Wild Globalization

About the Author

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

Gary Bedford is Wild Globalization’s author and primary contributor.

Gary has studied “globalization” since first living abroad (Tromsø, Norway, 1970-1971) and, later, as part of a unique world tour led by the eminent faith traditions scholar, Huston Smith, (International Honors Program, 1976-1977). The group studied and lived in the religious and cultural traditions of Islam (Fes, Morocco; Isfahan, Iran), Judeo-Christianity (Israel), Hinduism (Benares, India), and Buddhism (Benares, India, Kathmandu, Nepal; Candy, Sri Lanka; Hong Kong; Kyoto, Japan). His early curiosity about globalization “peaked” during a 5-week solo-trek studying Nepal’s Hindu and Buddhist backcountry, including the summiting of Kala Patthar, below.

His formal academic work includes B.A. and M.A. degrees in philsophical theology and global religions, with publications in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

Wild Globalization has also emerged from the author’s wealth management and estate planning professional practice, and especially from the many searching conversations with clients as we struggled to guide our wealth through the tumultuous 1980’s, 1990’s, and now into the 21st century.

Gary resides with his wife, Anna, in Boulder County, Colorado.

Summit Kala Patthar, Nepal, 1977 – Chomolungma, “Goddess Mother of Mountains” (Everest) in background.

Wild Globalization 1.0 (250,000-10,000 BCE)

2022-01-02T00:00:00Z

G1.0-Out of Energy, Ice & Waters, Fire…and Darkness

Wild Globalization (“WG”) starts deep and early. Possibly because of the Hubble telescope’s, and now Webb’s eyes, into deep space and time, human’s “skin of our teeth” march from nature’s seed can be now seen as a story of the Universe, a Solar System, our Earth home, and a remarkable “Bios” that nurtures, or destroys, life-forms. Hyper-natural human innovation-evolution emerges from this holistic “natural” circumstance. WG reminds the reader of the shocking breadth and depth of the natural world’s remarkable, actually miraculous, “Bios” because it sets in play the “order” of all life on Earth.

WG expands, actually, critics might claim it explodes, the definition of “civilization.” Fair enough. By adding “wild” to the mix WG may be changing the rules of perception. Human civilization’s far-reaching and impressive advancements (“creative” forces and “orders”) shadowed, even darkened, however by its horrific barbarities (“destructive” forces and “orders”) witnessed in the 20^th century demand, in our view, expanded data-sets, more comprehensive heuristics, and so wider horizons of interpretation. We are here less concerned with the “correct” answers and more focused on a fuller set of questions, particularly questions that spark critical thought and lively conversation between competing viewpoints.

Pause for a moment to consider others’ takes on “civilization”:

Richard Baldwin: “If nine workers…can produce enough food to feed ten people, the 10^th person can focus on “civilization services” (building monuments, creating religions, writing, collecting taxes, etc.) as well as military services…such services tended to be grouped in cities. …the connection between cities and civilization is ancient and inevitable (the word “civilization” stems from the Latin word for city, civitas). (Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence – Information Technology and the New Globalization, 2016, p. 26-27)

Peter Berger: …“ ‘civil society’ consists of two parts, one structural, the other cultural. Structurally, the term refers to the ensemble of institutions that stand in between the private sphere (which probably includes the family), on the one hand, and the macro-institutions of the state and the economy, on the other hand.” (Peter Berger, Religion and Global Civil Society, Religion in Global Civil Society, 2008, p. 12)

David Fischer: “Money, of course, is central to commerce and long ago replaced barter as the principle means of exchange for products and services. We know more about the history of money and the prices of things than any other historical subject. As Brandeis University professor David Fischer has pointed out: “Only one type of source material spans the entire range of written history: the record of prices…In the desert of Egypt, scholars have found papyri that record the cost of living in the time of the Pharaohs.” [David Fischer, David, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, 1996; quoted by Mark Mills, The Cloud Revolution, Encounter, 2021, p. 73)

Henry Ford: “The source of material civilization is developed power. If one has this developed power at hand, then a use for it will easily be found. …The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies thorough power; the machine is only an incident.” (Henry Ford, quoted in Richard Rhodes, Visions of Technology, 1999, p. 87.)

William Goetzmann: “Cultures are structures of interrelated institutions, language, ideas, values, myths, and symbols. They tend to be exclusive, even tribal. Civilizations, on the other hand, are open to new customs and ideas. They are syncretistic, chaotic, and often confusing societal information systems. They continue to grow in the richness, variety and complexity of societal experience.” (William Goetzmann, Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism, 2015, p. xii.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007, 11)

Alvin & Heidi Toffler: “…the obsessive concern with money, goods, and things is a reflection not of capitalism or socialism, but of industrialism….This divorce of production from consumption…affected our psyches and our assumptions about personality. Behavior came to be seen as a set of transactions. Instead of a society based on friendship, kinship, or tribal or feudal allegiance, there arose in the wake of the Second Wave a civilization based on contractual ties, actual or implied. (Toffler, The Third Wave,1980, 55-58)

“…The revolutionary wealth [of the “knowledge economies”]…is an upheaval similar to but even more sweeping than the industrial revolution – when thousands of seemingly unrelated changes came together to form a new economic system, accompanied by nothing less than a new way of life, a new civilization, called “modernity.” (Toffler, Alvin & Heidi, Revolutionary Wealth, 2006, xiii-xiv)

David Wootton: “There have been tool-making ‘humans’ on Earth for around 2 million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared 200,000 years ago, and pottery dates back to around 25,000 years ago. But the most important transformation in human history before the invention of science, the Neolithic Revolution, took place comparatively recently, between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago. It was then that animals were domesticated, agriculture began, and stone tools began to be replaced by metal ones. There have been roughly 600 generations since human beings first ceased to be hunter-gatherers. The first sailing vessel dates back to 7,000 years or so ago, and so does the origin of writing…what we may term historical humankind (humans who have left written records behind them), as opposed to archaeological humankind (humans who have left only artifacts behind them), has existed only for about that length of time, some 300 generations…This is the true length of human history; before that there were two million years of prehistory.” (David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, 2015, 3-4)

“Wild”
“Wild,” on the other or under hand, works a bit differently. From an undersided and underset of momentums. Wild momentums, both “creative” and “destructive” forces, energies, emergences and emergencies of “order.” Seemingly “spontaneous orders” which incessantly clash and compete. “Wild,” then, is not without “order.” Wild charts an actual evolution of order(s) that have gathered force and momentum over the entire reach of Earth’s and now human history.

Proto-humans and Homo sapiens, our version, changed the rules, began to innovate and so accelerate evolution itself. Rather than moving at the pace of genetic mutation and natural selection, humans competed, scratched, even cheated nature by cleverly inventing tools and techniques that define us even today. Knowledge, the basis of today’s global economy, has its deep roots in a native human intelligence earned by trial and error and so either bestowed by or cheated from nature, herself, hundreds of thousands of years ago. We built on it. We stand on the shoulders of giants who eeked “it” out.

WG’s big challenge to the reader asks: “Does this take us to a new promontory where “we,” that is, the diverse peoples and tribes and nations of our global community, might be able to take on the daunting and dire survival challenges of the 21st century, and beyond?” “Can we invent, innovate and dream our way forward using the two consummate tools we carried out of the deep savannahs and dark forests – that is, on the one hand, our keen ability to “think the Cosmos” (“Science”), and, on the other hand, our uniquely human “spiritual” desire (“Faith”) to live and express the consumate “soul” of human life, the lives and memory of our families now passed, our communities, our peoples, indeed, what it means to be a living, even prescient, being on this global home, Earth, but even then what any or all life signifies in the being of the Universe, itself, or beyond?
Let us see.

STREAM OF LIFE – ENERGY “ORDERS”

“Starting from nothing 4 billion years ago, life somehow contrived to capture high-grade energy from here and there and used it to assemble more life — so successfully, in fact, that life, a very complex form of order, now covers the planet. A second chain reaction of rising order got started with the dawn of agriculture, about eight thousand years ago. Human societies began selectively planting and breeding crops to capture solar energy systematically, and they used the expanding supplies of energy mainly to breed more people, who planted more crops. Humanity’s total energy consumption doubled about every five to ten centuries thereafter, in step with the (slowly) rising population.”ⁱ

Peter Huber & Mark Mills

In The Bottomless Well (2005) Peter Huber and Mark Mills tell the incredible story of “energy order” as it shapes and powers life on earth. Remarkably, we live today at the “top” of a billions-year-old energy pyramid.
Current cosmological theory holds that roughly 14 billion years ago the present observable universe is thought to have “come into existence” in a singular “Big Bang” event, an unimaginably violent “explosion” which “ejected” all the matter (visible as well as “dark” matter), and marked the “…beginning of space, time, matter, energy…the Universe.” [Source: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/big+bang] The “everything” is in quotes here because, just like looking forward 14 billion years into the future, looking backward is also a stretch – it’s a wild imagining but with more possible facts-data-theory to rely on. That noted, cosmologists even today have no idea what “dark” matter “is” though it may comprise as much as 85-90% of the “stuff” of the universe!

Here’s the time-line of Earth’s 4.5B year history – note how “Hominins” @2 million years includes our Homo sapiens’ 250,000 years – is just the thin, very, line at the end of the loop:

Source: WoudloperDerivative work: Hardwigg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; WoudloperDerivative work: Hardwigg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Something extremely subtle was taking place along this multi-billion/million-year trek – that is, the “extraction” and accumulation, and ordering, by hit and miss, of energy. The “stream of life,” in its most essential growth (or “scaling” – as we will begin to read it) is about “energy pyramids.” Homo sapien, in our hunting and meat-consuming ways, climbed the energy food-supply-chain to both dominate food resources but of course, at the same time, precariously, and as we are today, to become entirely dependent upon the lower rungs of the chain itself – we ate meat because it was the most energy-intensive food needed for our energy-devouring brains, but that meat had run up a vital pyramid to get to our hearths and tables. Energy is more about “orders” than quantity, it’s about “energy pyramids”:

Energy “pyramids”: Over the Earth’s 4-5 billion years the process of energy ordering gives rise to the gradual capture of exponentially greater energy concentrations (e.g., solar to carbohydrate to carbon, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium). Contrary to the possible “entropy” (A Greek term meaning “in-turning,” and which names the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, defined by Huber and Mills as the “winding down,” the “gradual decline toward disorder”) of the larger Universe, Earth’s processes appear to reflect increasing energy “orders.” Example: As Huber & MIlls point out, high-energy modern surgical lasers are powered by the energy supply chain – so, for example, @6,600 Kilowatt Hours (kWh) of base thermal energy powers the fine and focused beam of the surgical laser; but only roughly half of the total energy needed reaches the final “highly ordered” kWh’s of concentrated laser energy, while the remaining energy is lost in generation and transmission (energy waste). So increasing energy order, energy spent to concentrate energy, to focus the energy stream. The same principle holds when we drive our kids to baseball practice – the energy to build the vehicle has already been inputted to build the car, and the final “motive” power (e.g., gasoline or natural-gas or electric) is only the last energy input.

Earth’s energy supply-chain: First, solar energy is absorbed by vegetation >>> Herbivores transform @10% of solar energy into carbohydrate energy, expelling the remainder; >>> Carnivores consume herbivores and absorb an exponentially larger energy fraction >>> Human evolution exploits higher food-chain nutrition (meat) to support larger brain-size and intelligence >>> Also, vast amounts of energy gets naturally stored or “sequestered” in the deep fabric of the Earth itself (e.g., hydrocarbons such as petroleum and natural gas) >>> Human evolution exploits these fuels (first wood but then, e.g., coal-oil-natgas-uranium, as well as immediate solar/wind sources). Human innovative intelligence persistently innovates expansive energy resources – for example, WG will track the recent “Second shale revolution” where, from the 1990s to the present, the U.S. electric grid increases its conversion from coal-fired to natural gas-fired power and even though the U.S. economy doubles (gross domestic product or “GDP”) in that same period, CO2 emissions drop to 1990s levels. [Source: Daniel Yergin, The New Map – energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, New York: Penguin Press, 2020, p. 8-13]

A pyramid of energy represents how much energy, initially from the sun, is retained or stored in the form of new biomass at each trophic level in an ecosystem. Typically, about 10% of the energy is transferred from one trophic level to the next, thus preventing a large number of trophic levels. Energy pyramids are necessarily upright in healthy ecosystems, that is, there must always be more energy available at a given level of the pyramid to support the energy and biomass requirement of the next trophic level.
By Swiggity.Swag.YOLO.Bro – Extracted from this Commons file, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85276916

Cairn Note:

Today 700-800 million people (out of @7.4 billion) do not yet have accesses to electricity; consequently, energy demand will continue to dramatically transform the global economy and its geo-political alliances and inter-dependencies; the new automating and energy-intensive (e.g., robotics, the “Cloud,” digitization) 21^st century production economy will require substantially greater electricity (energy) supplies, than ever. [As you read or peruse WG your iPhone, Android, or iPad, you are “in” the “Cloud” which now uses energy equal to two Japan’s.]

In each successive level of the food-chain, “Life itself has evolved as an energetic pyramid…‘the animals at the base of a food-chain are relatively abundant, while those at the end are relatively few in numbers, and there is a progressive decrease in between the two extremes.’ ” [Huber & Mills, Bottomless Well, p. 50-51; quoting Charles Elton’s concept of the “grand pattern of life.”] The cleverest hunters end up at the top of things, and that energy food-chain delivers, eventually and exactly what (?) – the evolution of human encephalization – i.e., intelligence. On a purely energetic level, highly advanced human intelligence, which demands exponentially greater metabolic energies, is the product of energy supply chains which originate from sunlight and then scale up the energetic pyramid of life.

In its most essential reach, human globalizing evolution is an energy-flow: “Over the broad arch of human history, from the nomadic hunter-gatherer to Rome to modern America, the rise of population, life expectancy, great cities, military might, and scientific knowledge has been propelled by rising energy consumption. It is by mastering power itself — the capture and release of energy—that societies master everything else.” [Source: Huber & Mills, Ibid, xxix-xxx]

But energy is more than the metabolic food-chain. It’s also about “motive” (as in Baldwin’s “moving things, ideas, and people”) but actually it’s about moving and incessantly tapping into more energy, itself – energy chasing and “ordering” energy. Globalizing civilization doesn’t live under the “constraint” of energy. Rather, it lives and thrives as energy achieves higher orders. Even as the 21st century’s toys and devices are innovated to be more efficient, we actually need and use more energy as more of us get our hands on an iPhone or iPad or EV. We live in an “energy order.” [Source: Huber, Peter W., and Mills, Mark P., The Bottomless Well – The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, New York: Basic Books, 2005, p. xxix-xxx, 50; Huber & Mills are quoting work by Charles Elton, Animal Ecology, 1st ed., 1927, Sidgwick and Jackson, London.]

Along the way, energy order innovation creates greater efficiency – we constantly do more with less. As market demand increases, innovation and competition bring us cheaper and more efficient iPhones and IPads, cars and trucks, homes and buildings, aircraft, spacecraft (e.g., NASA’s Shuttle cost more than $1B per launch over its program life; SpaceX may be less than $100M/launch.) [Source: Vidya Sagar Reddy, New Space June 2018, 125-134, http://doi.org/10.1089/space.2017.0032]. But as Huber and Mills emphasize, efficiency and lower costs actually trigger greater (much) energy demand, not less: “Today’s aircraft, for example, are three times as energy efficient as the first commercial passenger jets in the 1950s. That didn’t reduce fuel use but propelled air traffic to soar and, with it, a four-fold rise in jet fuel burned. Similarly, it was the astounding gains in computing’s energy efficiency that drove the meteoric rise in data traffic on the internet – which resulted in far more energy used by computing. Global computing and communication now consumes the energy equivalent of 3 billion barrels of oil per year, more energy than global aviation.” [Source: “The ‘New Energy Economy’: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,” Manhattan Institute, March 2019, Manhattan Institute, 3-2019, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf; Alice Larkin et al., “Air Transport, Climate Change and Tourism,” Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development 6, no. 1 (April 2009): 7–20; 89 International Council on Clean Transportation, “Fuel Efficiency Trends for New Commercial Jet Aircraft: 1960 to 2014,” August 2015; Mark P. Mills, “Energy and the Information Infrastructure Part 1: Bitcoins & Behemoth Datacenters,” Real Clear Energy, Sept. 19, 2018; Mark P. Mills, “Energy and the Information Infrastructure Part 3: The Digital ‘Engines of Innovation’ & Jevons’ Delicious Paradox,” Real Clear Energy, Dec. 11, 2018.]

Cairn Note

Human civilization lives in the time and space and flow of energy. Even the Big Bang’s trace energy, its background “noise,” is still detectable. We can hear it. Its voice remains immersed in a kind of cosmic vibration still detectable today. How does science “know” this? The answer is brilliant scientific theory by physicists Ralph Alpher, George Gamow, and Hans Bethe, and then, not so theoretically, bird poop. You see, the actual empirical evidence of the Big Bang was discovered accidentally in 1965 by two Bell Labs astronomists (Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson) who were getting a background “hiss-like” static on their radar instruments which they first thought was caused by bird droppings, but when they cleaned the poop the hiss persisted: “It took a while for them to figure out that what they were hearing was the trace vibrations of the birth of the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation (“CMB”).” [Source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, 2007, p. 167-168.] The physicists’ map suddenly became real, wildly real. We live today in the subtle vibrating “tone” of the original universal Big Bang. Cosmic “bird poop on radars” might be a stunning example of “cairn” trekking – Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for working out a practical research problem.

Out of the ice & WATERS – Global climate:

“These three fundamental frequencies of climatic oscillation are termed Milankovitch frequencies…after Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch…who [calculated] the first handmade graphs of Earth’s recent climatic history…”

“Milankovitch’s insight, following that of the self-taught British geologist and physicist John Croll…was to appreciate that the distribution of radiant solar energy received across planet Earth changes through time in correspondence with fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit. These orbital variations are caused by gravitational interaction with the other planets of the Solar System, and affect both the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the shape of its orbit around the sun… the path of the orbit varies from more or less elliptical on a 100,000 year scale; the tilt of the Earth’s axis varies slightly, between 22.1˚ and 24.5˚ on a 41,000 cycle; and, third, the Earth’s tilted axis also precesses (‘wobbles’) on a roughly 20,000 year cycle.”

“The changing geometries exert a marked effect on Earth’s seasonality, which in turn controls the accumulation of snow and ice at the high latitudes at which the great northern hemisphere ice sheets accumulated over the last few million years.”

“Since about 0.6 million years ago…each major glacial-interglacial oscillation has occurred on the longer, 100,000-year periodicity.”

“For more than 90% of this time the Earth’s mean temperature was cooler, and often much cooler (up to ~6˚C), than today.”

“Warm interglacial periods comprised less than 10% of the time, and on average last only 10,000 years.”

“Civilization and our modern society developed during the most recent warm interglacial period (the Holocene), which has lasted 10,000 years. In many places, temperatures…were up to 1-2˚C warmer than today.”
Robert M Carter

Water. We came from the waters. Water covers seventy per cent of this blue planet Earth and is essential to the global Bios. Fifty-sixty percent of the human body is comprised of water and with a salinity (salt content) thought to reflect the salinity of the oceans when life first emerged from it. An Austrian bricklayer survived locked in a jail cell for 18 days (the Guinness Record) but the average survival rate without replenishment is just 3 days.

Here on America’s High Plains and at the foot of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains what water is doing, or not, defines our weather, crops, most everything – we get @18 inches of rain and another 70 or so of snow. Yet our westerly “Chinook” or “snoweater” winds move a lot of it out into the Great Plains and so our civilization depends on annual snowmelts caught, or not, in mountain reservoirs.

Water, as ice, gas or liquid, moves. At the margins, as gas it moves subtly, serreptitiously in the climate’s atmospheric winds, or catastrophically in the fury of thunder storms and tornadoes on land or as hurricanes and typhoons in the great oceans.

