Cultural Evolution in the Anthropocene

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: April 26, 2017 at 4:36:47 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Cultural Evolution in the Anthropocene
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Robert Berger.  DLH]
>
> Cultural Evolution in the Anthropocene
> By Joe Brewer
> Apr 18 2017
> <https://shift.newco.co/cultural-evolution-in-the-anthropocene-8cf93fcad322>
>
> I am a change strategist working on behalf of humanity, and also a complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and 
> evangelist for the field of culture design.
>
> Where humanity is going, there are no roadmaps. The terrain is unlike anything we’ve seen before. The changes 
> sweeping the Earth right now are literally planetary in scale and so filled with complexity that few among us even 
> have a semblance of knowing what is actually going on. This makes it very difficult to navigate the troubled waters 
> of the 21st Century.
>
> Here are a few examples of things our species has not known in the three million years we’ve existed as “tool using” 
> hominids:
>
>    • Emergence of a Globalized Economic System :: In the last 500 years, a vast web of intercontinental trade arose 
> spanning several empires, evolving into nation-states, and now becoming a truly globalized meshwork of supply chains, 
> trade agreements, human migration patterns, and so forth.
>    • Extraction and Consumption of Fossil Fuels :: The last time a species gathered up the waste products of a prior 
> era and consumed them to grow itself we had a mass extinction event. And that was more than two billion years ago! I 
> am referring to the cyanobacteria who excreted oxygen and changed the biochemistry of the Earth. Humans are doing 
> this again by disrupting natural carbon cycles with the combustion of fossil fuels.
>    • Explosive Population Growth :: There are now more than 7.4 billion living human beings on Earth. Our population 
> exploded in the last 150 years, well beyond anything in the history of our species. And now we are watching the rapid 
> depletion of vital resources as this huge population gobbles them up — literally as food and metaphorically as the 
> built environments of our globalized civilization.
>    • Crossing of Critical Planetary Boundaries :: The Earth has maintained incredible amounts of stability for 
> billions of years through a vastly complex meshwork of self-regulating feedbacks. Thresholds exist (called “planetary 
> boundaries” by the earth scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Institute) that if crossed will remove this 
> self-regulatory capacity. There is now ample evidence that human activities have pushed us beyond as many as four of 
> these critical operating boundaries for a globalized economic system.
>    • A New Pace and Scale of Complexity :: Most of our history was lived out in small tribal communities where each 
> person might know as many as 150 people. Rapid changes, when they happened, were either catastrophic (volcano wipes 
> out village) or disruptive (drought conditions cause the tribe to migrate into a new area). But they never happened 
> at the pace and scale we live with today. As complexity scientists will be quick to tell you, scale matters a great 
> deal! There are qualitative differences in the interdependencies, cascading patterns, and unexpected phase 
> transitions for large, volatile dynamic systems — intuition about smaller systems misleads and confuses more than it 
> helps.
>    • Entering A New Geologic Era :: Humans have enjoyed an unusual period of climate stability in which to birth 
> agriculture, build cities, weave trade networks, and grow economic empires. That 11,000 year period is known by 
> geologists as the Holocene. The same geologists now agree that human activities brought the Holocene to an end in the 
> 20th Century. We are now in the “age of humans” dubbed appropriately as the Anthropocene. Our footprints on the Earth 
> will be visible in the very chemical makeup of the planet’s crust hundreds of millions of years from now. This is how 
> unprecedented this time in history really is.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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