The 1992 Rio Earth Summit, aimed to galvanise the global actors including governance, political parties, civil society, nations, Peoples, the social classes and the world’s business community, in order to act and prevent catastrophic climate change. We aimed to create a sustainable future for all the Peoples of this world and also to introduce sustainability for the economy, society and for the environment. Because you can’t have an economy without a sustainable balanced environment. Period.
The one exists within the other. In this Goldilocks planet we have a symmetrical balance that allows us to live and thrive. And only because of that environmental balance, we are able to have life and consequently have an economy. Therefore to that end, Rio summit’s vision is important, if only because of our failure to change our strategies and to achieve any of our goals.
One of the major outcomes of Rio Earth Summit’s legacy of twenty years of consistent failure is that we learn from it and chalk it up to education. Yet twenty years of “special education” haven’t brought any solutions and now we are looking to delegating the job fully to the next generations by deciding in Durban, to not even consider how to act till 2020 and beyond…
Seriously we decided this and we hailed it as a success too. Stranger things seldom happen in our world of failed governance.
But we learned a lot this many years. Most importantly that our failures are the sandbox of our victories and we also learned that symbiosis and cooperation in many projects must be employed amongst the many actors of society in order to achieve that vision.
For example, we need to engage the wealthy global productive businesses and all the basic manufacturing industries in order to meet our needs. And in order to drive sharing of the responsibilities for our product needs and the economic impetus behind meeting those needs, we ought to recycle at the earliest manufacturing level. Cradle to cradle manufacturing has to become the norm. With an increased population of seven billion now and an increasingly consumer driven middle class requires that conservation of resources has to be the key government, industrial and business process mantra. As the world inches towards the nine billion population peak benchmark, projected within a few decades, this mantra will become a prayer…
Because we have to increase reuse of materials and the production of energy from renewable resources such as solar and wind, it also means energy efficiency must double as must agricultural output (using the same or even less amount of land), and forest production should double without deforestation. There is an environmental business leadership project, that sets key milestones using focus on energy, buildings, mobility, materials, economy, governance, people, agriculture, forests, ecosystems and biodiversity. Many of these paper only projects are as ambitious as a moon shot. They require enormous cooperation between governments, NGOs and the private sector. And that would only be possible with an astonishing degree of multi-sector leadership and cooperation. But it is not impossible to accomplish this here if we find the common mobility prerogative and incentive.
Biomimcry is where it all comes from. And we have a long tradition to that end. Even from Tennyson’s red in tooth and claw constant competition jungle of Life to the cooperative behaviour of our bacterial self coming together to create this animal, we are souls animated because of cooperation. And here comes symbiosis and cooperation as a species evolutionary mechanism. We can learn from this and apply it to our business and management systems. And this isn’t news…
Similar to improvements in computer technology, instead of starting from scratch to make all new modules again, the symbiosis idea is an interfacing of preexisting modules. Mergers result in the emergence of new and more complex beings, that are able to deal with the environment surrounding them far better than the component simpler beings.
All the way back and maybe more than four million years ago we managed this cooperation even when bacterial life went from the prokaryotic to the eukaryotic cell through the symbiosis and symbiogenesis. Our current state of evolution is the proof in the pudding where the two distinct bacterial cells joined and started moving far more aggressively to their survival in the primordial soup.
These symbiotic behaviours are evident in cooperative fashion helping our organism be who we are. One kind of evidence in favor of symbiogenesis in cell origins is mitochondria, the organelles inside most eukaryotic cells, which have their own separate DNA. In addition to the nuclear DNA, which is the human genome, each of us also has mitochondrial DNA. Our mitochondria, a completely different lineage, are inherited only from our mothers. None of our mitochondrial DNA comes from our fathers. Thus, in every fungus, animal, or plant and in most protoctists, at least two distinct genealogies exist side by side. That, in itself, is a clue that at some point these organelles were distinct microorganisms that joined forces. Same as are the very different organizations that make up the business world and the environmental defenders in the form of aggressive NGOs and IGOs. When we marry the two by rapid penetration we give rapid mobility to the business concern towards a sustainable future and help it adapt to the constrained reality of the future and thus give it much needed inoculation for their existence.
Because it all started with the cooperation of the organelles in bacterial form. And at some point these organelles were distinct microorganisms that joined forces.
And if you ask why do you bring biology into this — we have to answer that we have always had great difficulty getting our minds around large, complex issues and so-called “wicked problems”. Because of this we are now keen in bringing together the biological relativity to the constant Gaia dynamic equilibrium. Because the environment is the greatest challenge that our species faces amongst many difficult paths. The sustainability of the planet and human civilisation is clearly one such, where a failure to do good long-range thinking has prevented real progress in getting the interested parties to work together. We have also had great difficulty agreeing on fundamental underlying assumptions for dealing with wicked problems, as the history of political disagreement, lack of global consensus and inactivity towards climate change shows.