Water also moves without the push of weather and climate. The Earth Bios is home to tsunami waves that are triggered by geologic events such as earthquakes, volcanic activity, and landslides collapsing into fjords and oceans. Climax “mega”-tsuanmis move with almost divine force and scale – as they rush across open oceans their momentums submerge, but reaching landfall megatsuanmis can grow to hundreds of feet high moving at hundreds of miles per hour. Ocean waters adjacent to volcanoes are particularly vulnerable to megatsunamis – the Hawaiin Islands fragile slopes imperil Pacific coastlines, and the Atlantic’s Canary Islands’ Cumbre Vieja volcano threatens Africa and all of the America’s eastern seaboards.

Our Blue Planet is blue because of water. How life, including and especially human life, lives beside and with the Earth’s waters portends much of the planet’s, and our global civilization’s, future survival. We’ve always lived in and around oceans – yet today 3 billion of us live precariously within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of coastal seaboards and so vulnerable to the waters’ hurricanes, typhoons, and tsunamis.

Globalization has moved over and on (and now under) Earth’s waters for 100,000 years. Current “Out of Africa” theories (see below) postulate that humans spread out from that continent, beginning around 75-100,000 BP (“Before the Present”), reaching the Americas by 14,000 BP. In just 3-4,000 generations Homo sapien had occupied and begun to dominate the Earth’s spaces. We’ve been “globalizaing” for 100,000 years. And under – today, 85% of all global commerce moves on the seas, 90% of global data flows through undersea communcation cables, and vast amounts of energy (oil and natural gas) are extracted from the global economy’s ocean-borne rigs.* [Source: Bruce Jones, To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers, New York: Scribner, 2021, Kindle Edition, p. 48-50.)

Map of early human migations based onthe Out of Africa theory; figures are in thousands of years ago (kya). Source pubs.usgs.gov; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas#/media/File:Early_migrations_mercator.svg

The oceans’ waters also move on universal momentums as the Moon’s local gravity pulls tides “in” and “out.” Subtle, even “magical,” because just like “dark matter” (see further forward) science has yet to understand gravity’s force. These solar system momentums were theorized in the 19th century by, among others, a self-taught Scottish scientist named John Croll while he worked as a janitor at Glasgow’s Andersonian University museum. A true self-taught, “cairn-trekker” thinker! The concepts in Croll’s 1875 Climate and Time were finally applied to mathematical and physical calculations in the early 20th century by the Serbian astronomer and climatologist Miluntin Milanković. What can the Milankovitch Cycles tell us?

Milankovitch Cycles Tracking Croll and Milanković, 20th and 21st century climatologists are (just) beginning to understand (and debate) how the variations in the Earth’s flight through the Solar System trigger, and may even dominate, long-term climate.

Human Evolution and Climate: @2-3 million years of the genus homo and @200-250,000 years of our Homo sapien’s run occurred in the throes of global glaciation events which paleo-climatologists project will likely persist into the future. Curiously, and unlike the eminent paleo-climatologist, Robert Carter, quoted above, few observers appear to appreciate that human “civilization” (@10-15,000 years BCE to present) has emerged (just barely) during the most recent “climate optimum,” or the “normal” 10-15,000 year pauses in Milankovitch cycled glaciations. For example, as recently as 20,000 years ago the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of North America to depths up to 2 miles (3.2 km), rendering most of Canada uninhabitable for thousands of years. Human numbers are estimated to have declined to as few as 30,000 souls during climate and global-winter extremes. Imagine our world today under a 100,000 year glaciation period. Climate was a much rougher deal for these early folks – they shivered whle we bask in an “optimum.”

Three sets of disciplines, each with many sub-disciplines, study climate science:

Paleoclimatology includes many diverse earth sciences in the study of the deep history of climate. These sciences use a variety of “proxy” or indirect, and sub-discipline methods (for example, growth patterns of tree rings, istotope measuresments from deep ice cores, ancient pollen, coral, micro-fossil and other organic and inorganic geologic data) to estimate the past conditions of the Earth’s climates and atmosphere. For example, atmospheric data stretches many hundreds of years (ice cores at depths of 770 meters) to many thousands (ice cores at 2500 meters) to hundreds of thousands (ice cores at 3000 meters) deep. These sciences have emerged primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries as a result of new, advanced research technologies and methods.
Meteorology includes a diverse set of atmospheric sciences primarily concerned with weather forecasting. Meterology has ancient roots, particularly in marine weather forecasting. It has advanced in the last 100 years with the development of sub-disciplines including atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, and computer (“numerical”) weather modelling (e.g., hurricane forecasting).

IT (Information Technology) or “Numerical” Weather Modeling includes short-term hurricane prediction and has also been deployed to project weather many decades into the future. It is still an emerging science and its models have been vulnerable to inaccurate longer-term predictions. Even with super-computer modelling, for example, numerical forecasting has been unable to accurately model or reconstruct past weather events using known data.

The above summary over-simplifies the complexity of the many diverse fields of climatology. Actually, climatology flourishes under literally scores of sub-disciplines and sciences. From WG’s “layman” view it’s essential to note that the constant emergence of new data, new technologies, even entirely new sub-sciences just in the recent past 50 years reveals a set of disciplines in exciting and dynamic, and often early development. That’s just to say that this is cutting edge stuff and that scientists are in many if not most cases struggling to decipher, interpret and inter-relate the steams of new data. Naturally, there is disagreement and even sharply differing conclusions even within sub-disciplines and before (if ever) all of the multiple disciplines might even try to sit down in the same room and haggle, arm-wrestle, or “beer” their differences.

“Modern,” very-high-tech climatology has emerged in just the past 50-100 years, and really just the last 1-2 generations of scientists. It’s not unrealistic to observe that they have learned a lot, more than ever, yet perhaps “enough” to realize that they’ve just scratched the surface, that what they do know is just a sketch of what they don’t know and have yet to learn. Robert Carter, quoted above, and a recognized Australian climatologist, states it this way: “My reference files categorize climate change into more than one hundred subdiscipline areas of relevant knowledge. Like most other climate scientists, I possess deep expertise in at most two or three of these subdisciplines.” [Source: Carter, Climate: The Counter-Consensus, 2010, p. 27.) Essex and McKitrick, addressing the “heated” political topic of global warming, observe: “Global warming is a topic that sprawls in a thousand directions. There is no such thing as an ‘expert‘ on global warming, because no one can master all the relevant subjects. On the subject of climate change everyone is an amateur on many if not most of the relevant topics.” [Source: Essex, C., & McKitrick, R., 2002 Taken by Storm. – The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, Key Porter Books, Toronto, p. 12.)

Wild Globalization asks why there there appears to be such an apparent lack of cummunication, even at times positive regard, between the multiple climate disciplines? Why have these sciences apparently become subject to, even apparently dominated by, the public policy (political) arenas? Is there a viable consensus, and is science even about consensus – is that how it works?

Opposing data-sets and divided (sharply) “opinions” rule the 21st century day. Over the last 50 years here in Colorado there’s no doubt that winters are shorter, spring snowmelts come sooner, our ski areas are worried and now depend on human snowmaking. Global temps are up roughly 1˚Celsius (1.8˚ Fahrenheit) the Industrial Revolution got legs:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20200324_Global_average_temperature_-_NASA-GISS_HadCrut_NOAA_Japan_BerkeleyE.svg; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/20200324_Global_average_temperature_-_NASA-GISS_HadCrut_NOAA_Japan_BerkeleyE.svg

It’s also warmer in the Arctic – its summer sea-ice is diminished, and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Center for Biological Diversity warn us that the polar bears will starve and soon drown, as soon as 2050. But hold on! – Susan Crockford, a recognized polar bear expert, thinks there are more bears now than ever in the past 50 years they’ve been tracking the 13 sub-populations, and studies indicate that the bears in the warmest Chukchi Sea population with the most ice loss are now a lot bigger and heavier (females by 70 lbs/30 kg and the males by 100 lbs/50 kg) than their cohorts in other groups. (Source: Crockford SJ (2015) Polar bear population estimates, 1960 – 2017. wp.me/p2CaNngP2.] OK, should we worry about putting the Chukchi folks on a diet? What?

As recent as 2005, the United Nations’ Environment Program warned that by 2010 rising sea levels would force as many as 50 million “climate refugees” from their coastal homes. [Source: N. Myers, ‘Environmental refugees, an emergent security issue’, 13. Economic forum, Prague, OSCE, May 2005, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005.] OK, but it not only didn’t happen, the islands most at risk (Bahamas & St. Lucia in the Caribbean, Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, and the Solomons in the Western Pacific) actually saw their populations increase, the Seychelles by 100,000. What’s going on? [Source: Atkins, G. (2011) “What happened to the climate refugees?” https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/04/what-happened-to-the-climate-refugees/#BaTVoqe4ZRMjLr7K.97.] The UN removed the 2005 report from their website, but then added a new prediction for 2020 – again, 50 million refugees, etc. It’s 2022, I think, and there’s a lot of news about folks moving to cities (1-1.5 million every week) and WG tracks that, but 50 million moving away from the coasts, not so much.

So when the data-set is moved back from the 1850s, as above, say from the 17th century Maunder Minimum (Little Ice Age’s blue dip, see #10, below), or even further back, say to the beginning of the present climate “optimum” and the beginning of “civilization,” or @10,000 years, we get a different, very, perspective:

Source: Alley RB (2004) GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2004-013. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA. ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/iso-topes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt; See
Wrightstone, Gregory, Inconvenient Facts – The Science that Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know, Silver Crown Productions LLC, 2017

They probably had great skiing during the Maunder! Why? Well, it seems that the Sun took a long break and sunspot activity virtually disappeared, from fewer than 50 observations in the 1672-1699 period when “normally” as many as 40,000-50,000 would have been expected. [Source: John E. Beckman & Terence J. Mahoney (1998). The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change: Have Historical Records Aided Current Research?. Library and Information Services in Astronomy III. ASP Conference Series. Vol. 153. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife: Astronomical Society of the Pacific.]

WG doesn’t affirm or deny global warming, cooling, or degrees between. [OK, actually, point of confession, this author, an avid alpine skier, favors a bit more cooling and deep powder days, thank you!] Rather, we’re raising the question: Why aren’t scientists sitting down and arm wrestling it out, or better, in the 13,000 year tradition of fermented spirits, namely beer, why not just chill out (no pun intended) and put all the facts and data on the table alongside a good craft brew? A quick WG response would be that it appears to be not just about science any longer – it’s about wild governance which, and this is our curiosity, has insinuated itself into the equation? Our tentative conclusion is this: weather and climate are wild, that is, they are constantly emerging spontaneous orders and we are along for the ride – surely we can’t affect the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, or the planets’ random gravatational leverages on Earth, we can’t know (yet, if ever) future sunspot activity – it all defies prediction because even the equation can’t predict data, affects, or the unknowable pulls and pushes of the Solar System or Universe in the future. Tracking our billiard ball analogy, it’s wild!

Out of Fire – Global Volcanism:

“…we live on a planet that is very hot and dynamic in its interior…and [that] constantly feeds material to the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere that was generated by degassing of the Earth in the first place.

…A volcano is merely representing…one of several arrested stages in the flux of matter and energy from the Earth’s interior to its surface…

…Volcanic eruptions were responsible for the creation of the first crust on our planet about 4.6 billion years ago. This volcanic crust was subsequently modified by erosion, covered by sediments, folded and buckled by mountain-building, and transformed through metamorphism. The fact that processes such as crust formation occur on a grand scale day by day is a relatively new development in geology, springing from the second major controversy in the history of Earth science.

… To understand the origin of large composite volcanic massifs…volcanoes had to be viewed in their overall global tectonic framework.”^v Hans-Ulrich Schminke

Summers with the Volcanoes: Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

In the 1970s, with the U.S. economy in “stagflated” recessions, energy crises, post-Viet Nam War disruption, and while trying to work summer jobs to pay for college, my high school footbal coach was able to get me into wildland firefighting which led, after a “boot-camp” summer as a CalFire frontline “pogue,” to a helitack job in Alaska and then to a backcountry horse-ranger job in Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. (Rather than “Lassen,” named for a 19th century European pioneer, let us defer to the native people’s more spiritually grounded names such as the Mountain Maidu’s Amblu Kai meaning “Mountain Ripped Apart” or “Fire Mountain”; or the Yahi, whom we’ll study in G2.0, who called it Waganupa, meaning “Center of the World”.)

Anyway, hanging out on our horses in the Park’s majestic 100,000 acre backcountry, in particular the “Painted Dunes,” “Cinder Cone,” and the “Fantastic Lava Beds,” my ranger buds and I were able to observe and live in the midst of the geological features left from the verocious power and raw explosive beautry of volcanoes. I climbed Cinder Cone and Waganupa Peak many times, even working a high-altitude, nighttime mountain rescue. In the winter we skied the vast 1,000 foot north face on “skinny” skis and taught Nordic skiing and snow-camping.

Waganupa is a lava dome volcano that last erupted in the 1914-1917 period. The area was designated a National Monument in 1907 by Theodore Roosevelt and then a National Park in 1916. The volcano arose on the northeastern slope of a much larger, Pleistocene era “stratovolcano,” Mount Tehama (possibly derived from the Wintun word for “high water” but also “salmon.”) Tehama was active @600,000-400,000 years ago; the larger area’s volcanic “complex” has been active for 3 million years. As depicted in the sketch of its height and breadth in the photo below, Tehama (its remaining western face is named “Brokeoff Mountain”; its eastern slope Mount Conrad) was a monster compared to its remnants. Tehama’s largest event is thought to have occured when it first exploded and then collapsed into itself, an event estimated to have released as much as 50 times the energy of the 1980 Mt. Saint Helens event, the largest eruption in recorded U.S. history.

By Keller, Lynn, K. – Lassen Volcanic National Park: geologic resources inventory report. Natural resources report NPS/NRSS/GRD/NRR – 2014/755, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58963259

Why would WG bring up Waganupa? Well, first, this writer grew up and played on its iconic slopes and features and came to respect, even hold in awe, the raw and wildly sculpted remnants of its great natural forces. And, to skip forward, Waganupa will be the stage, indeed, the “Center of the World,” for G2.0’s re-telling of the life of the local Yahi people who called Waganupa home, and in particular the 20th century story of Ishi, their last surviving member and probably the final North American interloper between the Stone Age and modernity, so G1.0 to G3.0.

As well, from the global perspective we are bushwhacking volcanoes because, from the Earth’s lifeworld “view,” we 21st centurions are mere guests in their midst – global civilization itself lives on, actually, we “float” around on, the Earth’s vast sub-surfaces, Her tectonic “plates.” All nearly 8 billon of us, many living fragile high-tech lives, are more vulnereable than ever to the unrestrained power and devastation of volcanoes. Ask the Vesuvians, or the two billions living on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” so the Fukushimans, or Seattleites living under the looming presence of another Tehama-like stratovolcano, Mount Rainier (called “Tahoma” in native parlance, for “Mother of Waters.”). Rainier sits only 60 miles from the burgeoning Seattle-Tacoma metro area, home to 4 million Americans today – and ominously, Rainier is on the “Decade Volcanoes” list that tracks active, high-risk volcanoes lying near dense population centers. If you live in Rainer’s majestic presence, you know, or should, that it could well be the next Tehama in waiting.

Volcanism lurks beneath and within the surfaces of our deep and wild natural world. Indeed, to engage the Yahi’s prescient vision, volcanoes immanate from the “Center of the World.” We live the Earth’s beautiful surfaces, even thinking we “own” its real estate. But jump in your car and drive downtown, say 10-12 miles at 35 mph – you’re there in 20 minutes, and you’ve just covered the average depth of the Earth’s crust. That’s how close we live to the Earth’s immeasurable power and verocious real.

Tracking volcanism, here are key trekker concepts scientists use:

Supervolcanoes: Super’s dot Earth’s surface in the 21^st century: America’s Yellowstone Caldera, roughly 1200 square miles (3150 square kilometers…!) is the Earth’s largest.^vi And it is active, very, and in geologic time, recent, very. There are 6 known Super’s on Earth today, and three are in the Western U.S. (Yellowstone, east-central California’s Long Valley, and northern New Mexico’s Valles).* [*Source: https://www.ranker.com/list/the-world_s-6-known-supervolcanoes/analise.dubner] For example, here’s a map that shows how volcanologists have mapped out Yellowstone, below:

(1) This 2013 publication by w:United States w:National Park Service at web posting replaces previous w:USGS map, File:Yellowstone Caldera map2.jpg. The older diagram, File:Yellowstone Caldera map2.jpg, is posted on-line as “fig_03_yellowstone_map.jgp,” dated 14 March 14 2005. Very similar map, but nevertheless some minor changes were made over the elapsed 8 years. Specifically, the northernmost “uncertain boundary” for the 1st caldera has been replaced. (2) Note that West Thumb Caldera (44°25′40″N 110°31′57″W) is not to be confused with West Thumb Geyser Basin (44°25′07″N 110°34′23″W). Per the US NPS, West Thumb Lake is itself a smaller caldera. See Figure 22 at US NPS web site. West Thumb Caldera forms West Thumb Lake, and West Thumb Geyser Basin lies on the western shore of West Thumb Lake. Source: w:US NPS. See also: w:Yellowstone Lake#Pre-park era exploration w:Yellowstone Lake#Geology,

Plate tectonics: These are processes and properties that dominate the Earth’s crust and provide a methodology for understanding the forces and causes of earthquakes and volcanic “belts” that are active along the plates’ collision borders (e.g., the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” of the Earth’s tectonic plates.)^vii

Supervolcanic eruptions appear to date to 466 million years BP (Before the Present), minimally, since evidence disappears as it is absorbed in the natural processes of tectonic activity.^viii

Super-eruptions may trigger catastrophic “global volcanic winters”: volcanic ash and sulfuric acid ejected into Earth’s stratosphere may reduce global temperatures causing vegetation and agriculture failure leading to famines, e.g., Iceland’s 1159 BCE Hekla 3 eruption may have contributed to late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean.^ix

Volcanic Explosivity Index (“VEI”) Volcanologists have evidence of @40 VEI-8 magnitude eruptions within the last 132 million years, and 10 VEI-7 eruptions in the last 11,700 years (period of human civilization).

Volcanic Explosivity Index (“VEI”)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VEIfigure_en.svg

OBSERVATIONS:

Plate tectonics provides the “geo-context” for the increasingly complex, technology- and supply-chain driven, and more vulnerable(!), “global economy.”

The Earth’s ecosystem, and the 21^st century’s 8 billion human inhabitants, “floats” atop the Earth’s tectonic plates. Global civilization has yet to take seriously the presence of volcanoes in our midst and how we might survive their next great disruption of Earth’s eco-life forms.

At this juncture it appears difficult for science to “predict” anything more than very near-term volcanic activity – Yellowstone’s next event is “thought” to be hundreds or possibly thousands of years “out.”

Out of DARKNESS

Energy, ice and fire are what we “see” in the visible light spectrum. Actually, though, darkness is the Universe’s most pervasive aesthetic reality. Light, it appears, is the exception.

Apollo Photo: Earth from the Moon; iStock 1313489780

The Apollo missions captured some of the first images of the Earth from the Moon. What do we see? Most will notice the “Blue Earth” suspended in “space.” Just as amazing is the “background” – the vast, incommensurable reach of the universe in which the Earth lives. Darkness.

The brilliant American astronomer, Vera Rubin (1928-2016), was instrumental in convincing scientists “…that at least 90% of the total spiral mass, and hence the total mass of the Universe, is dominated by nonluminous (“dark”) matter. It took 50 years for the discoveries of Zwicky (1933) and Smith (1936) – that clusters of galazies contained unseen matter – to make it to mainstream astronomy.”9

Wild, universal darkness is, it seems, a “dark fullness.” A residual. WG will think a lot about residuals.

