Murray Grimwood says the future will be so different we need to go back to basics, and with degrowth inevitable it'd be better done voluntarily

By Murray Grimwood*

‘Science is a narrow tool: powerful and tenacious like a pit bull, but having no intrinsic wisdom or context. It concerns itself with what we can do, not what we should do.’ Professor Tom Murphy; astrophysicist.

“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.” —Marian Wright Edelman; children’s advocate.

‘But there are still vast sections of society – academia being one – that don’t yet integrate the magnitude and urgency of our systemic predicament.’ Nate Hagens; researcher/educator.

Peter Gluckman is currently leading two interrelated processes; one questioning the future of science; the other, education. Given that we are already late in addressing the ‘wicked problems’ facing humanity (correctly identified in the ‘science’ terms-of-reference) this has the potential to bode well. But given the unquestioned goal of ‘economic growth’, both threads also have the potential to be a misdirected waste of whatever time remains. Ideally, this exercise should once-over-lightly identify the bigger issues facing New Zealand/the world, and report back recommending an even wider-scoped brief. Urgently.

Not a new idea

Some time ago, I wrote a piece suggesting the need for such a review:

‘We need to teach an expertise-meshing discipline (Systems Analysis being the academic name for such, although I prefer Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Generalism’ term). Ideally, this would permeate the education system and spread to voter-awareness – assuming we have that much feed-back lag-time up our sleeves! We need Cabinet to be – or to have access to – such a discipline. Perhaps enlarge the role of Chief Science Adviser to case all things, indeed a report from the CSA into the need to think in Systems, would be a good start.’

Approaching the Limits to Growth

Ironically, these teams would not have needed assembling, nor my prior comment made, if the future was going to resemble the past. The driver is the same one which spawned the Productivity Commission; the yet-to-be learned lesson from its failure (to correctly identify what underwrites production) applies.

So different will the future be, I suggest, that they need to go right back to basics; question everything; assume nothing.

In simple terms, one species has run an unprecedented experiment; exponential consumption-growth within a bounded system (planet Earth). It takes neither advanced education nor particular expertise, to understand that such an approach was always going to be temporary. It requires equally non-advanced qualifications to understand that a series of bets laid on the expectation of permanent consumption-growth, would be increasingly unbacked as the physical underwrite fell away. Again, it takes no special expertise to understand that exponentially ‘up’ and exponentially ‘down’ graphs cross acutely; that the change we face will therefore be rapid.

Replacement values

In light of the above, it also takes no great intellectual capacity to realise that a growth-accommodating accounting-scheme (a series of ever-bigger bets on ever-more consumption) was always going to be displaced – whether proactively or retroactively - by a reduction-accommodating one. Thus, henceforth, the former is an invalid justification-basis for future science/education emphases… Let us re-phase that: Money, as currently issued/formatted, is no longer a valid measurement tool for scientific or educational goals (in fact, it never was).

That is where the financialized approach to research (both university and institutional) has fallen short; some form of physically-indexed and time-referenced valuation – as opposed to keystroke-issued, fiat-levered debt - needs to be the goal/base-line/yardstick from here on. (That goes for society-at-large too; the assertion that an unlimited population can be ‘raised out of poverty’ is incorrect, no matter how much believed, or how often articulated).

What science needs to address

In simple terms, everything we consume is either mined or grown. The mining - and subsequent processing/consumption/discarding - is done using energy which was solar in origin but is also mined (fossil fuels being historical solar energy).

Resource and energy throughputs, then, are the overarching topics. Subsequent facets include depletion, degradation, dissipation, efficiencies and entropy. Few scientists, fewer journalists and even fewer politicians, are addressing these consequential issues in weighted relativity. Economists – with singular global exceptions - are yet to turn up for class.

Where/how we have gone wrong

Science and education have grown of-and-with first-world consumption-growth. Like most activities they were parasitic upon energy and resource-flows; both accepted remuneration – consumption-proxy, therefore resource/energy proxy – in measures negotiated with wider society. Temporarily it seemed to work; teachers/lecturers/professors/researchers got ‘paid’. Nobody asked whether the seventh generation hence would thank us; nobody asked how long those flows would last; nobody noted the insidious displacement – by debt - of true wealth- underwrite; nobody questioned its message.