But the development of foresight methodologies such as scenario-building and computer modelling has begun to help outline ways of looking at our long-range difficulties and opportunities.
So how could we build this species future upon understanding biology?
First, we must acknowledge our weaknesses. For example, we as “the people” fail to deal with poverty, population and basic human rights issues. And, astonishingly given current headlines, the “economy” fails to touch on any of the problems raised by the financial crises in the US and Europe and the obstinate problem of how to make the transition to a clean, green energy, and low carbon economy.
As for “governance”, this does not deal with the crucial problem of planning cities, nor with some national, regional governance issues, such as the inability to help a half-dozen or more failed states, and the slowness to address the reduction of risks from weapons of mass destruction and nuclear proliferation. And then our “energy” fails to take fully into account the continuing increases in greenhouse gas emissions, increases in energy usage and need for more and more clean renewable energy.
Perhaps even more glaring is the absence of attention to whole areas of human and planetary phenomena. The oceans that cover three-quarters of the planet are facing the big risk of ocean acidification. Water availability is an issue is spread across all facets of Life.
Cities are predicted to contain 2 billion more people by 2050, yet do not feature in a correspondingly significant role in any of our projections. Issues such as adaptation to climate change, disaster relief and displaced people through migration do not feature at all. Climate refugees are all over the place… but nobody actually sees them.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s limit of 450 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 in setting the estimates for our “energy” future. This has been seriously criticised by climate scientist James Hansen, by the Environmental Parliament and many others, who argue that only a more severe limit of 350 parts per million can keep planetary climate and global warming within tolerable limits.
The organic farming research community has attacked the assumption that there will be a modest use of advanced genetically modified crops. And whether we can achieve the difficult goal of doubling timber and fibre output by 2050 also needs closer examination.
Perhaps the biggest assumption from Rio vision that needs debunking is the use of back-casting, which involves defining a desirable future and then asking what milestones need to be in place decade by decade to make it happen. It assumes the political and economic context within which various milestones might be reached, is going to be relatively straightforward. But we know from complex, chaotic systems that discontinuities do occur. So substantially more consideration needs to be given to all of the geopolitical and macroeconomic factors underpinning Rio’s must-have tasks, and the project requires considerable grounding in our constantly evolving reality.
Some of that grounding is probably already in position papers and reports of NGOs, United Nations agencies, not-for-profit climate change organisations, policy arms of governments, left-wing think tanks – even in protest camps in London or New York.
How different would a comprehensive vision and pathways model be with their input? A more inclusive Rio vision could produce a deeper understanding of what business, government and NGOs can do if they work together with the enthusiasm, clarity and focus that comes from a shared vision. It would provide a context for fruitful discussions at different levels of scale: local, regional, national and global.
So how big will the differences be? At present, media polarisation of world views magnifies disagreements that may be more apparent than substantive: in reality I think they won’t be that large. And, most of all, the expanded coverage and updated data will produce a more widely shared common language and a sustainable commitment plan.
But we badly need to know exactly how much agreement the Rio vision has with the governance and with the business vision, because the entrepreneurial sector is certain to be the major implementor of much of that work and, most importantly, the tasks are so gigantic that everyone needs to work together. Comparing best practices and husbanding comparative advantages and special abilities, will make those crucial differences and commonalities crystal.
And it is not difficult to do if we know the biology behind it. Because for more than a few billion years, the only life on this planet consisted of bacterial cells, which, lacking nuclei, are called prokaryotes, or prokaryotic cells. They looked very much alike, and from the human-centered vantage point seemed rather boring. However, bacteria are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement. Indeed, all interesting features of life except perhaps speech. They’re still with us in large diversity and numbers. They still rule Earth.
At some point, a new more complex kind of cell appeared on the scene, the eukaryotic cell, of which plant and animal bodies are composed. These cells contain certain organelles, including nuclei. Eukaryotic cells with an individuated nucleus are the building blocks of all familiar large forms of life. How did that evolution revolution occur? How did the eukaryotic cell appear?
Probably it was an invasion of predators, at the outset. It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another — seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving large numbers of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.
A map of the future?
A future of this species intertwined or interjoined with IP or AI or just other bacterial life forms, or a conscious design?
As Lynn Margulies might have said we are products of our bacterial self…
But I say, we are wholly responsible for our future.
Free will and all that Jazz…
Yours,
Pano
PS:
But the real question is:
Do we have time?
Many more questions follow…
Do we have the requisite time to adapt?
Do we have the time to cooperate and syndicate our solutions?
Different bacteria form consortia that, under ecological pressures, associate and undergo metabolic and genetic change such that their tightly integrated communities result in individuality at a more complex level of organization. The case in point is the origin of nucleated protoctist, animal, fungal, and plant cells from bacteria. And it took a billion years or so.
Do you think we have that kind of time?
Because in my view, climate change does not give us this window of opportunity. We simply don’t have the time to adapt. But we surely have the time to cooperate…