“Natural” to “Hyper-Natural” (Homo sapien sapien) EVOLUTION

“For most of our own evolutionary history our lineage was no different from any other. Our ancestors were among those…that survived and reproduced. Over billions of generations, [their] genomes accumulated mutations and our lineage adapted. Climates changed, habitats shifted, niches emerged and disappeared. Our lineage became animals, then mammals, then primates, then apes…then our ancestors figured out how to break the rules. They learned to work together to overrule chance, to help others rather than allow those less fit among them to die. They learned to fashion their surroundings rather than be changed by them. They learned to direct evolution—to determine both their own evolutionary trajectories and those of the species with which they interacted rather than be subject to its whims. And while paleoanthropologists still don’t fully understand where or when or how this happened, this is how we became different, unquestionably, from every other species that lives or has ever lived on Earth. This is what it means to be human.”^xi
Beth Shapiro

Primate evolution is thought to trace back 57-85 million BP (“Before the Present”). Hominid primates appear in the African fossil record around 4-7 million BP including our genus Homo genus perhaps 2-3 million BP.

Our very early human ancestors started to do at least four things differently: First, @3-6 million BP, they started to favor and eventually tranform their gait to “bipedalism” or walking on two legs – this probably allowed better vision over the high savannah grasses and improved hunting success as they began to hunt in teams; Second, @2.5-1.5 million BP, standing upright freed their arms and hands to evolve opposing thumbs and increasingly complex dexterity which facilitated early tool-making; Third, improved hunting, teamwork communication, and toolmaking required more calories (meat) to support larger (much) brains, what physical anthropologists call “encephalization”; Finally, and most impressively, living in small social units, and gathering and hunting in teams, our clever “survivalist” ancestors gradually improved their communication skills including speaking in complex or “symbolic” language – “we” had started to become intelligent, inventive, and so “cultural.” [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution.]

Notice how all four of these factors would have interacted, overlapped, and so likely evolved together. We don’t get smart without bigger brains; we don’t get bigger brains without lots more calories; we don’t get more calories from eating just gathered grains and fruits or crawfish alone – we needed meat, lots; we don’t get more meat, as in larger prey, if we don’t work together and invent clever tools and techniques, without (see above) atlatl-aided power; we don’t make better tools and free our arms to throw spears without standing upright; we can’t do any of this without eventually talking and learning together. Collective learning and memory (teaching the kids how to make a spear or stone knife, or how to approach the herd) come about because we were doing all these things, together. We had to. To survive. Evolution, especially the human version, is a cumulative process that builds over time and generations. Human evolution can now emerge suddenly, sharply, at the knife’s edge, at the now leveraged speed of the atlatl-thrown spear. One gain begets another. All gains work synchronously. Trial, error, defeat, and wins give rise to the next spontaneous order.

Once we figured something out it could be remembered and passed down to rising generations. Innovation and invention (management of our physical world) along with memory and communication of our accumulating skills and prowess (cultural learning) were our new survival secrets. Sophisticated intelligence and language represent the most significant differentiators of the human way, and possibly the wildest, most radical and miraculous evolutionary ploy ever ventured by nature herself.

“**Human”…the “hyper-natural”**:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nativo_do_Novo_Mundo_lan%C3%A7ando_flecha_com_o_propulsor_ou_est%C3%B3lica.jpg

Above is a sketch of an atlatl thrower, a kind of precursor to a modern Jai alai player or, possibly, an American football “quarterback.” Except that here, the spear is aimed at the pig whereas for, say Joe Namath or Joe Montana, the spear is the pig, or rather the “pigskin.”

We introduced the atlatl in our notes about Wild Tech. We noticed, or suggested, that the atlatl is a curious “device” – it transforms and expands the power of the human arm, even if the arm itself has not changed say, biologically. The “arm” remains “natural.” But then we can wonder, “Is it?” OK, alone, the arm is the “same.” But with atlatl, not “quite.” By taking hold of the atlatl, and the spear, the human arm now commands a radically new, a kind synthetic strength, synthetic because it’s a “synthesis” of nature and something entirely unknown at the scene of the kill, that is human artificially crafted innovation. The atlatl thrower is an entirely new evolutionary phenomenon. An innovation-order of evolution.

Wild Tech then asked, “So what’s “natural” or “un-natural” here, and is that even a relevant or interesting question?” And what, if anything, do we gain by making the difference? Or, in the same line of inquiry, is nature herself “different?” Or, rather, has one of its creatures merely come up with a new twist from the fuller set of options that nature herself dreamt up? So, let’s consider: First, aching, biting hunger and many mouths to feed, combined with, next, a survival instinct, then combined with some clever dude wanting to go for the kill from a distance rather than exposing his vulnerable little human fanny to the rage or the fangs or horns of the beast, all of these rippling through the long-won and nature-bestowed human brain, and voilá – we have the atlatl. Artillery!

The “nature” game and the human game have, indeed, changed, and “things” will never be quite the same as long as these scrawny bipeds are running around the planet. They have the atlatl, for heaven’s sake (!), and lots more meat, and now everyone in the neighborhood is running. Away. Quickly. Suddenly, these wily Homo sapiens (Note: the atlatl is thought to have entered the historical record about 30,000 years ago) rule the grassy or the forested roost. For now. Until…the next big-small thing, the next atlatl-like gadget, the next crossbow or atomic bomb, comes along…

Human evolution is “natural” but with a twist, it’s now hyper-natural evolution. It’s now intelligence-innovation driven adaptation and growth (sudden, accelerated, super-biological) versus biology alone (mutation, natural selection). The atlatl hunter and his cohorts set the stage, the new orders of evolution that emerge spontaneously from their trek and trace, are set in play in G1.0. These are the game-changing drivers that will track all of future human history.

The spontaneous wild orders of human evolution emerge in G1.0: Ecology’s natural “given” order finds us gradually co-habitating (loving, caring, protecting, fighting, competing, reproducing) in the forests and savannahs, and give rise to demographic orders; over just a few million years nature gradually hands down increasingly upright, vision-empowered postures, hand’s-free bipedal motion, and consequently ever larger brains, and now we start to build on nature’s own teamwork-aided hunting skills (we’re not unlike other species who work and hunt in teams – witness a wolf or coyote or magpie kill – we just took it to new levels); and so to compete with these other critters, we come up with new stuff they don’t have, that is, very clever and artificial technologies, and we start to use fire instead of run from it; we get better, we learn to not just kill but to over-kill, and so produce economies of excess; but then, wait (!), now we have to figure out how how to manage “that!,” all that stuff, and so we start to think ahead, to turn to the more clever and wizened in our clan, we have to come up with governance.

So we can look back with our really cool and ingenious iPhones, we can send distant photos from our spaceships as we fly to the Moon or Mars or beyond, and we can might think we can condescend and brand these early folk as “primitives.” The fact is, however, that the essence and requisite order of everything we are today begins, it gets hands and feet and legs and most decisively, brains(!), in G1.0. It took time, trial and error, lots. Two steps forward, then 1 back, or two, but it was building, accumulating, nonetheless. If we’re gauging tools, well, maybe it takes 1-3 million years. If we’re talking fire maybe we figure that out a million years ago. (See the timeline, below.)

The spear-point of our short human history points to the fact that this human evolution thing is utterly cumulative – it builds and gets a leg up always from those who trekked and bushwhacked the wild before us. G2.0’s “civilization” is not conceivable, it cannot itself emerge, without all these earliest of peoples eking out and rising above their, and our, contiguous path out of the original wilderness. Viewed wholistically, in spite of all our 21st century marvels and magics, what happened in G1.0, say 1-2 million years to 10,000 years ago, represents the most astonishing transformation in nature’s own history, that is, the transformation from a purely biologic driven nature to now a hyper-natural and innovation-intelligence-logic driven nature.

Cairn Note: We’re not equatng “cumulative” with “progress” here. That’s another social science, or philosophical, even ideological query. Whatever human “progress” may be, it can be seen as maximally creative and, at the same time, wildly destructive – the 20th century leaves us smack in the void of that question: “The 20th century, then, endured imperialism, communism, and nationalism. It saw the Boer War, the Great War, the Armenian genocide, the Russian revolution, the Soviet Gulag and the Holodomor, the Second World War and the Holocaust, the deployment of atomic weapons, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the greatly misnamed Great Leap Forward, the killing fields of Kampuchea, the bloody genocide in Rwanda, the Yugoslav Civil War, and more. After all that slaughter and suffering, humanity still entered the present century living longer and healthier lives and being better fed, better educated, more equal, and more free. Given all that, how should we think about progress?” (Source: Tupy, Marian L.; Pooley, Gale L.. Superabundance, 2022, p. 68, Cato Institute. Kindle Edition.).] At this juncture, we are saying that all the stuff we do and use and take for granted today, our jet engines and silicon devices, all our tools and techs, including our governance strategies, are built on what even Sir Issac Newton recognized as a kind of grand, accruing and collective “pyramid,” a kind of chassis, of innovation and knowledge. We did name ourselves, afterall, Homo sapien, or “wise creatures.”

G1.0 globalization occurs as Homo sapiens are thought to have spread over the Earth’s entire land mass. And as we did we either absorbed trace DNA of other genus Homo players (including Homo antecessor, Homo erectus, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo neanderthalensis) or we eliminated them from the field.

Moving Out – Homo Sapien goes global…from “deep” Africa 200,000 years ago to the present.

Working Questions and Possible Observations:

“Modern” human evolution continues to emerge and manifest its “wild,” “hyper”-nature.

So-called “civilization” functions like a black box – that is, we can imagine and estimate/measure what goes into the equation (Ecology+Demographics+Tech+Economy+Culture) and, likewise, we can observe, measure, debate and haggle over, what emerges from the black box, yet the internal, super-“inter-variability” of the drivers at play remain unpredictable, some would say “stochastic,” that is, akin to predicting the flight of the morning dove or hawk, they resist precise measure or complete knowledge, or even, some would claim, “decidability” because the outcome is always and fully “in play,” changing moment to moment, and so, at the margin, vulnerable to gray (“known unknowns”) and black (“unknown unknowns”) swans.

The human capacity to govern struggles to keep up, to pay attention to and respond to feedback loops, it sits incessantly vulnerable to human frailties (vanity, greed, power ambitions, competition). Modern, hyper-globalizing evolution is further vulnerable to asymmetric growth and competition between nations with lesser or greater (“asymmetrically” competing) states of technical and economic development. Human governance responses are often too slow or late, awkward, often “grid-locked,” and, at the extreme, catastrophic.

Vitally, the “wild” black box equation has now SCALED – in the depths of the previous ice ages, or in the aftermaths of ancient global volcanic winters, the human tribe is thought to have dwindled to just thousands of souls. Yet now, under these same natural threats, along with those new threats manifesting in the current political-cultural economy (nuclear war, fiscal debt, hyper-urbanization), Earth supports 7.5 billion human members – in spite of, or as a result of, our clever technologies, the wild Earth and, more so, our own “wildness,” make our endurance in this obscure corner of the universe more fragile, vulnerable, than ever.

Time-Line of the Universe/Solar/Earth/Bios Homo sapien sapien (“BYA”-billion / “MYA”-million; “TYA”- thousands years ago):

14 billion years BP (“Before the Present”): Present observable universe “came into existence” in a singular “Big Bang” event, i.e., an “explosion” which “ejected” all the matter (visible as well as “dark” matter), and marked the “…beginning of space, time, matter, energy…the Universe.”^xiv

4.55 billion years BP: Formation of planet Earth; 4.5 billion years BP Moon forms.

4 billion years BP: First life on Earth; 3.2 billion years BP Photosynthesis.

2.3 billion years BP: Major increase in atmospheric oxygen; first glaciation.

2.3 billion years BP: Milankovitch Cycle glaciations (Eccentricity-Obliquity-Precession of Earth’s solar orbit).

466 million years BP: Brook Formation largest volcanic event known (2-12K cubic kilometers; 2-12 times larger than the Yellowstone’s eruption 640 thousand years BP).

380 million years BP: First vertebrates.

230-66 million years BP: Dinosaurs.

85 million years BP: Primates.

Chicxulub meteroite event strikes Northern Yucatan Peninsula in modern Mexico; global winter, and likely extinction of the dinosaurs.
2.4 million years BP to Present: Global volcanic winters – Yellowstone, U.S., erupts every 600k years; 100 times greater than the 1980 Mt. Saint Helen’s event.

3-4 million years BP: Genus Homo & finally homo sapien sapien emerges (.00066% of Earth history; @1 min. of a 24 hr. day¹).

Genus Homo and finally, Homo sapien:
- 3.4 million years BP: Australopithecus; unshaped tools;
- 2.5 million years BP: Oldowan tools.
- 2.3 million years BP: Genus Homo species, Kenya.
- 1.8 million yars BP: Archeulean tools; Eurasian Migration.
- 1.1 million years BP: Use of Fire.
- 0.6 million years BPO: Homo heidelbergensis in Europe, Africa.
- 320-300 thoiusand years BP: Homo sapien; “culture” appears in funeral rituals; long-distance trade (Olorgesailie).
- 200 thousand years BP: Genus Homo globalization over planet; Neanderthalensis; Mousterian tools.
- 120-100 thousand years BP: Possible use of symbols; earliest structures.
- 95-20 thousand years BP: Laurentide Ice Sheet covers Canada; Great Lakes carved; Greenland ice shelf a modern Laurentide remnant.
- 75 thousand years BP: Toba Volcano eruption; global population declines to as few as 15-30,000 individuals.
- 70-32 thousand years BP: Cave art (Blombos Cave; Chauvet Caves); Flute music (Europe); Sculpture (Aurignacian).
- 40 thousand years BP: Human settlement (Australia).
- 30-29 thousand years BP: Atlatl (advanced weaponry); cooking ovens.
- 14-12 thousand years BP: Oldest evidence of warfare; domestication of pigs, dogs, sheep.
- 13-10 thousand years BP: Last glacial maximum period; abrupt global warming.
- 9-7 thousand years BP: Neolithic “civilization,” 1^st Agricultural Revolution; (3% of homo sapien history).
- 3 thousand years BP: Writing, written history (Mexico; Egypt).^xv

Human “Hyper-Natural” Culture – Science, Art, Myth, and Faith

As we opined above about the atlal-thrower, G1.0 raises the question: What is “nature” after human gets hold of it? At what point, as many critics of humanity worry and ponder, did we become “un”-natural? When we began to stand upright, altering our originally horizontal spinal architecture? When we first lit the fire or intentionally burned forest brush scathes to clear hunting lanes? When we carved the first spear or arrow? When we symbiotically coerced and then domesticated and exploited the wild canine?

Altamira Cave, Spain; earliest painting date to the Upper Paleolithic ~36,000 years ago; Source: iStock, Jesus De Fuensanta, IStock Photo ID 1171354569, 9-9-2019.

Or rather, did G1.0 humans, with a radically new dexterous grasp and over-charged intelligence – both “gifts” of nature herself – simply extend and embolden nature, and by force of will trigger a new set of (unpredictable) consequences already given in nature’s own DNA? How do we explain how human nature is unnatural? If so, when in the evolutionary record did we become unnatural? Or are we nature’s own consequence – perhaps we could say her “unintended consequence?” Homo survivalist?

The term “survive” derives from the Middle English “surviven,” from Old French “sourvivre,” and from the Latin “super-vīvere” – so “super,” for the Latin “exceeding the norm, above, over,” and “vīivere,” “to live.” Reading the archeology of our own speech, could we say that humans “survived” by “over–coming” the threats and challenges before them? Did human survival simply bring on a new experimental order of evolution itself?

Re-thinking what we mean by “human” and “nature” challenges our sense of how to value human history and circumstance. In one light, “survival” implies “different…differentiated” but here what was different was simply “what worked…what strategy was more effective …that is, whatever strategy, over time, was most practical for the given conditions confronting nature’s creatures.” For hundreds of millions of years the dinosaurs were apparently a practical, surviving vertebrate species. At the same time, smaller mammalian vertebrates were also survivalists. When apparently the Chicxulub meteorite extinction event occurred @66 million years ago, the mammals’ survival strategies started to work better. The dinos, not so much.

We can imagine that humans walked out of the deep woods and savannahs with two deep desires: first, like all living creatures, we had an indominable will to survive. We were driven, even panicked, to “make” it, desperately reminded of the alternative. Will-power meant big-brain-power and a survival-driven need to solve problems, sometimes quickly! Our “extra” (“excess”) intelligence was our lifeboat in the face of terror-driven circumstances – we had to come up with survival strategies at the edges of icepacks or in the heat and fury of sudden and random volcanic eruptions that triggered global winters and the disruption of life-giving food-chains.

Intelligent survival, though, gave rise to perhaps an even more magnificent and unique human evolution, the emergence of a visionary, even serendipitous desire: the desire for beauty and meaning. Again, we can imagine that the magical and majestic human imagination surfaces in beautiful cave-art (c.f., the Altamira cave images, above, which appear 36,000 BCE, long before “civilization”) and as well in the appearance of orally transmitted and remembered mythic stories that account for the human circumstance in the natural world of creation.

Rather than “un”-natural, did humans become hyper-natural as they bushwhacked off-trail, scraping a thin, exposed and highly unlikely survival from the clutches of extinction? Recall that paleo-researchers believe that human numbers may have declined to as few as 10,000 or possibly 300,000 after the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago? Homo survīve was a “cool” cat to endure the ice, a tricky folk to eke out life through a volcanic winter. Somehow human clawed and scratched and overcame – we rose above the given circumstance. We endured.

So, curiously, as they crafted tools it appears they also began, in deep and dark caverns, to etch elegant, abstract images of their intended prey and to perform rituals to prepare for the fight of the hunt. With antelopes and bison scratched on cave walls, they began to ritualize and see their prey as “objects,” the early traces of “object” or “abstract” human thought. Objective, “image-driven” thought slips into human experience surreptitiously, subtly, and we ponder how this represented the early appearance of “rational thought” itself, which eventually leads to “science?”

And there’s also a new twist here, an unexpected consequence of nature. Something else happened along with just clever survival and objective thinking. As humans started to paint caves, to make beautiful objects, their behaviors and the ways they perceived their lives and one another likely began to reflect something entirely new and different – what was emerging over thousands of years and generations was what we roughly call today “culture.”

Along with their cave art and clever weapons, humans began to formally mourn their dead and prepare “after”-life rituals of dedication and remembrance. They began to tell stories. The story of a great hunter who had passed on. Of their hunt and the fight.

Speech and language are at the heart of why the appearance of humans in the natural world is one of the most miraculous achievements in the evolutionary record. Speech as communication was likely a key hunting tool, a tactical innovation – over generations it helped us to hunt and to work together. Yet after the hunt, by the fire, we can wonder how our ancestors would reflect, would turn back on the day, recall and tell stories of the hunt or the fight, but also to tell larger stories and remember their clan’s greatest leaders, its heroic hunters and beloved goddess-mothers – human speech signifies far more than communication, then, it also gives rise to the sound of meaning, humans seeking expressions of their place and time and significance in the world.

Stories of individual hunters and fathers and mothers, leaders of the tribe or clan, but also stories of the tribe itself, of the “people.” “Myths” or stories emerge as early humans scratched and scraped to live with and under the mystery of the origins of these fire and ice energies, of the wind, the hurricane and tornado, of lightening, the earthquake and volcano. These were not just clever folks, these were folks beginning play on the cosmic and spiritual frontiers.

How to imagine what we mean by “myth” and what it tells us about human evolution, and how, if at all, does myth inform the understanding of global culture today?

Mythic stories suggest that the appearance of intelligence is not just about survival – about clever tools and economy. Mythic stories and the rituals and art-forms that accompany them point to the emergence of the human imagination which enlightens, enlivens, and reaches beyond mere survival to celebrate human existence in the natural world. Its epic stories and rituals are practiced long before written “history.”