Declining quality; lowering EROEI; surplus energy reducing

As the best-quality energy and resources got extracted/consumed/ejected, a sequential trajectory of ‘next-best’ became inevitable; an ever-worse-source scenario aggravated by rising demand – via both outright population and per-head consumption – and compounding reductions (for instance: ever-more ‘overburden’ needing removed per ton of retrieved ore; said removal using energy of ever-reducing EROEI). The proportion of surplus energy – energy available over-and-above essentials like food – inevitably reduced; first per-head, then overall.

Science and education – along with health and infrastructure-maintenance – have been squeezed by that surplus-energy reduction, plus entropy. Increasingly, what society could once ‘afford’; it no longer can. Science has mostly reacted by ‘following the money’; allowing short-term corporate avarice and/or personal ease, to dictate what is – or, more importantly, isn’t - studied.

Tertiary education is arguably worse, and should hang its head in shame. Not only has it ‘followed the money’, it has chosen to ignore already-available-internally knowledge. Consequently, politics has had no choice – even if it wished - but to peddle ignorance, to pander to a voting populace increasingly adrift from the truth of their ever-worsening predicament.

Inevitably – and entirely predictably – student loans, institutional and other debts have become increasingly hard to justify, as business models developed in the late-stage growth years become increasingly invalid. This, coupled with the growth-narrative’s increasing need to avoid inconvenient facts – by disestablishing positions; starving funding; muzzling communication – has led society ever-closer to the cliff, while wearing an ever-bigger blindfold. That a collection of past-system winners would pull on all available strings to continue the past, was predictable; that the majority of educators and a goodly proportion of researchers would choose to fall into line, placing personal ease above moral obligation, was not. J’accuse.

To those responding indignantly to the previous sentence: warning about climate change and/or driving an EV, may salve personal consciences but do NOT - to any meaningful degree - address the poly crisis facing humanity.

We are seeing this less-bang-for-buck/increasing debt trend manifesting in multiple ways; Local authorities permanently increasing charges beyond inflation; infrastructure failing even so; lengthening waiting-lists; increasing conflicts - at all levels - over ‘what’s left’.

Moral obligations of science, and education

Warnings about the muzzling/commandeering of science have been sounded over the years; locally Shaun Hendy’s Silencing Science (BWB) and further afield Chris Turner’s The War on Science (Greystone). The de-funding, de-placing and active muzzling of Mike Joy, is a classic study in this regard. But the moral implications are clear; if a scientist or senior educator is made aware of multiple self-induced existential threats to humanity – let alone to the rest of the biosphere – they have a moral duty to holler it from the mountain-tops. And to challenge the no-existential-threat-here brigade, including academics in other siloes if need be. With protest, if necessary; better still, with storming of the ivory towers, demanding change on behalf of those yet to come.

In this matter, I completely disagree those who believe that the role of science is to lay information in front of politicians but to refrain from moral campaigning; I suggest that it strongly resembles virtue-signalling. One can understand the need to remain dispassionate when doing research, but given the implications of the above? That approach could only be valid if commercial/corporate/short-term interests stayed an equal distance from decision-making. Which they do not, by some patently-obvious orders of magnitude (think: politician/lobbyist and politician/trough-feeder revolving doors; think: election funding). Silent backroom research cannot be the sole role of science, vis-à-vis a society needing to alter its trajectory if it is to survive. Precise communication is an essential component.

A similar thought occurred when the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Otago University, Professor Richard Blaikie, opined to me that ‘all we have to do is plant a trillion trees’. (A simple fellow like me, then asks how many trees there are, and were? The respective answers are ‘about three trillion’; and ‘nearly twice that’. Does the Deputy Vice-Chancellor really believe that replacing one-third of what we have already felled, can redress our burning of mined – and therefore additional - fossil carbon? Has he asked when/where/how his trillion trees will be grown/planted/left forever?

Yet Professor Blaikie – instead of warning that commercialization is a core component of the poly crisis facing humanity, ‘oversees all the research and commercialisation activities of the University’.

