we're doing now The only real long-term future is an ecologic and biophysical future.

Paradise is ours to lose, and we're losing it. A trillionth human child sometime deep in the future should be able to share her world with hummingbirds, orangutans, elephants, and millions of other species, including to be able to water. a field of fireflies at night, I've come to conclude that such a future, many, many human generations in the future, coexisting with all the other wild diversity of life on this planet, that is heaven. And against all odds, I hope that people listening to this recognize our time and place, at stake in a very lonely universe, we have to value and protect the ecosystems and species that we share

this planet with. Thank you for listening. I hope you play a role in some small way in your corner of this beautiful Earth.