The word “myth” has a confused history. For many moderns who live under the umbrella of science, myth means “a false or unproven story or belief,” and then also stories about “creation.” Myths attempt to give contexts of order and understanding. Of course, today science can explain the natural world through empirical research and verifiable experiments, and through brilliant theories derived from the principles of theoretical mathematics and physics. For decades we’ve had the Hubble telescope looking “back” toward the “beginning” of the universe, and now the Webb’s gold-plated infra-red seeking berylium mirrors capture light energy from very near the formation of the earliest stars. Biology, and now genome science uncover the secret codes of biological life.

Before modern science, though, myths were the way we imagined and told the story of our lives in the natural world, of its creation, its deep mysteries and wonders but also its terrors and tragedies. In its core signification, “myth” comes from the Greek mȳthos (μῦθος) which simply means “word” or “speech,” the act of speaking. It gains complexity as it moves through history to also mean “story” or “saga, tale.” For the Greek philosopher Plato (and before him, his wonderful inspiration, Socrates) “myth” was considered “false” only if it was also accompanied by the adjective skolios meaning “deceptive.”* [*Source: Maurizio Bettini, ”Mythos/Fabula: Authoritative and Discredited Speech Author(s)”; History of Religions , Vol. 45, No. 3 (February 2006), pp. 195-212 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503713]

So “myth” in its core expression may simply be understood as a “speaking” – as the beginning of the human desire to imagine, to talk about, to memorialize, and to dedicate stories to lost family or clan members, to tell the story of the “people.”* [* “Mythology is the study…of such stories which deal with various aspects of the human condition: good and evil; the meaning of suffering; human origins; the origin of place-names, animals, cultural values, and traditions; the meaning of life and death; the afterlife…Myths tell the stories of ancestors and the origin of humans and the world.” Source: (https://www.worldhistory.org/mythology/.]

Written mythic stories appear in formal history during G2.0 – the Epic of Gilgamesh (~2100 BCE), the Enūma Eliš (~1900-1600 BCE). The first gives an epic accounting of the individual human being’s search for meaning, the second tells the story of the creation of the universe. Myths appear in the deep history of every known culture. Myths tell stories of the “hunt” or the day-to-day fight for struggle for survival against the stark odds of creation.

The earliest known myths are associated with ritual practices, most likely burial rites. Evidence shows that Neanderthal cultures, “who flourished in the Middle Paleolithic period between 140,000 and 40,000 years before our era…used to bury some of their dead…so they had some idea of survival after death, which is one of the psychological preconditions of religion.”* [Larousse World Mythology, ed. Pierre Grimal, Chartwell Books Inc., Secausus N.J., 1973 Edition, p. 17; see also “Mousterian” in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian.]

So hyper-natural human evolution evolves to exceed the concern for physical survival alone – over thousands of years and long before written history humans become “meaning” beings. Innovation and clever technologies bring us endurance, the ability to rise above the “cosmological” nature of our physical existence, so what we refer to as “wild ecology.” Yet, were we satisfied, are we ever satisfied, even today, with just technical wizardry or economic efficiencies? Our native human pathology, our passions, which were bestowed by our native and natural intelligence, are always looking for more. We are “hyper-beings” – seekers…explorers…engineers of the “hard-body” wild, the inventive, the game-changing…yet also and perhaps more incredibly we are “imagineers” of “embodied” story and beauty. Humans, we can surely observe from even the pre-historic record, made it through and around the terrors of the fire and ice and darkness yet also, by the firelight, we dedicated a space and a pause for beauty, for our search for the meaning of existence in creation, and perhaps not coincidentally, these new expressions bring into the human experience celebration and entertainment.

How do we know this? It turns out that another clue in the paleo record is, well, beer. It appears these early peoples knew how to party. Beer can be added (or opened) into the mix of our meditation, here now if you please. Beer is found throughout the pre-historic record – it’s right up there with tea in popularity among the ancients. It was consumed for nutrition but also during ritual feasts. In the Raqefet Cave of the Carmel Mountains of Israel, archaeologists have uncovered 13,000 year-old residues of a fermented beer product associated with the ritual feasts of the semi-nomadic Natufians.* [*Source: Li Liu, Jiajing Wang, Danny Rosenberg, Hao Zhao, György Lengyel, Dani Nadel, “Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting.” Journal of Archaelolocial Science: Reports, V. 21, October 2018, pp. 783-793.] Similar evidence appears in the archaeological records of ancient China.* [*Liu, Li, et al. “The Origins of Specialized Pottery and Diverse Alcohol Fermentation Techniques in Early Neolithic China.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 116, no. 26, National Academy of Sciences, 2019, pp. 12767–74, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26744099.] Drink up!

The earliest peoples created mythic stories trying to account for the significance of their time and place in the “cosmos,” the physical universe. These epic stories also “animated” their world. The stories gave a new and fully human spirit to nature – a spirit that could be celebrated by the fireside after the hunt or in memorial to the passing of a loved family member, and also that could be handed down to the children of the family or clan. In the powerful and often terrible clutches of these ecologies, indeed, emerging from these “wild” physical realities, could we even say that humans pulled another trick on nature herself? We resisted, even rebelled against, the natural odds of our own survival. We embraced “nature” in a very new and imaginal way, a fully human way, by naming its creatures, by animating its powers, and by “capturing” its energies in stories that began to re-shape even our own imaginaton.

Our wild thesis here is just this: mythical stories represent a common “trunk” of the human imagination which evolves into two broad new branches of human knowing: “science” and “spirit” or what we’ve also called “faith.”

On the one hand, can we say that humans began to think about, really to “live” and adjust to their physical world through mythic stories that, over generations, gave psychic momentum to their endurance. Yet curiously, these same stories of our “physical” life (so “physis” – “concepts of growth and change in nature”; reference https://www.thefreedictionary.com/physis) weren’t just there for moral support – they were open and vulnerable to the incessant challenges and inquisitions from upcoming generations, to the rambunctious and the rebellious, the “Millennials” and “Gen-Z’ers” of their day, the insouciant, the curious – and as well vulnerable to radically alternative myths of competing peoples, to the inevitable internecine clashes and wars between other emerging cultures.

For a mythic story is not unlike a “theory,” that is, an angle of understanding by way of plausible (or not) explanation. Of course 16th-18th century CE modern science will add “experiment” and “observable data” to the mix – and so “empirical,” data-based, and increasingly complex levels of understanding. But theory remains, in its core expression, a “formulation,” a proposed telling or organization of “facts” and “data,” of how things are and come to be. Myths of physis are the precursors to scientific theory.

Humans, hyper-folks that we are, however, are not, actually are we ever satisfied with just what we have or know right this moment? Bernard Lonergan, the very clever 20th century philosopher of science, but also the equally sagacious theologian of the spirit, described the human passion for knowing as “the full set of answers to the full set of questions.” His definition tricks the modern mind, though, because his account of our knowing-passion defines both “science” and, in the same trunk of thought, Lonergan is referring serreptitiously to his conception of the term “God,” or for our Wild Globalization conversation, what we might also name as “spirit” or “faith.” “God…the gods,” “spirit and faith,” are the second branch of knowing and curiosity that grow from the singular trunk of hyper-human desire. Indeed, the present “modern” economy we will explore in G5.0 is called the “information-age” or, more correctly, the “knowledge economy.”

These survivor-souls lived in the ecstasy of their gatherings by the fire. So utterly vulnerable to the fire and ice, to the creatures of the wild night, their lives would have been threatened by the constant ruptures and jagged edges of their natural world. Perhaps in defiance, or perhaps in a kind of ironic and serendipitous reversal, they transformed these ruptures into raptures – they defied their own natural capture and turned back on nature herself to instead embrace it in story, song, ritual and beautiful artistry. They empowered themselves by giving nature a speaking life – they named and so embraced nature’s energies as their stories, their mythic “speakings,” to then chant and dance in its exaltation by the deep-night fire. Is human being the exception in and of the darkness?

What if we moderns live in this same “ectasis of the fire” – when we gather by our own campfires, or gather in our sacred spaces, can we not reach out and imagine our own spiritual origins across deep time and space, and so gain some essence of these ancient peoples? And ourselves?

WG will track this ecstasy throughout its account of globalization, but here’s an early takeaway. It seems that, as we collect and study the trace evidences of our ancient ancestors, what emerges is how they lived in a “cosmic circumstance” – that is, how they experienced and began to tell the story of their lives in the natural “cosmos” or “world.” Or more to the spear-point, how they lived on the very sharp and bloody and ecstatically mortal edges of survival? Very simply, their “stance” (how they found themselves “standing”) surrounded (“circum”) by a natural world (“cosmos”). This all emphatically screams the “wild”…and, again, it’s painted elegantly in their cave-art.

Rock art by the San People at Giants Castle in the Drakensberg, South Africa; iStock-153956137; the Drakensberg yields 35,000-40,000 works of San rock art, the world’s largest, yet because of the types of materials used they are difficlut to date, though other anthropological evidence indicates the San people existed in the Drakensberg at least 40,000 years BP. Source: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakensberg

Could it not be that this cosmic circumstance gave rise, emergently and “naturally,” to an intimate and immediate “cosmic élan vital” or “vital life…a vitality…a spirit…a life force…even a divine vitality” – to an ecstatic “life of mind and soul…”, to an “approach or manner” arising from this “stance?” They were smart, very smart, yet they couldn’t (yet) fully understand or explain “things” – and so they named and animated the tornadoes, the hurricanes, or the volcanoes or massive snow avalanches, the ice and fires of this magnificent, this violent, this beautiful world. And yet the force of their intelligence and imagination carried forward into the emerging annals of “history,” when the “everything” began to be written down – what the ancients discovered and handed down to us was the life-force of the imagination, the human spirit in the throes of the cosmos.

G1.0 – the “Big-Game” SUMMARY:

So our Wild Globalizaiton thesis, our big instinct or intuition, can be summarized like this: globalizing civilization is wild – it emereges more or less from a “black box” set of orders (Ecology, Sex (!)-Demographics, Technology, Economy, and Governance). We can kind of know and measure the energies and forces that go into the black box, and we can observe, hypothetically measure, and work with the outflows from the box, but how these hyper- and inter-variable forces interact, mix together, inside the damned box is not only unknown, it’s unknowable. By definition. One thing affects all the others but then that one thing is never isolated, it’s always one of the other things that’s itself under the extreme variability of the game. It’s wild. But it’s also an “order.” Even and especially and including our human hubris to think we can know or control this order is, YES!, part of the wild order, a very big part, actually!

So, to recap G1.0, here’s a summary of these five factors or energies and how they each give a leg up to globalizing civilization today:

Ecology: Huge, very! Maybe the most obvious and real. Without a “climate optimum” it’s very hard to imagine the 21st century, or any of the preceding 50-100 or so centuries that comprise so-called “civilization.”

Demographics: Also huge! Homo sapien, Us!, emerges as the dominant “victor” of the Homo genus. It was sexy and bloody – our DNA is part Neanderthal, Homo Habilis, Homo heidelbergensis, etc., but they are no more; and, by the end of G1.0 the sapiens are everywhere on the planet; we are global and globalizing.

Technology: We can’t just guage G1.0 by “what” we invented. Rather, it’s about “that” we invented, at all. The transformation from just “nature-given” to “human-innovation-given” is, arguably, the most profound evolutionary fact of all because it signifies the real, practical, and so the applied emergence of hyper-natural intelligence. We weren’t just smart, we did stuff, used it, and made stuff with our smarts and so we began to change the entire course of nature, itself.

Economy: First we produced, then we OVER-produced. We went out and “got” more than we needed for the moment. Then we stored and reserved it, we in fact created the first “virtualized value” (“capital”), the “residual” of our production. Excess reserves gave us a naturally occurring “excess” and so consequently two new factors: first, more time to think and plan how to store the stuff (and yes(!), more time to make love and art and culture!), and also, it drew in a new set of problems (families, fueds, crimes and misdemeanors between all the clan folks) to manage, or what we now call governance.

Governance: The equation above – the eco-demo-tech-econ thing – is utterly wild, it’s a “black box” order. Governance, understandably, must then represent the incredible assumption that this wild box can be “managed,” at all. More incredibly, no doubt to do it, to govern that is, means that whoever is governing must to some degree buy into the expectation (or illusion) that the wild can, in fact, be governed. G1.0 governance had not scaled, gotten large, yet. But the foundation had been laid for the coming of big governance in G2.0, the net phase of the wild story.

1 Huber, Peter W; Mills, Mark P., The Bottomless Well, – The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, New York: Basic Books, 2005, pp. 174-175.

2 Huber, Peter W; Mills, Mark P., IBID, p. 10.

3 Carter, Robert M., Climate: The Counter Consensus – A Paleoclimatologist Speaks, London, Stacey International, 2010, pp. 40-41.

4 WoudloperDerivative work: Hardwigg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; WoudloperDerivative work: Hardwigg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

5 Schminke, Hans-Ulrich, Volcanism, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2004, pp. 5-7.

6 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano.

7 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tectonics.

8 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano .

9 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter .

10 chris 論, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VEIfigure_en.svg

11 Shapiro, Beth, Life as We Made It – How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined-and Redefined-Nature, New York: Basic Books, 2021, pp. 52-53; author’s emphasis.

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution.

13 Source: Wikipedia; Sebastião da Silva Vieira – Livro de minha autoria: CAVALCANTE, Messias S. Comidas dos nativos do Novo

Mundo. Barueri, São Paulo. Sá. 2014, p. 403, Nativo do Novo Mundo lançando flecha como propulsor ou estólica; Note: The Wikipedia Foundation confirms that the copyright holder has approved use of this image, permission archive reference #201409191001051.

14 https://www.thefreedictionary.com/big+bang

15 Wikipedia: http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/evol.html Version 10.14

Wild Globalization 2.0 (10,000 BCE to 32 CE)

2022-01-03T00:00:00Z

G-2.0 – “Settling…Cultivating…” – The Neolithic (10,000 BCE to 32 CE)

G-2.0 (c. 15-10,000 BCE – 32 CE):

“Settling,” Neolithic’s 1^st Ag-Revolution, Excess Production

Governance & Commerce, Specializing Labor, Slavery, Writing & Finance

Climate Heating (+/-) Cooling – G2.0’s Climate Risk – Famine

Prosperity v. Peril : Beginning of Cities, Human Complexity and population “Scale”

“The dog was the first domesticate. Without dogs you don’t have any domestication. You don’t have civilization.”^[1] Greger Larson

Trekking the Wild Neolithic: Bearings, Cairns, the Samí

Though homo sapiens appear in the fossil record 250,000 years BCE, historians of civilization contend that the “civilized” human world does not emerge until somewhere between 12,000-5,000 BCE with the appearance of agriculture, urban centers, and writing. The eminent historian, David Wooten, recently summed it up like this

“The world we live in is much younger than you might expect. There have been tool-making ‘humans’ on Earth…for around 2 million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared 200,000 years ago, and pottery dates back to around 25,000 years ago. But the most important transformation in human history before the invention of science, the Neolithic Revolution, took place comparatively recently, between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago. It was then that animals were domesticated, agriculture began, and stone tools began to be replaced by metal ones. There have been roughly 600 generations since human beings first ceased to be hunter-gatherers. The first sailing vessel dates back to 7,000 years or so ago, and so does the origin of writing…what we may term historical humankind (humans who have left written records behind them), as opposed to archaeological humankind (humans who have left only artifacts behind them), has existed only for about that length of time, some 300 generations… This is the true length of human history; before that there were two million years of prehistory.” David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, New York, HarperCollins, 2015, 3-4

Fair enough, if, what we’re tracking is “science,” writing, advanced watercraft, agriculture, or the domestication of species.

If, from another track, we are bushwacking the total spectrum or foundation of human “complexity,” that is, the development of all the tools and techniques and clever strategies that made each successive level of homo sapien’s path to here possible, in a word, if we are looking for the cairns of our total cumulative survival story, and, as WG posits, the layer-on-layer, trial-error, success-failure, advance of these hyper-natural skill sets and cumulative knowledge that had to precede, and that Wootton tacitly must presume for “science” to come into existence, at all, then so-called “big” history trackers are on to another level of critical thinking about what it means to “be,” or really, to “have achieved and become…and now even forgotten a lot of…what it means to be 21^st Century “human.” And, like Newton, we acknowledge, we’re listening, trying to imagine, and indeed, acknowledging our deep ancestors “on whose backs we stand.” Or, to remind, better captured in Beth Shapiro’s words:

“The rules of evolution are simple. Mutations accumulate. Most of the time it is a simple game of chance that decides whether those mutations are passed to the next generation.…For most of our own evolutionary history, our lineage was no different from any other. Our ancestors were among those in their populations that survived and reproduced. Over billions of generations, our ancestors’ genomes accumulated mutations and our lineage adapted. Climates changed, habitats shifted, niches emerged and disappeared. Our lineage became animals, then mammals, then primates, then apes. And then our ancestors figured out how to break the rules. They learned to work together to overrule chance, to help others rather than allow those less fit among them to die. They learned to fashion their surroundings rather than be changed by them. They learned to direct evolution—to determine both their own evolutionary trajectories and those of the species with which they interacted…while paleoanthropologists still don’t fully understand where or when or how this happened, this is how we became different, unquestionably, from every other species that lives or has ever lived on Earth. This is what it means to be human.”

Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It – How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature, New York: Basic Books, 2021, 52-53; my emphasis)

If we’re talking “civilization” or “globalization,” then Wooten’s, or Richard Baldwin’s Great Convergence, or Fogel’s “techno-physio evolution,” approaches capture most of the recent modern story.

Bearings

If, from our longer-toothed view, however, we are tracking wild globalization, then we bear down hard on Shapiro’s compass. And while we are at it, let’s add three new bearings to our trekking compass:

First (unknowability), we don’t and can’t know a lot of the paleo-record – we’re not flying completely blind, but we are grappling in and into the darkness.

Second (“primal v. primitive”), the folks that trekked into the Neolithic (G2.0) were probably far more advanced than we (or Wootton’s, or Baldwin’s, or Fogel’s) compasses are able to measure or perhaps to even imagine – in their fully human brains and souls they bore the cumulative knowledge that had carried all of their predecessors (and eventually, us) to their “here.” They were not “primitive” but rather, in wild globalization terms, they were “primal” – they were, as we are today, “hyper”-natural.

Third (“scale”), the most important bearing for our wild compass is “scale” – like the dinosaurs, once humans figured out this “hyper-innovation” thing, human population growth turns to domination and explodes, from as few as 10-30,000 possible cohorts in the depths of glaciation and volcanic winters to the nearly 8 billion souls roaming the planet today. “Natural” evolution (mutation, natural selection) can take hundreds or thousands of years, or more; the wild global human version can happen with hyper-natural swiftness, in just a few generations, or even one – think of the socio-cultural and evolutionary effect of iPhones or the Internet of Things (“IOT”) on our children or our access to knowledge and information.

Compass Bearing #1 – Unknowability: Any deep paleo-history derives from the likes of random and scattered bone fragments, scratch DNA in pottery residues, stone tools, etc. We just don’t know, and likely may never know, a lot of it. The record may be growing, but it’s still limited, gaping and gapping with blind spots, and it’s spoken from the highly inquisitive and informed yet nonetheless, the imaginations, of smart trekkers like Shapiro…or here David Graeber and David Wengrow…:

“Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.”

(Reference: David Graeber, David, and Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021, p. 118)

Compass Bearing #2 – Primal over Primitive: Wild Globalization’s tracks Graeber and Wengrow – these very early homo sapien folks lived and died, scrapped and thrived, under conditions impossible for “moderns” to imagine today, and without all of our accumulated knowledge, some of which comes from them. Cognitively, their brains were as large and full of ideas, and they were inspired by the human imagination. They were our brothers and sisters. They were less “primitive” than “primal.” From a WG view, their jagged, skin-of-their-teeth survival was one of the most historic, the most against-the-odds, feat our species has pulled off – without which we, or Hubble or Webb or Apollo on the Moon, iPhones, Wootton’s science, would not have come about. They knew, daily, what most of us today have forgotten or suppressed: “Extinction is a real possibility.” Their primal instincts, intuitions, their trials and errors, their endurance, carried our species out of darkness and through 250,000 years of ice ages and volcanic winters. They were fully human, with the same if still emerging intelligence and the same propensities for good and evil, for horror and beauty, as us. As clever and advanced as we moderns are, if we met them on the open savannahs or deep forests of their world and with only their resources they would be our teachers – if they didn’t kick our butts around first. Again, tracking Graeber and Wengrow:

“Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too…they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.”

