Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ahead, competitive and cooperative behaviors will in turn come to the fore in various times and
places. My initial point in all of this is that, even in the absence of effective action to
avert
econom-
ic and environmental crises, we still have the capacity to set ourselves up to be either more com-
petitive or more cooperative in times of scarcity and crisis. With the right social structures and the
ing community organizations now, we are improving our survival prospects later.
But I'd go further. Here's a preliminary hypothesis for which I'm starting to collect both con-
firming and disconfirming evidence: We're likely to see the worst of ruthless competition in the
early stage of the release phase, when power holders try to keep together what wants to fall apart
and reorganize. The effort to hang on to what we have in the face of uncertainty and fear may bring
out the competitive nature in many of us, but once we're in the midst of actual crisis we may be
more likely to band together.
Among elites—who have enormous amounts of wealth, power, and privilege at stake—the
former tendency has carried the day. And since elites largely shape the rules, regulations, and in-
formation flows within society, this means we're all caught up in a hyper-competitive and fearful
moment as we wait for the penny to drop. Elites can deliberately nurture an “us-versus-them” men-
tality (via jingoistic patriotism, wedge issues, and racial resentments) to keep ordinary people from
cooperative undertaking, and in order to forestall it rulers sometimes harness the cooperative spirit
of the masses in going to war against a common foreign enemy.
The over-competitiveness of this prerelease phase is playing out most prominently and fatefully
in debates over “austerity,” as nations bail out investment banks while leaving most citizens to lan-
guish under layoffs, pension cuts, and wage cuts. It seems that no measure aimed to prevent defaults
and losses to investors is too draconian. But in many historic instances (Russia, Iceland, Argentina)
it was only
after
a massive financial default—that is, once release had run its course—that nations
could fundamentally revamp their monetary and banking systems, making recovery possible. That
makes “release” sound a bit like a long-overdue vacation. It's important to emphasize, however,
that what we face now is not just a collapse and reorganization of a national financial sector, but a
crucial turning from the overall expansionary trajectory of civilization itself.
Our collective passage through and reorganization after the release phase of this pivotal adaptive
cycle can be thought of as an evolutionary event. And, as noted above, evolution is driven by co-
operation as much as by competition. Indeed, cooperation is the source of most of our species'
extraordinary accomplishments so far. Language—which gives us the ability to coordinate our be-
havior across space and time—has made us by far the most successful large animal species on the
planet. Our societal evolution from hunting-and-gathering bands to agrarian civilizations to indus-
trial globalism required ever-higher levels of cooperative behavior: as one small example, think for
a moment about the stunningly rich collaborative action required to build and inhabit a skyscraper.
As we adapt and evolve further in the decades and centuries ahead, we will do so by finding even
more effective ways to cooperate.
Ironically, however, during the past few millennia, and especially during the most recent cen-
tury, social complexity has permitted greater concentrations of wealth, thus more economic inequal-
ity, and hence (at least potentially) more competition for control over heaps of agglomerated wealth.
As Ivan Illich pointed out in his 1974 classic
Energy and Equity
, there has been a general correl-
ation between the amount of energy flowing through a society and the degree of inequality within