Society has the right to challenge such (trillion-tree/partying-on implied) claims; science – academia included - has the obligation to ascertain/purvey the truth of them.

Henceforth, all governments will need to obfuscate/ignore/silence, if they continue to peddle ‘growth’. The degree may alter with a change of government; the trend will not. Trite cliché sound-bytes will replace fact; ‘backbone of the economy’; ‘sustainable growth’; ‘responsible pipelines’ (the latter classic courtesy of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau). These are regurgitated by the media, largely unchallenged. Scientists, particularly scientific educators, need to challenge these, and be free to do so. En passant, journalism – itself declining - needs to raise its bar too.

Quo Vadis?

The future is brutally simple to anticipate; all overshot species collapse, and we have – by transcending time via the levering of fossil energy – levered our species’ overshoot more than any ever has (or, almost certainly, ever could). Growing out of overshoot is NOT an option – indeed it defies logic - degrowing is therefore inevitable and better done voluntarily, that involuntarily. That means a re-formatting of most growth-facilitating constructs (interest; profit; resource extraction; maintenance deferral/curtailment; waste-dumping) and triage of most of our fossil-dependent infrastructure. We are out of lead-time to fully replace that collection, and out of surplus energy with which to do it. Triage will therefore increase exponentially; growth, Jim, but not as we knew it…

The future role of education

In a de-growing reality, future bets will no longer be discountable; thus living via student, tenant and government debt (living now, at the expense of the future) will not be an option. Put differently; in a de-growing reality, teaching can be done, but for a fee which does not impinge the future. Hallowed halls will therefore likely become a thing of the past; the future is unlikely to deliver the surplus energy to maintain them.

Information retention – mindlessly assumed to be via the internet, forever – is likely to revert to less energy-intensive, less technology-reliant formats. Written word, hard-copy; in other words, books. Which means that the throwing-out of those, at all library levels – was short-sighted ignorance.

Truth-based education will be of even greater importance than it already is. Social media and algorithms have further skewed already-falsely-based societal narratives, to the point where few understand the poly crisis facing humankind, or their part in it. Tertiary education, by and large, has succumbed rather than challenged. Whatever format it morphs into, will have to do a great deal better (hopefully driven/made easier by the young demanding truths).

The future role of science

There is a time to research; a time to warn; a time to adapt. Further researching climate, for instance, will not change our trajectory; we know enough now, and have steadfastly chosen inertia. The same applies to the other concurrent issues.

Simple logic tells us that we will continue consumption-growth until one-or-more limits impinge; a sad epitaph for supposed sapience. At some point, the current financial construct is likely to fail; a majority of the bets laid by corporates and individuals will therefore be unrequitable. Leadership – already trending towards ideology and belief (‘It should come as no surprise then, that magical thinking, tribalism and cargo cults took over even the highest echelons of power.’ will rapidly need replaced. The societal chaos can only be guessed at.

Future societal scientific needs, though, are obvious: monitoring will be paramount; even if done voluntarily. Extrapolation thereof, too; our operating margins – ultimately between food/energy production and habitat reduction - will be too narrow to negotiate blindly. Thus, the science that corporate-bought politics currently seeks to silence, is – unsurprisingly – the very science we will need.

Conclusion

We have been churning out bricks for 150 years, without questioning the validity or permanency of the wall. Science inevitably made large early strides for little outlay, but now regularly demands large outlays (think; Large Hadron Collider) to add small particles of knowledge; arguably a waste of the resources and time remaining to deal with our existential precarity. Education – science included – was built and paid for in a growth phase which was temporary, and which is peaking.

Addressing of the inevitable degrowth phase, is the overarching imperative of our time. That includes reducing consumption to maintainable levels; holding entropy at bay; re-evaluating just about everything. Science and education will traverse this evolution like everything else, with the important proviso that they will be the most important tools in our toolkit. Contemplating their formats, use and delivery ahead of time, is about the most important contribution anyone can make at this juncture; a ball better caught than dropped.

*Murray Grimwood comments on interest.co.nz as powerdownkiwi.