(Reference: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021, p. 118)

Our wild challenge is to try to imagine how we are possible today in part because of what they achieved in surviving the human trek out of the original wildernesses. They took the first steps on the incessant march towards greater levels of hyper-human evolutionary development and complexity.

Yet in a deep irony of human existence, we must also realize, in that same imagination, that much of the knowledge and innovation gains they achieved and which began to define our hyper-nature have either been forgotten or has slipped into and has been stealthily assimilated into our own subconscious. Like Neanderthal DNA which lives in us today. Their essence, their secrets, their mysteries, remain part of us, yet their deep history portend what Carl Jung called the human psyche’s “Collective Unconscious,” or what “big” historians call the full content of our “cumulative human learning.” Genius is sometimes described as “…she’s forgotten more than we’ll ever know.”

What might we gain by imaging them as our “peers” or distant cousins?

Well, by the opening of the G2.0 Neolithic, humans may not have yet achieved formal “science,” but we were very long on the tooth in having developed the most vital component of science itself, that is, “objective thought.” Humans intuitively considered their cosmos as something “other” than themselves, as an “objective” universe. Flowing upstream from Wootton’s view, we apparently did this less (if at all) through abstract writing but rather through art and especially cave art and, as we will study soon, through mythic and orally transmitted cosmic stories that later grow into faith traditions, so in modern-speak, “religion.” And curiously, as these early peoples grew objective thought through oral traditions, story, myth, they began to “model” their world, to animate the great natural forces that both supported and threatened them – this same hyper-natural intellect would also, we contend here, become Wootton’s “science.”

Artifacts of writing appear globally and reach back to Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Elamite cultures (4^th millennium BCE), to China (2^nd millennium BCE), and to Mesoamerica (4^th millennium BCE).* [*Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing#Origins] So roughly 2-3-4,000 years ago.

However, by the time writing appears in the record, cave paintings and other artforms had been part of the human soul’s “record” for at least 30,000 years. Probably much longer.

Peruse this cave painting from the San People who lived and thrived on South Africa’s Great Escarpment, and who created one of the greatest arrays of cave art in the world.

(Rock Art by the San People at Giants Castle in Drakensberg, South Africa; iStock-153956137.jpg)

Appreciate here the colors, the possible drama, even the abstract nature of the human and ungulate images. If the Louvre and Met are modernity’s great monuments to beauty, how then do we regard the five-hundred natural cave cathedrals of the San and the 35-40,000 works of some of the most extraordinary, consummate images in human history, and that may reach back 40,000 years BCE, or more*. (*Note: The materials used for their colors and images are difficult to date.)

Cave painting has been a global human pursuit for perhaps most of Beth Shapiro’s 50,000 years of “hyper-human” development. Cave painting is found ubiquitously around the globe and may also include our Neanderthal cousins: the Maltravieso cave in Cáceres, Spain dates to possibly 64,000 years BCE, before Homo sapien showed up in the record. The Chauvet Cave in France dates back 30,000 BCE; Coliboaia Cave, Romania, to 32,000 BCE; the Nawarla Gabanmang site in Australia, 28,000 BCE; primitive images of humans hunting pigs in the Maros-Pangkep karst of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, date back 43,000 BCE. Observe Spain’s Cave of Altamira:

(Source: Museo Nacional & Centro de Investigación de Altamira; Approved for publication, Wikipedia Foundation.)

Picasso, or Monet, or Chagall, would all have been elated to have spelunked deep into these ancient caverns, and to have sat with these primal artists.

We’re curious if cave art might call into question Wootton’s distinction between “archaeological” and “historical” humankind?

Minimally, why must formal “writing” take precedence over “image” or works of the imagination? What do we gain by distinguishing the written word as initiating formal “history?” Or giving precedence over the spoken word and the great oral traditions such as Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey which appears around 800 BCE, while the epic Vedic Mahabharata appears in written form centuries later, between the 3^rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE?

Finally, it’s a curious footnote that early writing systems appear not to have been about beauty or imagination – they appear more focused on accounting practices and societal order. Sumerian Cuneiform (circa 4^th millennium BCE) were used for keeping account of contracts and agricultural records, and as Graeber astutely observes, “debt” or “credit systems.”* [*Source: David Graeber, Debt, the First 5,000 Years, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011, p. 21-40.]

Contrasted to Graeber and Wengrow, it’s perhaps not an accident that Wootton’s distinction about “history,” that “historical humankind” “begins” with written records and mathematical accounting methods, focuses on the inception of “modern” humankind. Perhaps the whole thrust of a “wild globalization” theory is to attempt to re-capture what the so-called “civilized” view gains, but also may obscure, in the distinction. We will explore whether something like Wootton’s partition between “archaeological” and “historical” humankind does not outline, buty also mask, the secrets of how and why the “wildness” of civilization haunts the modern order today?

Compass Bearing #3 – “Scale”: From G2.0 forward, Wild Globalization theory proposes another compass bearing, that is, that the predominant theme of this human trek out of the wilderness is in fact the steady, indominable, yet subtle and stealthy march of “complexity,” on the one hand, (e.g., from crude stone tools to highly crafted obsidian tools, arrows, atlatl-powered spears, to the combination bow, to gunpowder, the atomic bomb, etc.); or, on the other hand, the uneven, then gradual, and then exponential growth of human population numbers from @250,000 BCE to the present.

“Scale” is also evident in one of the most dynamic and pervasive trends in modern globalization, and that is urbanization, or initially the move from smaller hunter-gather groups toward larger and more settled urban centers. In our 21^st century urban scale point to one million or more souls per week moving into cities across the globe.* [Sources: Both Geoffrey West, Scale, 2017, and Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities, 2006, and Stealth of Nations, 2011, are keen observers of this this trend.]

“Scale,” then, studies how systems and networks grow or shrink (“quantity”) as well as how things and systems become more complex (“quality”).

G2.0’s 1^st Agricultural Revolution may have opened around 9-10-12,000 BCE with an estimated 1-15 million human cohorts on the planet. But the trek to early agriculture had not been a smooth ride – it’s likely that global human population may have declined to as few as 10-30,000 around 74,000 BCE following the super volcano eruption in Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia. [Note: Scientists have competing theories about whether this possible demographic “bottleneck” was triggered by the Toba event; Toba does appear to correlate to the beginning of migration away from Africa.]

Human population “scale” is observable in Fogel’s conception of “techno-physio-evolution” in which human numbers grow steadily following the 1^st Agricultural Revolution (@9-12,000 BCE) but then explode as the Scientific Revolution’s emerging technologies and accumulating knowledge emerge in the 16^th-17^th centuries. Fogel’s vertical graph tracks population numbers (scale as “quantity”), and the horizontal graph tracks the advance of human innovation and science (scale as “quality”, but also “complexity”):

So it takes @200,000 years for human population to reach 1 billion souls by about 1804 CE, and it takes only another @125 years to reach @2 billion in 1927, and then just another 100 years for human population to grow to the nearly 8 billion humans on the planet today in the 2020s. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#History )

In the 21st century, we stress over the deepening physical (e.g., supply chains) but also the psychological and sociological “angst” (e.g., the explosion of psycho-tropic pharma) brought on by the realities and risks of modern “complexity.” In Fogel’s longer tooth view, perhaps we can appreciate how the evolution of complexity speaks to the very essence of the hyper-natural human trek out of the original wilderness and into the new wildernesses of hyper-complexity.

In WG Part II we will be thinking a lot about “scale,” inspired in part by Geoffrey West’s 2017 research. West observes that:

“One of the major challenges of the twenty-first century…is…whether human-engineered social systems, from economies to cities, which have only existed for the past five thousand years or so, can continue to coexist with the “natural” biological world from which they emerged and which has been around for several billion years. …Existing strategies have failed to come to terms with an essential feature of the long-term sustainability challenge embodied in the paradigm of complex adaptive systems; namely, the pervasive interconnectedness and interdependency of energy, resources, and environmental, ecological, economic, social, and political systems.”

(Source: Geoffrey West, SCALE, the Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, New York: Penguin Books, 2017, p. 411-412, Kindle 6863-6880)

West is tracking Fogel’s scale correlation between population growth (“quantity”) and complexity (“quality”), and then wondering how 21^st century resources can adjust to this black box of “…interconnected…interdependent resources, energy, economy…and social-political orders.” A “wild” formula, to be sure.

Cairn-Logic: Human-Change “Radicals”

Humans impose new and different pressures on evolution. We are both the beneficiaries and the authors of what might be called “change radicals” of the very forces that enabled us to move out of the jungles and savannahs and into the by now even wilder 21^st century.

This new, innovation-evolution changed the order of the pre-human schema. Recall our atlatl-spear-throwing friend – overnight, or at least as soon he could learn it’s tricky technique – the atlatl-thrower became more powerful…and deadly. It’s speculated that over-hunting contributed to the early Neolithic shift to animal husbandry – raising rather than hunting animal resources.

Innovation and invention changed the rules of the game. Our deep ancestors, equipped as they were with higher intelligence and communication, bipedal mobility and opposing-thumb dexterity, began to break, then change, even to make up, their own rules. New possibilities and synergies emerge. Teaming up with wild canines (@ 15,000 BCE) provided security and new hunting techniques. Husbanding wild species like sheep and goats (@13,000 BCE) provided more reliable supplies of meat and milk.

WG notices that human innovation-evolution either bends and adds to nature’s own change radicals or, in our new innovation-driven way, we morphed a new set of radical changes to nature. First order changes (suddenness, speed, scale, efficiency) appear as well as second orders changes (artifice, discontinuity, emergence, consequence).

First (1st-Order) Radical: Suddenness of Change. We know that the evolution of life can trigger sudden changes as it responds to, for example, ecological shocks. 60 million years ago the dinosaurs ruled. Until, apparently, the Chixculub asteroid, estimated at 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in diameter at impact, hit Earth in North America’s Yucatan Peninsula region. Its impact released energy equivalent to 21-921 billion times the energy of the first nuclear bombs, and @100 million times the energy released by the largest ever human thermonuclear device, the Tsar Bomba bomb tested in 1961. The Chixculub impact is speculated to have caused catastrophic global climate disruption which triggered a “mass extinction” event – as much as 75% of plant and animal species became extinct. Including the dinos.

Suddenly.

Astrophysicists hunt asteroids today. Our blue planet, moving through the universal darkness, remains at sudden risk. Wild ecology.

Evolution theory tells us that “we” survived, that is, the mammalian DNA that somehow endured at the margins, traces of which still peeks through the deep paleo-record.

Likewise, 60 million years later, early human-like souls (perhaps Homo antecessor, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster) mastered fire (circa one million BCE) and so changed the rules. Except that this time, their rule-change, as they scrapped and scraped through the Pleistocene’s thousands-of-year ice ages, was triggered by their human cleverness and perception.

Certainly not with the swiftness of a mass extinction, yet in nature’s pace of time and change an unforeseen transformation, nonetheless. They had discovered a way to take a very limited resource, that is, the magic of heat in the throes of ice, and then transform it into a virtually unlimited resource. Nature’s own creatures changed nature, itself. They borrowed natural fire and took it into their own hands, and caves, and so upped their odds of survival. No waiting around for DNA to emerge. “Natural” – but now intelligent – “selection.” And sudden.

Second (1st Order) Radical: Speed of Change. OK, it might seem like the same thing, but “speed of change” is actually a consequence of suddenness. Think of speed as the intended-unintended shadow of suddenness – if you are the atlatl inventor-thrower 30,000 years ago you can shock and conquer the savannah or the forest. Change is now quick and deadly. And, in its radical form, it’s all powerful. The thrower rules. The target is dead meat.

So: positive consequence – more successful hunting, more meat; negative consequence – a new risk of over-hunting, and not just the ungulate herds but now other human competitors. “Intraspecific” aggression was weaponized. Wild demographics.

Speed haunts modernity today, especially today. The American’s 1945 atomic bomb was a “sudden” emergence and emergency which speedily changed the trajectory of human global politics. We are still floundering around, decades later, trying to get a grip on how to live with the power of the atom. Our clever technology advances ahead of the human practical and ethical response.

Speed shows how human-innovation evolution is always “ahead of itself” – everything else in the natural world can’t keep up – the dinosaurs took millions of years to present the T-rex or the velociraptor. The atlatl? The atom? Not so much.

Wild tech’s clever devices are quick and their consequence open-ended, unpredictable. Observe how the mobile phone has transformed culture in less than a generation – the lexicon of human knowledge is at one’s fingertips, but modern social life and interaction have been radically and speedily altered – we sit down to dinner and read our cell phones rather than talking with one another. Our kids can track YouTubes and Tweets but read books – not so much.

Third (1st-Order) Radical: Scale of Change. See above under “Bearings,” but we mention it again here as a fundamental radical of human evolution.

It’s BIG. Suddenness and speed of change meant the newly equipped player could “go big” and so dominate his or her environs and peers. One atlatl thrower is one thing, fifty raining down on the herd or neighboring tribe is another.

The human paleo record is replete with traces of our distant and now disappeared cousins who were either vanquished in the fight or absorbed into the conquerors (our) DNA in fireside liaisons.

Homo sapien showed up around 250,000 years (1,000 generations ago) after surviving and eliminating every other Homo species. In that stretch we have grown (“scaled”) to nearly 8 billion and now dominate essentially any corner of the globe we care to.

Human innovation evolution has catapulted natural evolution on an exponentially scaling trajectory.

Fourth (1st-Order) Radical: “Efficiency” of Change. OK, so change is always at “play” – at risk. Today’s order may be “set” but it can change. Quickly. Drastically. Miraculously. Disastrously. Again, ask the dinos. Or the Romans.

It is estimated that 99.9 per cent of all biological mutations end up going nowhere.^[2] So on the one hand we might observe that change is wasteful. Maybe.

But we can invert that insight as well – what if we just say that change is constantly, incessantly, trying to change. Everything, every current order or possibility of the moment, is always on the table, vulnerable to change, some players, like the dinos, dominate but others lurk underneath, in the crevices, outlier alternatives, ready to emerge as conditions evolve. Everything is always at risk. Tested every moment.

So other possibilities are always out there. Available. Latent. Waiting. IBM in the 1980’s was the dominant I-Tyrannosaurid, until a group of scruffy, burrowing mammalian hippies got a contract to buildout the “minor” software components of IBM’s new personal computer products – then the giant almost imploded and the hippies became Microsoft, the new biggest player on the global block.^[3]

The inventor of the atlatl may not have been the biggest, strongest spear-thrower in the clan. This holistic evolutionary process works because there’s always a lot of alternatives ready to go, ready to fill in, a kind of backup squad of possibility.

The present order is always being tested. It’s at risk. What works now may not work later. Mammals appear roughly 300 million years ago, and the Jurassic mammals that burrowed and scurried under the dinosaurs were likely small, weird creatures (certainly from the dinos’ view). Until they weren’t. Until their way worked.

So we can also think of the 99.9% as a measure of efficiency, as a hint at nature’s spectrum of possibility, the multiple alternatives that are always trying to emerge. From this view, the 99.9% is a factor of potential, of possibility, maybe burrowed underground, what we might call “hanging around” outliers.

Thomas Edison made 10,000 failed attempts before he came up with the successful incandescent lightbulb. Michael Jordan claims he missed 9,000 shots, lost nearly 300 games, was trusted to and failed 26 times to make the winning shot. Failure? Or the incessant condition of, the test of, success?

Evolution works because it’s always about the test of success and the risk of failure. It’s therefore highly efficient. Even when, or maybe especially when, it fails.

Fifth (2nd-Order) Radical: “Artifice” of Change. Change itself changes. Nature gave humans rules – “…this is what you can and cannot do, OK?” Then we changed the rules. And we changed how change itself would work.

So the first radicals – suddenness, speed, scale, efficiency – we can think of these as “quantitative” – they show the magnitude or amount of how a phenomenon or creature adapts to challenges or threats or opportunities. Suddenness-speed-scale-efficiency are 1^st-order, “quant” radicals.

The next radicals, “artifice,” “discontinuity,” “emergence,” and “consequence” – fancier terms but we’ll cook them down – are more subtle and illusive, and so more challenging to WG’s cairn-logic. They are fully human. Radically differentiating. Even…wilder.

For artifice, look again at the atlatl. What is it? Relative to, say, the human arm? First of all, it’s just a stick. Sure it’s been whittled and shaped, but it’s still…just a stick. Isn’t it? Or not? OK, it’s now, possibly, something different. It’s a tool. But the atlatl-stick is really silly, really meaningless, itself, without the spear. Or the arm.

So, well, isn’t the stick now an “extension,” a kind of prosthesis – it’s not real, really, it’s artificial, but, wait a minute (!), it is real when the arm and hand take hold of it and it holds the deadly spear. Voilà! The stick arm is now a hyper-arm…! The small-armed under-achiever is now the “chief!” A new player is in charge now. “Things are different! I’m the boss. Get in line! You, over there, start making a lot of these thrower-stick^[4] things!”

The atlatl changes the human arm – but the arm itself has not changed. It’s still “natural.” Or is it? OK, alone, it is the “same.” Taking hold of the atlatl, and its spear, the human arm now commands a radically new, artificial, strength. The “it” – both the arm and the stick – are just not the same anymore. The “it” has changed, differentiated. It is entirely new. Sure the arm itself is identical – naked, unleveraged. It’s this piece of wood, with a handle, that’s new, that’s a new thing. Entirely. “Qualitatively” if we’re looking for a bigger word.

Without the imagination to conceive it, the hand to hold it, the perception to focus and aim it, it’s just a fancy stick.

Together – in synergy – the original, “natural” arm plus the new, invented, “artificial” atlatl-stick-arm, well, we have a whole new ball-game. Not merely a “radical” of change, but, in fact, a spontaneous 2^nd order of change. What will come to be called a “paradigm shift.”

“We” take it entirely for granted in this 21^st century – artifice is now an essential, perhaps the most essential, human characteristic. It’s our nature, or, rather, our hyper-nature. Artifice, the virtual, has become our singularly human way of encountering the world itself. Sure, we still go hiking on a beautiful mountain trail, but how many of us now carry our GPS empowered iPhones?

This subtle, thousands-of-years transformation of the human experience – really of what it means to be human – occurred before G2.0. Virtualization marks the bridge from human nature to human hyper-nature. We owe its evolutionary emergence to these scrappy and clever and resourceful ancestors acting under the power of their big-brain imaginations and no doubt often in desperate straits. WG postulates that much, it not all, of our 21^st century “human nature” got legs and arms, indeed, “atlatled”-arms, from these earliest of dreadnaught humans and proto-humans.

But back to the “nature” question, if we must. What’s “natural” or “un”-natural here? And what, if anything, does our WG thinking gain by making a difference? OK, right, the whole game is different. We have the atlatl, for heaven’s sake (!), and lots more meat, and now everyone in the neighborhood is running. Away. Quickly. Maybe we rule the grassy or the forested roost. For now. Until…the next big-small thing comes along…

The reader can wrestle with their own take on the “natural” question. We’ve already kicked it around a bit. In WG’s take, though, the question just doesn’t track out in a serious way. It’s just not a helpful distinction.

Why’s that? Well, because without the atlatl, the grassland or the forest is still wild. It’s rough and, to use a highly technical, big anthropological term, it’s “bad-ass!” But with the atlatl, (or the atom bomb…) the grassland or the forest or the steel and concrete jungles are, actually, even wilder. [Hint: This is the essence of WG’s “wild” – WG is trying to tell us that the “natural” was always wild and “we” have just made it wilder. But we’ve forgotten, we’ve tricked ourselves, as to just how wild the original wild was, or, more seriously, how much wilder we have made it. In fact, you can stop reading now. Put the book down. Maybe get a beer. That’s the whole point here.]

Sixth (2nd Order) Radical: “Discontinuity-Liminality” (the “@”) of Change. The trace evidence of WG’s walk through the cairns is just not a “Point A to Point B” “thing”…or “think.” It’s not a linear track. In all these change-radicals, innovation-evolution happens unevenly, even asymmetrically or discontinuously – more quickly here, on this continent, and seemingly pacing more slowly on another. Discontinuity between continents, between various cultures, even between individual human players, is a dominant observable of globalization.

But think of how evolutionary reality itself is really layered, with different strategies working at the same time. In one epoch, one major leaguer dominates, while the minors are waiting. The dinos were way bigger, way more powerful, totally dominant, than us wimpy mammals. For hundreds of millions of years. Until…they weren’t! Major and minor leagues moved along unevenly, but simultaneously.

For example, the bridge from the Pleistocene^[5] to the Neolithic, literally, “pleistos” for “most” and “cene” for “recent,” is a formal term – the period is also referred to as the “Ice Age.” The Pleistocene stretches from @2.5 million to @15-12,000 years ago. So it’s a big term and a big time. There’s a lot of “point A’s” and “point B’s” along the way. Hence the cairn mark “@” – for “about…” or “approximate…” or really “we’re guessing here…” Even the @15-12,000 number is not really boiled down – some estimate 15 and others 12, still others 9 or 7, etc. – we’ll try to cook it down a bit soon.

When G2.0’s Neolithic (“neo” for “new” and “lith” for “stone,” so new stone age) gets moving around 10-15,000 years ago, the Pleistocene is still hanging around. The shift is uneven, over scores of generations, and the change is “liminal” – like the light at sunset or sunrise – a kind of “between” time. One foot in the Pleistocene and one in the Neolithic – the Sámi on reindeer sleighs and the Sámi on snow-mobiles. There will be no singular linear inspired “event,” or if a point is suggested, such as Hammurabi’s Tables which may “mark” a possible inception of human writing or “civilization,” they are in WG’s schema really read as cairns on the trail.

Still, again, this is not the biologic clock of the dinosaurs. Liminal time and space hints at how transitions are often, if not usually, incremental. And discontinuous – tracking unevenly, at different paces from one corner to the next, accelerated for some and held back for others. Steps forward and back, sideways, at the same time.

Sure, “Pleistocene” and “Neolithic” are helpful terms or labels – thinking loves labels. Thinking likes, it even flows, on the waves of words and names. Thought is kind of like the atlatl – an artificial extension of nature thinking, itself. Thought is the meaning-thrower and words and names are its thought-spears. Thinking not only needs them, to think, on a practical level it is them. [Hint: “Pleistocene…Neolithic” fall under the human passion for labels. On the grandest “scale” we’re talking biology’s binomial nomenclature, so “kingdom, phylum, class, order, species.”^[6]]

The liminal-discontinuity radical fits into a kind of time-shadow of how evolution emerges. It’s like the working holism that all the previous radicals give rise to. Liminal reminds us that, as gallant and ambitious, really as audacious, as our big-brain thinking aspires to be, it’s hard to get a hold of all the radicals in one sweep or in a single equation. And all these radicals are in play. At once. And they are happening to, shaping, affecting, one another. All the time and in every moment. This creates a kind of hyper-variability. Of change. Change is changing and changeable. Because of change, the real defies total observation or accounting. A black box. Emerging orders. Wild.

Seventh (2nd Order) Radical: “Emergence” of Change. We have already come across the terms “emergence” and “emergency.” Let’s cook them down a bit.

Recall our friend Michael Berry’s pool table story – predicting billiard-ball collision trajectories? Well, emergence is kind like that.

What emergence says is that the natural order, where we live-survive-thrive (or not!), the Wild, is read by very perceptive folks as presenting different “levels” of order. “The forest,” so the old folk yarn goes, “is more than just a collection of trees.”

So think fire – if we light a tree on fire, it burns. But if a forest is set ablaze, watch out! A crowning, climax forest fire is a whole new ball-game that can create its own winds, even tornadic winds, and so its own weather, including lightening – it actually gives rise to a new localized meteorological order of behavior. These new fire-behaviors are not entirely predictable in the single tree burning alone.

In chemistry, emergence may be seen to appear as “phase transitions” where, for example, when a liquid is heated it changes to gas with new behaviors and properties (e.g., volume) that were not present in the previous state.

Likewise the atlatl – it would have presented a new human order – no longer did the hunter have to get as close to the prey, or be hunted as the prey by the tiger or lion or the great wild bear. Or neighbor. The atlatl, a simple tool, would have changed not only the hunting order but in fact the entire social order as the atlatl-armed tribe emerged superior to its peers.

The science of ecology, among others, is teaching us about the ways new orders “emerge.” Ecology appears as far back as Aristotle, or likely many thought-throwers before. As a formal science, it appears in the mid-20^th century with early observers like J.K. Fiebleman (1954) and the American brothers Eugene and Howard Odum. Eugene boils it down here in a 1974 article: “An important consequence of hierarchal organization is that as components, or subsets, are combined to produce larger functional wholes, new properties emerge that were not present or not evident at the next level below. Fiebleman has theorized that at least one new property emerges with each new integrative level of organization. Whatever the emergent rate, we can conclude that results at any one level aid the study of the next level in a set but never completely explain the phenomena occurring at that higher level, which itself must be studied to complete the picture. The old folk wisdom about “the forest being more than just a collection of trees” is indeed the first working principle for ecology.”^[7]

When we say that there was nothing in the human story that predicted the atlatl until it flew the spear onto the scene of the hunt, we are observing how the evolutionary principle of “orders” give rise to, like the water boiling, new, different, unforeseen and in fact unpredictable orders. And that emergent order changes and affects both every previous order down the line, and it effects a new set of possible consequences for the future.

The big change coming up in the Neolithic will be agriculture. The atlatl, a stick of wood, may have aided in the appearance of agriculture. Here’s how.

The atlatl increased human hunting prowess and efficiency. More kills led to more meat led to more food for the tribe led to more parties by the fire led to more tribe member kids and population led to the need for more meat led to possible scarcity of game and – voilà – someone thought, “…why don’t we just catch the wild goat or pig…” – and the rest of the story may account in part for the beginning, the emergence of, husbandry. Raising, cultivating critters then allowed folks to settle a bit, to not have to follow the herd but rather to tend to the herd. Husbandry may have been an early precursor of agriculture itself.

Emergence sustains its own totalizing and wild radicality. It is the total stage-act of all of these evolution radicals. Emergence is the end-brew of all the other radicals cooked into a singular sauce. Emergence defies any final registration or end-name because, in spite of its continuously advancing complexity and development, or rather as a result of it, emergence remains hyper-variable and so indefinitely complex.

Emergence undermines and ruins any attempt to fully define or quantify itself. With its suddenness and speed when set in motion, its enlarging scale, its apparent and hidden efficiencies, the artifice of its expression and applications, the constant disruption and asymmetries of its liminal and discontinuous possibilities, emergence not only leverages the real – it is the real. Wild.

Eighth (2nd Order) Radical: “Consequence” of Change. So we innovate something. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident. Even randomly. Copernicus’s planetary motion discoveries “were obvious to him and to others in his day [but] he had been dead seventy-five years before the authorities started to get offended. The president of the Linnean Society, which first published Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859¸ commented that there were “no striking discoveries” in that year’s publications. Penzia’s and Wilson’s discovery of “cosmic background radiation,” the early empirical evidence of the Big Bang, came about because they were cleaning bird poop off their radar arrays. And Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of the penicillium mold sat on the shelf and was not converted into usable medicine for years. ^[8]

So not only are we challenged to know or predict the future, but we can’t know or fully predict the consequences of our own innovations and inventions. Human evolution is an “open” order of change – under the always emergent and spontaneous and unruly change orders above. It’s wild. Human evolution lives in nature’s own Pandora’s box of clever ideas and devices (the iPhone, the atom bomb) that might birth through us but once on the ground move ahead of our abilities to fully control. We, and the world around us, become the intended and unintended consequences of their energy and force. We are nature’s hyper-natural experiment.

A Sleighride with the Sámi

While living in far-northern Tromsö, Norway, in 1970-71, Ottar Skagen, my Norwegian host, and I were invited on a “ski tur” outing into the Finmark interior with some twenty or so other adventurous Norwegian “city” folk. For two days we cross-country skied up a magnificent frozen river, ending up on top of Finmark’s “Vida” (“Plateau”). We had slipped into a new world, into Sápmi, or “land of the Sámi.”

For on the second day, after a tricky ski up a jagged trail that took us out of the canyon, we were met on the Vida by teams of Sámi women with reindeer sleighs. We would then ride, each to our own sleigh and single reindeer, over the vida to their hometown, Kautokeino. For a 18-year old American kid – an experience of a lifetime…!

The ebullient Sámi women, their smiles beaming, exuded a natural elegance, an irresistible grace and beauty, in this harsh Artic winter world – because it lies in the interior it does not receive the effect of the Gulfstream that warms the Norwegian coast and so Sápmi is the coldest region of northern Scandinavia. For our two-day sleigh ride they outfitted us with parkas and special moccasins (with the classic curled toes that serve as ski bindings), both made of reindeer fur – one of nature’s warmest furs due to air pockets in the hide.

Why Sámi women? We speculated, without conclusion. There was, however, no doubt in our urban hearts that, first of all, we were in their charge, and secondly, they were in charge. Period. With a smile.

After many kilometers we overnighted in thin-walled summer cabins at one of their out-camps. Temps that night dropped to well below zero. We rose in the morning to Sámi “coffee” – double strong and tinged with pure reindeer fat!

Our ears perked to the distant but familiar drone of internal combustion engines – some of their men-folk had ridden out on their snowmobiles to tend to the reindeer herd. We learned that overnight one of the reindeer had broken a leg in the deeply crusted snowpack. Away from our “turista” presence, it was to be slaughtered and carted back to town for butchering. An everyday in the Sámi reindeer life-cycle.

The Sámi name for the reindeer is boazu, and the Sámi’s co-existence with the boazu is called boazovazzi, meaning “reindeer walking.” Over thousands of years – and as WG will imagine it – both on the “fringes of” yet also “into” and “with” the Neolithic, or with an emerging “civilization” – the Sámi have walked over and about Sápmi with the boazu, whom they consider a kindred, life-giving and so sacred spirit.

As we rode in their sleighs, we came to see how the Sámi had one foot in the boazovazzi yet the other firmly in a two-cycle snowmobile 20^th century – like many of the noble and proud, and wonderfully full-living indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Perhaps we can imagine that their cultures obliquely span the breech between the late G1.0 and early G2.0. G2.0 wants to claim that it slips into what we “moderns” think we can call – in our techno-cultural-econ brand – “civilization.”

But just what is this emergent phenomenon, “civilization” and how to imagine it?

The Neolithic

“…the psychology that evolved when our ancestors lived in small hunter-gatherer groups prepared us to cope with a world of personal cooperation and exchange in small communities. It did not prepare us to cope with a world of impersonal cooperation and exchange among millions of people (a typical advanced economy) or billions of people (the global economy).In a way, the complexity of the modern economy outran the ability of our stone-age minds to understand it…”

Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley

[Source: Marian Tupy, & Gale L. Pooley, Superabundance – The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, 2022, (pp. 513-514). Cato Institute. Kindle Edition.)

Looming and now faded into the shadows of this vast human history are the countless individual souls and clans who carried us to here. “We” are their culmination, their “after-thought.” We and they are one another’s “residuals” – we could not live in their world nor they in ours, and yet we are cousins.

The progression of increasingly complex spontaneous orders – e.g., to cities, modern energy tech, global supply chain inter-dependencies – would be foreign, perhaps even unimaginable to them. Yet their survival ways – advanced foraging and hunting techniques, crude tool and weapon making, their intuitive migratory patterns as they adapted to climate changes – would be foreign and impractical for us to craft from a dead start today. While it may appear that their ways have been forgotten or lost, from another perspective we can imagine that their techniques have been absorbed into our species’ “collective unconscious” memory, the deep archive of human evolution. And like the magnificent cave-art, or Natufian beer residues, present day deep explorers are uncovering the trace residuals of theirs and our past.

Our curiosity to grasp and re-imagine their ways will only fall short of their actual story. Even more likely it will obscure the “natural” grace and agony of their endurance to here, through and in us. It will over-, under-, and mis-state, it will mis-construe the violence and harshness, and beauty, which we, as their “modern” result, now pursue to new limits. Likely, we are not imagining them as much as we are attempting to regain a sense of our own perilous status as we move forward into the 21^st century.

In this sense, WG fully acknowledges its own arrogance and hubris in the attempt. We ask for their patience as we stretch to prepare and save our own way by in part wondering how they managed their ages.

WG notes various modern navigators of history here – Baldwin, Fogel, Shapiro, McCloskey, Stark, Wootton – and many others, listening, quoting, watching for their insights and their blind-spots. Cairn-monuments mark the trail’s trajectory, but the bushwhacked tracks between are always incomplete, only sketched, projected, imagined.

WG, then, speaks as a kind of psychoanalysis of how we moderns perceive ourselves and our ancestors. It’s an attempt to re-vise and re-vision what might be termed “cultural theory,” or the ways we think about globalizing civilization, about “us.” “Cairn-Logic”…“Bearings”…“Change Radicals…” – these are heuristic strategies, lamplights rather than spotlights, so improvised torches in the darkness, as we grapple with our incessant curiosity to imagine, as Beth Shapiro notes, “what it means to be human.” Even though we are now assisted with the advanced techniques of science (mitochondrial DNA), we are in essence spelunking their deep caves and lost secrets.

The “Neolithic” is a “big age.” Minimally, it can be read as a “hybrid” age, one that carries all of the Pleistocene’s radical “hyper”-natural accomplishments. Maximally, and stretching over hundreds, even thousands of uneven “two-steps-forward-and-one-back” years, the Neolithic gradually breaches the Pleistocene’s thresholds and bursts into an entirely new and transformative set of orders, into a radically new age.

Agriculture, urbanization, large governance appear. Emergent Pleistocene potentials expand and “scale” from groups of hundreds to groups of thousands living together, moving gradually, over hundreds of generations, into the foreign land of “cities.” Complexity rises.

The magnificent cave paintings and images we traced above illuminate the beauty and extraordinary sensibility of that potential. Yet catastrophically, these same potentiating orders expose human capacities for unrestrained wickedness and evil on the new scales of larger and more powerful population orders – human trafficking and slavery, horrific human and even child “religious” sacrifice, war on massive scales, tyrannies, holocausts, even the annihilation of entire peoples, cultures and ecosystems.

Civilization lurches backwards and forwards. It gets ahead of itself. Our hyper-natures will unlock not only clever innovations and inventions, but also our powers to control and dominate, even destroy, our cousins and neighbors, even nature itself. It’s our essential “hyper-nature” that the human way grows clever and powerful before it grows careful and wise.

So by the onset of the Neolithic, either we had “disappeared” all of our other Homo genus cousins. We made love and war with them. We were most likely on the throwing end of the spear that took many out, and we also captured their DNA by the evening fires after the fight. Their ghost traces live in our own Homo sapien blood today.

The Neolithic, then, is the end-game of the competition we and all of our Homo genus cousins fought under the new rules of “hyper-natural” evolution. We all likely used fire and stone tools, we all had enlarged brains and walked and ran upright, and we teamed up to hunt and fight. Yet it was our “we” that emerged. We had become agents of nature’s own process of “natural selection,” or, more precisely, what the 20^th century evolutionist Ernst Mayr called “non-random elimination.”^[9]

In this way, Homo Neanderthalensis (Europe), Homo Heidelbergensis (North Africa), Homo Erectus (Java, China, East Africa), Homo Antecessor (Spain, Ethiopia), and likely others, slipped into the unknowable archives of our genus.^[10]

Using our categories of ecology, sex-demographics, technology, economy, and governance, we can inventory and assess the bridge from the “old” stone age Pleistocene into the “new” stone age Neolithic.

Ecology: The Neolithic Climate Optimum

Historians request, say, 5,000 years of “transition” time, give or take, from “old” stone-ages to “new” stone ages, and the gradual, very, of our settling into new ways of cultivating crops and domesticating creatures like the dog, goat, or sheep. It’s notable that thousands-of-year spans are needed to describe the human gait through time – WG ponders “How can that not be the case today?”

The Neolithic demonstrates how climate moves in thousand, or hundreds of thousand year gaits over the earth’s ecologies. As the paleo-sciences now suspect, this 12-7,000 year Pleistocene-to-Neolithic-to-Modern “bridge” occurs entirely in the warming grasp of the most recent “climate optimum,” the very brief minor interludes between the major cooling and ice periods. It’s been warm, actually warmer, at times much warmer, as Homo sapien came of age in this optimum. Below, and tracking “paleo” or “old…deep” climate over 400,000 years, a clear cyclic pattern emerges, and the Neolithic emergence is crammed into the far right red uptrend after the last four glacial/inter-glacial periods:

^[11]

Demographics: Husbandry, Agriculture, Cities

Below, John Garrett charts another very clever “model” of human history. Actually, it’s a model within a model and it transitions us from ecology to demographics. Notice that the top half, the last 10,000 years, depicts the various cairn-points on the trail – dogs team up with humans, agriculture emerges and enables settling and cities, then the progression to the printing press and industry of the 19^th-20^th centuries.

(Source: Image by John Garrett; https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=424)

The lower half model attempts to chart the larger one million year Homo genus trail and includes our other now lost cousins, (Homo antecessor, Homo erectus, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo neanderthalensis). “We” (Homo sapiens) came along only very, very recently, perhaps the last 300-250,000 years or @10,000 generations. The jagged blue line at the base shows the sporadic and changing record of global temperatures. All of our human and proto-human time has been dominated by cold and ice, very deep ice.

The history of human populations (demographics) is intimately interwoven with what our ecology and climate are up to. They manage us. We adapt. Climate, deceptively “steady” on day-to-day or decade-to-decade or even century to century intervals, portrays very different and more daunting patterns on a larger, “creeping,” thousand- or hundred-thousand-year perspective. And it’s writ large with perilous fluctuations. Change is the radical norm of climate. It’s climate over the 100,000 year (4,000 human generations) span of an average ice age, and then punctuated by brief 10-15,000 year warm periods. Roughly, optimums last 1-2 minutes ago if earth’s 4.5 billion years were scaled into a 365-day year. [15,000/4,500,000,000 X (60 minutes X 24 hours X 365 days)].

So-called “civilization,” at least so far, is a climate optimum event, a warming moment in the very long and more realistic “cold” span of climate time. Just 20,000 years ago, Canada’s 21^st century lush forests were buried under the Laurentide, a 10,000 foot deep ice shelf, which paleo-climatologists estimate grew and receded, then grew again over at least the last 2.5 million years. Or roughly 2-3 minutes ago in our scaled model.

WG takes seriously the paleo-climatological record as we attempt to account for the move of human demographics out of deep time and into the near and long future. Climate casts a defining light and shadow over human existence. Climate happens more in thousand and hundreds of thousand year cycles more than in daily or weekly forecasts.

We, all global life, are creatures of the Milankovitch Cycles, the million-thousand-hundred-year dance between the Earth and the Sun. Difficult for us today, with our instant iPhoned weather-reports, to imagine. We cannot read climate, its past or future, as a simple or “clean” set of facts or predictions.

The two dominant trends of the Neolithic, global warming (Wild Ecology) and population growth (Wild Demographics), carry one and the same momentum. With warmth civilization begins to thrive.

It appears that, after thousands of years of warming climes, humans gradually commenced to team up with other creatures (animal husbandry; canine domestication) and to grow foodstuffs (early agriculture; emmer wheat cultivation). The transition from hunter-gatherer-foraging to settled agriculture was uneven – it lurched forward and retreated for several thousand years.

Settling offered potential advantages (reliable food resources) but also disadvantages (poorer nutrition, vulnerability to crop failure) over hunting-gathering-foraging. The two lifestyles competed and for a long time.

Quoted in the Great Lectures, “Big History – Agriculture, Lecture #4; see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZn98bIhqnE. ↑
Joel Mokyr, 2009, in interview with Kling and Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity, p. 132. ↑
“At IBM…so satisfied was the computer giant with the fat, 60% profit margins on its flagship mainframe that it was asleep to the tectonic shift unfolding in computing, which dislodged mainframes in favor of the personal computer.” (Roger Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash – The Great Bubble and its Undoing, New York, Penguin Press, 2004, p. 5). ↑
In the Uto-Aztecan language of the Nahautl, “atlatl” derives from the word “atla,” to throw. [Source: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Nahuatl] ↑
From the ancient Greek (“πλεῖστος” or pleīstos, “most”) and (“καινός” or “kainós, Latin “cænus,” or “new”). Source: Wikipedia. ↑
Our high school biology teacher, Mr. Robert Kirkman, taught us the binomial nomenclature with the mnemonic, “Kirkman plays craps on Friday, good sport!” – he was a cairn-logic thinker of the highest order. ↑
Eugene P. Odum, “The Emergence of Ecology as a New Integrative Discipline – Ecology must combine holism with reductionism if applications are to benefit society,” SCIENCE, 3-25-1977, V. 195, Number 4284, pp. 1289-1293; Odum is quoting from J.K. Fiebleman, British Journal of Philosophy & Science, 5, 154, 1954. ↑
Taleb, Nassim Nicolas, The Black Swan, 2007, 167-168. ↑
E.J. Chaisson, “A Unifying Concept for Astrobiology,” International Journal of Astrobiology 2 (2): 91–101 (2003) Printed in the United Kingdom DOI: 10.1017/S1473550403001484 f 2003 Cambridge University Press, p. 7: “Actually, the term ‘natural selection’ is itself a misnomer, for no known agent in Nature deliberately selects. Selection is not an active ‘force’ or promoter of evolution as much as a passive pruning device to weed out the unfit. As such, selected objects are simply those that remain after all the poorly adapted or less fortunate ones have been removed from a population of such objects. A better term might be ‘non-random elimination’, a phrase long championed by one of the leading evolutionists of the 20th century, Ernst Mayr (1997). What we really seek to explain are the adverse circumstances responsible for the deletion of some members of a group. Accordingly, selection can be broadly taken to mean preferential interaction of any object with its environment – a more liberal interpretation that also helps widen our view of evolution.” ↑
Source: http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/evol.html ↑
Jouzel J, et al. (2007a) EPICA Dome C Ice Core 800K Yr Deuterium Data and Temperature Estimates. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series # 2007-091. NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.; in Wrightstone, Gregory, Inconvenient Facts, Silver Crown Productions, LLC., p. 39. ↑

Hints at How We do "Wild G"

2022-01-04T00:00:00Z

“Method,” “Data” & “Rules of Thumb”–“History,” “Bios,” “Ethos-Praxis,” “Cairn-Logic”

The reader will notice how Wild Globalization (“WG”) uses both “rules of data” learned or gathered from the sciences (e.g., volcanism, geology, climatology, biology) or the humanities (e.g., history, economics, philosophy, religion), but how it also deploys practical rules picked up by experience, by accident, from everyday trial and error, often without formal account – an intuition – a subtle trekking skill that’s not afraid to fall and then regain its footing, or as the wonderful thinker, Michael Polanyi, himself both a scientist and philosopher, named it, “tacit” knowing.[1] So you might ask yourself – “How did you learn to ride a bicycle?” Did you get it from a book, or did someone first help you along and then, voila!, you were off?[2]!

A person riding a bike with a child on the back.

Formal science shores up our thinking, it tightens and sharpens observation, it demands experimental reproduction, and it inspires communities of cross-testing interrogators. It records the status of our current knowledge (or ignorance) and advises our approach to a phenomenon or problem. Yet in its immense and impressive achievements – Apollo on the Moon, the Polio vaccine, cosmological physics – even “data-” or “theory-knowing” works with a “quiet” or “tacit” dimension, what Polanyi recognized as a “gestalt,” “an active shaping of experience,” a magical power of perception “by which all knowledge is discovered and, once discovered, is held to be true.”

True? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Paying it its due, we will notice that science’s best performances actually produce something other than “truth,” but rather a kind of intense rugby match of method, observations, and contested arguments rather than merely tight conclusions. We will find that science, research science especially, is not “settled.”[3] It’s not that scientific investigators merely “disagree” – rather, they are approaching a subjet of inquiry, let’s say “climate,” for example, often with very different data-gathering or theoretical methods, and those different methods often yield data-sets that don’t match up neatly or which in fact even challenge a given theory.

For example, the meterologist focuses primarily on very current data (150 years); the meterological forecaster uses computer algorithems to try to “model” past-current-future events (e.g., hurricanes, typhoons, tomorrow’s weather); and the paleo-climatologist uses “proxy” sets of chemical and geological evidence (e.g., ice cores, isotopes, ocean sediments) to try to reconstruct climate conditions over longer periods of Earth’s deep history (hundreds to thousands to millions of years). They are all researching “climate.” Sometimes they agree and other times not so much. So what? Is that such a problem? Or might it rather be an advantage because it drives their research forward and constantly calls their findings, their theories, into question? It’s quite often the “gaps” and breeches in understanding, and even the rogue thinkers, who see into and between the gaps and then open new insights.

Putting folks on the moon was a “complete story,” a hand-clapping, marvelous achievement. But researching how the Moon was formed, or how the Moon and planets in the Solar System have shaped our climate over Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, or how the Milankovitch Cycles (see “Wild Ecology”) affect climate, well, that’s not such a quick study. Instead, science and research are better read as well-orchestrated and extremely disciplined “games” that intentionally pursue various methods which then generate different data-sets, and then, delighfully, wrestling matches of interpretations, often over very well-prepared adult beverages – one of our first local micro-breweries here in Boulder Valley was started by a buch of scientists wanting British-pub quality beer instead of a standard Schlitz.

WG’s bicycle-like ride through terrains and issues will demand a firm grip on the handlebars – on the one hand an exacting grasp of the details and subtleties of data, and on the other hand a practiced and practical common sense, a healthy welcome to debate, and a subtle sense of “perception” that, possibly, at certain ecstatic moments, might let us ride hands free. Knowing, like riding a bicycle, always has a hidden, unknowable dimension, indeed, a “wildness.”

History

“History,” our deep story, often, even usually, moves ahead of civilization. WG observes that humans respond and adjust to emerging historical circumstances rather than controlling unfolding events. Though we are far removed from the savannahs and jungles, history remains “wild,” maybe even wilder, than ever.

WG has a “starting point,” a kind of presumed “beginning,” and hence an “approach,” a “point of view,” a set of biases and initial perceptions, presumptions.

“Facts” are never known as much as they are “interpreted.” History, it is said, is often “written by the victors.” WG wants to try to hear from the losers too, those under-sided facts and souls suppressed or lost to history’s triumphs and rampages, its flows. [Note: A splendid example of this cairn-loigic is found in Clint Eastwood’s and Iris Yamashita’s storytelling of the WWII Battle of Iwo Jima – first, Flags of Our Fathers recalls the American experience, and then Letters from Iwo Jima tells the Japanese story.] WG wants to explore and try to think about what is hidden in history’s annals and archives, possibly lurking beneath the surfaces of its well-lit spaces.

Living history is perhaps a bit like riding a great ocean wave to shore – you’re not “thinking” as you fly down the wave’s slope or through the barrel of its tube – in a really big 100-footer the surfer is riding and, let’s be honest, probably praying like mad – and so intuitively guessing where and how the wave is moving the board and what’s the best angle and speed to ride its momentum out. Balancing on Polanyi’s bicycle.

Understanding history, on the other hand, is like remembering what just happened – the wave is gone, it’s now just an ephemeral flash of brilliance or disaster, it’s now the foam on the sand beneath your feet. In gratitude, and maybe even ecstasy, the surfer is now “telling” the wave’s story, recounting the glorious successful ride or, just as poignantly, the disastrous wipe-out. Surfers, it would seem, live a different kind of existence, an immediate and “sudden” and, in a sense, very honest “real.” Likely they prefer to talk less of the wave and would rather just turn around and catch the next one.

How to test this?

We can discern two deep, 20^th century themes, or “waves,” that forbode our 21^st century’s “peril” and “prosperity.” First, history’s peril is clear and present and dangerous in the two catastrophic world wars that vanquished perhaps 75+ million souls and, quite unexpectedly, shocked and nearly crushed global civilization in the century’s first 50 years.

Yet in the century’s second half, new global prosperities emerged, if still under the threat of a cold-war nuclear shadow. The wrecked remains of Europe and Asia, along with a super-charged United States, suddenly re-set into competing global market orders – relatively “open market” models in the West and “controlled market” models in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Both would compete in third world boundary spaces.

As these new possibilities of prosperity emerged, though, we observe both beneficent or “intended” consequences – for example, wide-reaching economic development, the prospect of abundant nuclear power, the promise of controlling disease and famine, the exploration of the universe. At the same time, these same circumstances manifested deficient “unintended” consequences – in the West, violent civil rights movements, the Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear accidents, and large-scale industrial pollution, massive amounts of space junk. In the Soviet and Chinese models the facts reveal the horrors of millions of souls lost in Gulags and cultural revolutions, millions more lost to public policy triggered famines, even worse industrial pollution, and the most catastrophic human-caused environmental disaster when Chernobyl’s Number 4 nuclear reactor exploded on April 26^th, 1986.

These under-currents color the “good and evil” of history’s recent 20^th century path, and they shadow the portal through which the our current 21^st century challenges emerge.

WG reads “intended” consequences as the ways societies try to make their way through new problems and challenges – governing leaders try to shape viable public “policies.” At the same time, we know that “unintended” consequences are ever present in the same decisions and policies – future results can be unpredictable and leaders can be foolish, arrogant, even and often corrupt. The human condition, especially as it “scales” to billions of souls on the planet, gets riskier and more vulnerable.

History, we are suggesting, is “wild” – we struggle to agree on, let alone understand, the past. We argue and debate and even fight over present policy, and we too often fail to predict the consequences of even our most well-laid plans.

WG is looking to reinvigorate critical thinking and to hunt out a renewed humility of perception.

The reader may come to see how our human story emerged in the wild spaces and shadows of human and, actually, pre-human, evolution. That is, to give the reader a peek at what lies ahead, the paleo-record seems to reveal how our proto-human ancestors vied in deadly competitions that consummated in both conception (gene-pooling) and, just as often, and more violently, in species extinctions. A bushwhacking survey of pre-historic humans reveals their mastery of fire, cooking, and tool/weapon-making (technology); the management of scarce resources and excess production of foods and fuels (economy); and most miraculously, the transformational emergence and dominance of human intelligence and language (culture). Indeed, pre-human evolution reveals the radical transformation of evolution itself. What emerges is “hyper-nature” – “organic” evolution now transformed into “innovation” evolution.

WG will explore how the human story is in fact still wild and so “hyper-natural.” We are riding a wild wave first endowed from “nature” herself. And as our powers continue to emerge and grow, the ride grows even wilder and will require our best technical and moral survival skills.

Bios

“We” – humans – that is, and all planetary life, are residents of Planet Earth. With our every breath life is global. Our home is just this fragile, gossamer thin and incredibly vulnerable layer of reality, spinning in a curiously eccentric and elliptical orbit around and at just the serendipitously exact distance from a solar center to facilitate precious biological life, this Bios. By any measure or leap of existential faith, we, and our planet, are a kind of inevitable miracle. “Inevitable” because of the likelihood that life is universal – there may be billions (upon billions…etc.) of other earth-like possibilities in the universe. A “miracle” because, when we imagine the track from the “Big Bang” to the Bios to human presence, whether we are accidental or intentional seems incidental to the elegance and splendor of this miraculous phenomenon we call “life,” perhaps perceived most intimately when we hold the new-born human child as it emerges from the womb.

We hominids are a kind protozoan-to-metazoan end-game – “we” emerged first from the oceans and then from its gardens, and still carry all the evolutionary traces of our origins.

Evolution is essentially about two magnificent and magical processes – on the one hand, survival, eking out and even flourishing an existence, and on the other hand, extinction¸ or what may appear to be extinction. That is, nearly every species that has ever graced the planet is either extinct, vanished, or, more likely, some of its DNA has passed on, “inherited,” by succeeding life-forms.

It gets wilder.

It’s thought that, of the billions, or possibly even trillion, life-forms that have ever existed on Earth, all descended from a single micro-organism or microbe stretching back perhaps 4 billion years. “That microbe is both extinct and survives in every living thing.”[4] This is the magic of reproduction, in its broadest sense, what WG will call “sex – demographics.”

Humans, as will quickly become obvious, though, are utterly unique – while we co-exist with all life-forms, our radically different version of evolution also creates risks and vulnerabilities for all other life on earth. Consequently, the secret sauce of human evolution mixes both innovation-driven survival and advancement (WG-Part I), and in the same telling, and even more critical for the planet’s survival, it must include equal or greater portions of a uniquely human moral and ethical intelligence (WG-Part II). In a word, “wisdom,” scratched from and carried down through our ancestor’s marches, their successes, their failures and errancies, even the miracles and horrors of theirs and our story.

For the moment, however, we might stretch our vision even deeper and ask, “…does a “global” inquiry stop there…or is an earth-bios itself not immersed in a Solar System, which is ensconced in a “Universe…?” Are we not then…“universal?”

Ethos & Praxis

Someone once asked Margaret Mead to identify in the fossil record what she thought was an early sign of human “civilization.” It’s said she referred to a fractured human female femur that had healed – given the time necessary for such a severe injury to mend Mead thought this ancient ancestor would not have survived without an intense amount of care and protection from her family or community. She summed it up with the idea of “altruism.”[5]

Curiously, Adam Smith, an early modern thinker about “economy[3]” may not have actually thought of himself as an “economist” but more likely would have described his work as “moral philosophy,” so an early thinker about how newly emerging human productivities and markets were, or might be, better arranged to improve the “wealth of nations.” It’s debated, hotly, whether Smith’s work reflects a sensitivity to some productive life “force” – an “invisible hand” – or was he rather laying bricks for what his bookend thinker, Karl Marx, would awkwardly and inadequately name “capitalism?” We’ll explore both thought-leaders, but what emerges from both their concerns is just this universal Ethos – how or can freedom and justice co-exist? Can we achieve both a “free” market and a “just” earth-space for ourselves and all living creatures?

Today, while we might track the history of modern globalization from, say, 1820-present, observers from as early as the 6^th century Jains in India to the primatologist Jane Goodall call us to a deeper ethical instinct. They remind us that prosperity must, and in fact, already includes all Earth-life. Their call is for practical “bio”-survival and at the same time for an “ethos” of care and action, a bio-ethos practice. The unique survival challenge is to figure out that there can be no viable hominid Bios without an equally vital human “ethos,” so both a call and a responsibility to Earth’s full bio-community. When the oceanic plankton suffer or thrive, “we,” from protozoans to humans,[6] all suffer or thrive. Many peoples, many nations, One Earth. To recall Beth Shapiro’s image, above, “…a single microbe…both extinct and yet surviving…”

“Wild Globalization” speaks to this bios/ethos arrangement. Global wildness turns on this bio-eco realness and the impossibility of human (or Earth survival) absent a practical–ethical conscience. In the nuclear age, this consciousness is unrestrained.

So a third and working rule of thumb jumps up: this bio-ethos arrangement is not some “holier than thou” or special or elite human talent or capacity. No, first and foremost, it’s a – to use a technical term – “wild-ass” and practical game, a life and death circumstance. It doesn’t start with debates about “ideological” motivations – it starts with what is pragmatic[4], what “works,” what’s “practical,” what’s our praxis[5]? And what will be the intended and, more crucially, the possible unintended consequences, of a given strategy or policy. Let’s break “praxis” down further into four key attitudes:

First, we can ask “What are the “facts?[6]” What are the bits of evidence that we think we have observed, that we can roughly or accurately acknowledge as evidence – we may not fully agree on what they mean, but we can generally accept them into the data-set of our inquiries.

Second, and as the great, “wild” 19^th century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, exclaimed, “there are no facts, only interpretations,”[7] praxis is about living with each other as we debate and argue and wrestle with interpreting what we think the facts are and what they say to us. Another way of reading this is that human thought, and science in particular, are not about “consensus,” about everyone in the game agreeing on what the facts are or say – quite the contrary, science, and practical investigation in general, are more about an “evenly hovering attention”[8] over and testing of the “facts” (see attitude #3, next), and then arm-wrestling with our opposing theories and interpretations that attempt to describe and best account for the facts and outcomes. It’s important to emphasize this attitude and so we listen here to the medical doctor and science story-teller Michael Crichton’s vision of science and data and the advancement of human knowledge:

“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”[9]

Thank you, Michael.

Third, ideas and discoveries often emerge in advance of what we know or think we know at the moment – our thinking and knowledge lags the wild real. For example, we’ll soon learn about two astronomers who accidentally discovered the residual radiation of the Big Bang when they were cleaning bird poop off their radars – and then won the 1978 Nobel prize in physics when they figured out what was actually going on! Ideas, discoveries, often sneak out from under our thinking, they emerge, like a “Eureka!” moment: “Useful knowledge more often than not emerges before people know what it will be used for.”[10]

Fourth, re-read #3. And #1 and #2. Hence, praxis might think seriously about starting small before going big – if possible, test facts and policy and consequences locally before casting the broad net over larger national strategies. Take the interpretation fight (#1 and #2) seriously, and respect the lag of getting ideas to actually work. Set test spaces to pursue numbers 1 and 2 and 3, above, rigorously, before putting them on the big stage or into national public policy arena.

Fifth, finally, putting 1-4 together, and this is most critical to a sober and practical attitude, praxis openly accepts, and in fact constantly reminds itself of the limits of investigation or learning. Praxis accepts that it can’t know or doesn’t have, or that it is simply impossible to know all the facts from a given case or problem, or all the variations of a given fact, or to precisely and accurately measure or track each or all of the data-points of a given case – the “data-set” is always incomplete – it itself “lives” on a wild and indefinitely variable information horizon. And that’s just the current set of facts at hand. Praxis has to admit to itself that, if the data we think we have in the present are incomplete or imperfect or variable – can you say “weather forecasting…?” – then facts projected into the future are likely to be even more unpredictable, variable, and hard, likely impossible, to get a grip on. Praxis embraces and constantly hounds its own limits. It accepts that an investigation or act of learning in the present may not, and likely cannot include unknown facts or data from the future – could anyone in Newton’s time have predicted the theoretical “discovery” of the Big Bang event, Quantum physics, or Black Holes…? NassimNicolas Taleb tells the story in his seminal book, The Black Swan, of how honest, heads-up praxis becomes increasingly unstable and unpredictable as it tries to predict deeper and deeper into future events. He describes how the great mathematician, Henrí Poincaré, first realized from his critique of his own data and equations that increasing complexity quickly creates unpredictability or “nonintegrability.” Taleb gives example of how the contemporary English mathematician and pool player, Michael Berry, takes this up with a billiard ball example:

“If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table…and to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome.”[11]

Summary: Praxis is wild with consequences both simple, intended, obvious, but also wildly behind or out of its control, even its imagination. It tries to track and focus on the data, still seeking more data, but civilly thinking about, debating, arguing, possibly arriving at “theories” or “hypotheses,” but sharply aware of its own practical limits, ever critical of its hidden human vanities, arrogances, and hubris. It thrives on a healthy, humble, working skepticism so it may remain open to revision as it encounters new data or angles of approach, open always to emerging haggles and fights over the real.

Cairn Logic

Along the way – and the 2-3 million year path from the forests and savannahs to a New York City or a London or a Beijing is a stretch – WG will be suspicious of what we think we know, it will be wary of seeing the world as an already fully mapped space.

Maps lay out boundaries, abstracted edges, some geographical, others political, still others cultural, but any map, including WG’s sketches, should be only warily or uneasily trusted.

WG will move just as easily tracking “cairns” – ancient pre-map markers, piles of stones along or off the trail that continue to serve as both natural “mnemonics,” that is, memory traces or triggers, but which, curiously, may also become memorials, or “sacred” sites.

Along with maps, then, WG will try to deploy a complementary or second-level thinking. So on the one hand an on-trail, i-Phoned GPS geolocator mapping, but at the same time and on the other hand, a bushwhacking off-trail trekking-intuition, a “cairn-logic.”

Old Stone Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland.

Cairn-logic, because it can work on and off-trail, applies the above rules of data and thumbs. It questions, inquires, and interrogates the data, but in a more decisive way it questions and interrogates itself. Constantly, consistently, stubbornly.

Consequently, the reader will notice, and eventually may even tool up to practice, a kind of subversive suspicion about the “status quo,” or state of affairs, of any current accepted idea or explanation or public policy. Because cairn-logic will uncover past errors and over/under-sights, or false narratives, we may develop revived habits of critical thinking. A hint at cairn-logic may reveal several intriguing, yet disturbing, disruptions in the ways we have come to hold the past, or present. Random queries pop up, such as:

What is nature…what is “natural”?
Were our early human ancestors “primitive” or were they actually the most phenomenal revolutionaries in human evolution, that is, “prime” innovators of economy, tech, and culture?
Were the Dark Ages really “dark”?
What is “money”? When and how does it appear in history?
What is religion and how important is it now that we “know” and can manipulate the atom, or have AI?
Why does slavery get going and how and why does it “end”…or has it?
Why or how or does the Industrial-Scientific Revolution first gain traction in the “West” rather than the Orient?
How “safe” is planet Earth and what are its most real ecological risks?
What the heck is the System “D” or “shadow” economy?

OK, so what’s the takeaway here? In very simple terms we might recall the great Buddhist attitude: “Question everything…especially your questioning.” Evenly hovering intellectual and existential attention exerts this careful suspicion, and it also turns its suspicion back on itself. It’s not just that the facts are debatable, subject to interpretation, it’s that we need to be realistic about our own limitations when we think we can comprehensively and accurately account for the facts, or even more presumptuously, precisely calculate or predict future results, particularly as we deploy public policy strategies. Recall Mike Berry’s pool game story.

Wild Globalization moves in this arrangement of interrogation – the reader can think of it as a revised way to imagine our bios, as an ethos-driven rethinking of “Where have we come from?” and “What’s going on now?” and “Where do we go from here?”

What’s at stake in the 21^st century? Everything. But then everything has always been what’s at stake, at risk, in our very brief trek on this obscure, blue watery speck of universal reality we call Earth.

Part I will first attempt to re-imagine and track a history of globalization, from our African savannah “beginnings” to the new jungles of the “ICT” (“Information-Communication Technology”) revolution. Then we will dive more deeply, outside the routine metrics and narratives, into globalization’s various “flowing” momentums –Wild Ecology, Wild Sex & Culture, Wild Tech, Wild Economy, and Wild Governance. As we bushwhack together on and off the trail a first chore might be to notice how these flows sneak into and energize the story. A second chore might be to discern how and if WG’s text makes sense, how or is it, in fact, riding and telling the story of the wave, or not?

[1] Jaco Blund, iStock ID 1126785367.

[2] A splendid example of this approach is found in Clint Eastwood’s and Iris Yamashita’s storytelling of the WWII battle of Iwo Jima. A first movie, Flags of Our Fathers, tells the American experience; the second, Letters from Iwo Jima, tells the Japanese experience.

[3] The term “economy,” from the Greek oikonomos, means “manager of a household” – so our family household on a small scale and our national and then global “family” on the larger scale.

[4] Pragmatic: Dealing or concerned with facts or actual circumstances; practical; from the Greek root prāg- “to do.” (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/pragmatic)

[5] Praxis: Practical application or exercise of a branch of learning; habitual or established practice; custom; from Latin prāg-, to do. (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/praxis)

[6] Fact: something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed; a real occurrence; an event; Latin factum, deed, from facere, to do. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/fact

[1] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.

[2] Ibid, p. 6.

[3] Koonin, Steven E., Unsettled – What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Dallas, Tx.: BenBella Books Inc., 2021. (Koonin served as Undersecretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under the Obama Administration)

[4] Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It – How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature, New York: Basic Books, 2021, p. 44, Kindle p. 52.

[5] David Barash, Book Review of ‘The Altrusitic Urge’ by Stephanie Preston, WSJ 5-7-22.

[6] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa – Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2020.

[7] “Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.” The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1954, p. 458.

[8] James Hillman, the psychologist-scholar who developed a unique “archetypal” approach to psychology develops this attitude in, among other texts, Revisioning Psychology, Harper & Row, New York, 1975.

[9] Michael Crichton, author-filmmaker (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) and Harvard trained M.D., 2003 CalTech lecture: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/michael-crichton-explains-why-there-is-no-such-thing-as-consensus-science/

[10] The economic historian Joel Mokyr, in an interview with Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity – Intangible Assets, hidden liabilities, and the lasting triumph over scarcity, New York & London, Encounter Books, 2009; republished as Invisible Wealth – The Hidden Story of How Markets Work, New York & London: Encounter Books;

[11] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York: Random House, 2007, 178.

Opening Act

2022-01-05T00:00:00Z

Opening Acts: Globalization – Bushwhacking Its Wild Path

To grasp how we moderns, and our practical social-economies, our deep histories, are so utterly immersed in this global eco-sex-tech-econ-gov condition, lurking in the endnotes the reader might scout out several thought-leaders – we mentioned Smith and Marx and Nietzsche, then Taleb, but watch for others – Fogel, Baldwin, Shapiro, the Odum brothers, and many more, all bushwhackers on the trail.

Immediately ahead, Beth Shapiro’s recent contributions from mitochondrial evolutionary data will re-set our thought about how we became “human” long before we entered the era of “civilization.”¹ Robert William Fogel will light the path with his idea of human techno-physio evolution – the interaction between human physical health (measured objectively by height and weight or “biomass”) and the development of modern technologies, particularly beginning with the Scientific Revolution.² Also in view are Richard Baldwin’s observations about the “Great Divergence/Great Convergence”³ – Baldwin observes that hominids have always been constrained by Earth’s distances, her spaces, and by the challenge of moving three basic resources: 1/goods; 2/ideas; 3/people.

Our Cairn-map borrows from and adds to Baldwin’s, among others, framing of globalization into “epochs” of accumulating knowledge, craft, and innovation. Our version digs far more inquisitively into how these drivers (ecology>sex>tech>economy>governance) are already emergent in pre-history, how “culture” – the arts, language, the faith traditions – play along at least equally with tech-economy-governance, and we place more weight on how globalization tracks the deployment of “energy,” first with the harnessing of fossil fueled fire perhaps 1 million years ago (40,000 generations) and progressing to coal, oil and natural gas and the atom. Global civilization burns under the lamps of innovation and energy.

Thirdly, the seminal environmental economist Howard Odum re-grounds the trek to remind us that “…with the turning of the earth, the sun comes up on fields, forests, and fjords of the biosphere, and everywhere within the light there is a great breath as tons upon tons of oxygen are released from the living photochemical surfaces of green plants…”⁴Climate and ecology embrace and constrain the human global condition.

Wild Globalziation is searching for a new “take” on what we already “know” – or think we know. It’s more of a re-imagining. It asks “What if we imagine ourselves, here in the 21st century, as standing on the shoulders of our deep ancestral brothers and sisters – were they “primitive” or rather “primal” – after the 20th century’s horrors can we claim to be “civilized”? What if this global civilization thing is not new but rather has been building and accumulating over the entire throw of human history…? What happens as we realize that, rather than “un”-natural, we are actually “hyper“-natural – that all of nature’s gifts to us (bipedalism, huge brains, opposing thumbs, language) are the latest experiment of nature’s flow, itself? How does our sense of humanity become more alive (or not) if we awaken to these wild energies (ecology-demographics/culture-technology-economy-governance) flowing through us? What if, on Schumpeter’s or the ancient Vedic gods, Shiva’s (“God of Destruction”) and Vishnu’s (“God of Creation”) shoulders, we re-sense human history as the march of “creation” and “destruction,” as a singular, incessant momentum?

Our journey to re-imagine, re-set, this read of globalization will sketch five epochs – “G1.0 – G5.0” – from (very) roughly 2 million-200,000 BCE to the present:

G1.0: “Hyper-Nature – Out of Energy-Ice-Fire-Innovation” (2 million – 10,000 BCE) – Walking Away and Around…

G2.0: “Settling…Cultivating” (10,000 BCE to 1800 CE) Agriculture, Bondage, the ‘State’ and ‘Civilization’ emerge…

G3.0: “The Great Divergence” (1820 to 1909 CE) Energy, Technology, Cities, Global MAD War, Everything “Scales”…

G4.0: “The Great ‘Internet’ Convergence” (1990 to 2020 CE) – Supply-chained Globalization, Wealth & the Welfare-Debt State, Hyper-Urbanization…

G5.0: “The Street Today” – “IT’d, the Knowledge (Wisdom?) Economy, System D…into the WILD… ”

Hints About Method, Data, Rules of Thumb – History, Bios, Ethos-Praxis, & Cairn-Logic

The reader will notice how Wild Globalization (“WG”) uses both “rules of data” learned or gathered from the sciences (e.g., volcanism, geology, climatology, biology, physics) or the humanities (e.g., history, economics, philosophy, religion), but how it also deploys practical rules picked up by experience, by accident, from everyday trial and error, often without formal account – intuitions – a subtle trekking skill that’s not afraid to fall and then regain its footing, or as the wonderful thinker, Michael Polanyi, himself both a scientist and philosopher, named it, “tacit” knowing.⁵ So you might ask yourself – “How did you learn to ride a bicycle?” Did you get it from a book, or did someone first help you along and then, voila! – you were off⁶…?

Photo credit by Agung Pandit Widuna

Formal science shores up our thinking, it tightens and sharpens observation, it demands experimental reproduction, and it inspires communities of cross-testing interrogators. It records the status of our current knowledge (and ignorance) and advises our approach to a phenomenon or problem. Yet in its immense and impressive achievements – Apollo on the Moon, Hubble-Webb, the Polio vaccine, cosmological physics – even “data-” or “theory-knowing” works with a “quiet” or “tacit” dimension, what Polanyi recognized as a “gestalt,” “an active shaping of experience,” a magical power of perception “by which all knowledge is discovered and, once discovered, is held to be true.”

WG’s bicycle-like ride through terrains and issues will demand a firm grip on the handlebars – on the one hand an exacting grasp of the details and subtleties of data, and on the other hand a practiced and practical common sense, a healthy welcome to debate, and a subtle sense of “perception” that, possibly, at certain ecstatic moments, might let us ride hands free. Knowing, like riding a bicycle, always has a hidden, unknowable dimension, indeed, a wildness.

History

“History,” our deep story, often, even usually, moves ahead of civilization. WG observes that humans respond and adjust to emerging historical circumstances rather than easily controlling events as they unfold. Though we are far removed from the savannahs and jungles, history remains “wild,” maybe, probably, even, wilder, than ever.

WG has a “starting point,” a kind of presumed “beginning,” and hence an “approach,” a “point of view,” a set of biases and initial perceptions, presumptions.

“Facts” are never known as much as they are “interpreted.” History it is said, is often “written by the victors.” We need to try to hear from the losers too, those under-sided facts and souls suppressed or lost to history’s triumphs and rampages, its flows. A splendid example is found in Clint Eastwood’s and Iris Yamashita’s depictions of the WWII battle for Iwo Jima. A first movie, Flags of Our Fathers, tells the American experience; the second, Letters from Iwo Jima, tells the Japanese experience. Formal history is written, archived. But “wild” history must be some interstital time and space between the “flags” and “letters,” in the confluences of passion and terror held in the hearts of the ordinary souls who lived and fought that extraordinary battle. WG wants to explore and try to think about what is hidden in history’s annals and archives, possibly lurking darkly beneath the surfaces of its well-lit spaces, like the tunnels of Iwo Jima.

Living history is perhaps a bit like riding a great ocean wave to shore – you’re not “thinking” as you fly down the wave’s slope or through the barrel of its tube – in a really big 100-footer the surfer is riding and, let’s be honest, probably praying like mad – and so instinctively playing the wave as it moves under board, gauging from experience the best angle and speed to ride its momentum. Balancing on Polanyi’s bicycle.

How to test this?

Yet in the century’s second half, new global prosperities emerged, if still under the threat of a cold-war nuclear shadow. The wrecked remains of Europe and Asia, along with a super-charged United States, suddenly re-set into competing global market orders – on the one side, “open market” models in the West and on the other “controlled market” models in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Each immensely powerful order would then compete in third world boundary spaces.

As these new possibilities of prosperity emerged, though, we observe both beneficent or “intended” consequences – for example, wide-reaching economic development, the prospect of abundant nuclear power, the promise of controlling disease and famine, the exploration of the universe. At the same time, these same circumstances manifested deficient “unintended” consequences – in the West, violent civil rights movements, the Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear accidents, and large-scale industrial pollution, including massive amounts of space junk. In the Soviet and Chinese models the data reveals the horrors of millions of souls lost in Gulags and cultural revolutions, millions more lost to public policy triggered famines, even worse industrial pollution, and history’s most catastrophic human-caused environmental disaster when Chernobyl’s Number 4 nuclear reactor exploded on April 26^th, 1986.

These under-currents color the “good and evil” of history’s recent 20^th century path, and they shadow the portal through which our current 21^st century challenges emerge.

WG reads “intended” consequences as the ways societies try to make their way through new problems and challenges – governing leaders try to shape viable public “policies.” At the same time, we know that “unintended” consequences are ever present in the same decisions and policies – future results can be unpredictable and leaders can be foolish, arrogant, and often corrupt. WG suspects that the human condition, especially as it “scales” to billions of souls on the planet, has grown riskier and more vulnerable.

History, we are suggesting, is “wild” – we struggle to understand, let alone agree on, the “truth” about the past. We argue and debate and even fight over present policy, and we too often fail to predict the consequences of even our most well-laid plans.

WG is looking to reinvigorate critical thinking and to hunt out a renewed humility of perception.

The reader may come to see how our human story emerged in the wild spaces and shadows of human and, actually, pre-human, evolution. That is, to give the reader a peek at what lies ahead, the paleo-record seems to reveal how our proto-human ancestors vied in deadly competitions that consummated in both conception (gene-pooling) and, just as often, and more violently, in species extinctions. A bushwhacking survey of pre-historic humans reveals their mastery of fire, cooking, and tool/weapon-making (technology); the management of scarce resources and excess production of foods and fuels (economy); and most miraculously, the transformational emergence and dominance of human intelligence and language (culture). Indeed, pre-human evolution reveals the radical transformation of evolution itself. What emerges is “hyper-nature” – natural “organic” evolution now transformed into “innovation” evolution. The secret of the Genesis myth, the Serpent and the Apple.

WG will explore how the human story is in fact still wild and therefore “hyper-natural.” We are riding a wild wave first endowed from “nature” herself. And as our powers continue to emerge and grow, the ride grows even wilder and will require our best bicycle-balance, our sharpest technical and moral survival skills.

Bios

“We” – humans – that is – and all planetary life, are residents of Planet Earth. With our every breath life is global. Our home is just this fragile, gossamer thin and incredibly vulnerable layer of reality, spinning in a curiously eccentric and elliptical orbit around and at just the serendipitously exact distance from a solar center to facilitate precious biological life, this Bios. By any measure or leap of existential faith, we, and our planet, are a kind of inevitable miracle. “Inevitable” because of the likelihood that life is universal – there may be billions (upon billions…etc.) of other earth-like possibilities in the universe. A “miracle” because, when we imagine the track from the “Big Bang” to the Bios to human presence, whether we are accidental or intentional seems incidental to the elegance and splendor of this miraculous phenomenon we call “life,” perhaps perceived most intimately when we hold the new-born child as it emerges from the womb.

We hominids are a kind protozoan-to-metazoan end-game – “we” emerged first from the oceans and then from its gardens, and still carry all the evolutionary traces of our origins.

It gets wilder.

It’s thought that, of the billions, or possibly even trillion, life-forms that have ever existed on Earth, all descended from a single micro-organism or microbe stretching back perhaps 4 billion years. “That microbe is both extinct and survives in every living thing.”⁹ This is the magic of reproduction, in its broadest sense, what WG will call “sex – demographics.”

Ethos & Praxis

Curiously, Adam Smith, an early modern thinker about “economy”¹⁰ may not have actually thought of himself as an “economist” but more likely would have described his work as “moral philosophy,” so an early thinker about how newly emerging human productivities and markets were, or might be, better arranged to improve the “wealth of nations.” It’s debated, hotly, whether Smith’s work reflects a sensitivity to some productive life “force” – an “invisible hand” – or was he rather laying bricks for what his bookend thinker, Karl Marx, would awkwardly and vaguely, even inaccurately name “capitalism?” We’ll explore both thought-leaders, but what emerges from both of their concerns is just this universal Ethos – how or can freedom and justice co-exist? Can we achieve both a “free” market and a “just” earth-space for ourselves and all living creatures?

Today, while we might track the history of modern globalization from, say, 1820-present, observers from as early as the 6^th century Jains in India to the primatologist Jane Goodall call us to a deeper ethical instinct. They remind us that prosperity must, and in fact, already includes all Earth-life. Their call is for practical “bio”-survival and at the same time for an “ethos” of care and action, a bio-ethos practice. The unique survival challenge is to figure out that there can be no viable hominid Bios without an equally vital human “ethos,” so both a call and a responsibility to Earth’s full bio-community. When the oceanic plankton suffer or thrive, “we,” from protozoans to humans,¹¹ all suffer or thrive. Many peoples, many nations, One Earth. To recall Beth Shapiro’s image, above, “…a single microbe…both extinct and yet surviving…”

So a third and working rule of thumb jumps up: this bio-ethos arrangement is not some “holier than thou” or special or elite human talent or capacity. No, first and foremost, it’s – to use a very technical term – a “wild-ass!” game, a practical life and death circumstance. It doesn’t start with debates about “ideological” motivations – it starts with what is pragmatic [Definition of “pragmatic”: “Dealing with or concerned with facts or actual circumstances; practical; from the Greek root pragmata], what “works,” what’s “practical,” what’s our praxis?] [Definition of “praxis”: Practical action or exercise of a branch of learning; habitual or established practice, custom; from the Greek praxis.] Pragmatic praxis asks what will be the intended and, more crucially, the possible unintended consequences, of a given strategy or policy. Let’s break “praxis” down further into five key attitudes:

First, we can ask “What are the “facts?”¹² What are the bits of evidence that we think we have observed, that we can roughly or more or less account as evidence – we may not fully agree on what they mean, but we can generally accept them into the data-set of our inquiries.

Second, and as the great, “wild” 19^th century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, exclaimed, “there are no facts, only interpretations,”¹³ praxis is about living with each other as we debate and argue and wrestle with interpreting what we think the facts are and what they say to us. Another way of reading this is that human thought, and science in particular, are not about “consensus,” about everyone in the game agreeing on what the facts are or say – quite the contrary, science, and practical investigation in general, are more about an “evenly hovering attention”¹⁴ over and testing of the “facts” (see attitude #3, next), and then arm-wrestling and brain-twisting with our opposing theories and interpretations that attempt to describe and best account for the facts and outcomes. Michael Crichton, himself both a doctor of medicine and a brilliant science story-teller, cautions us as we approach data and the advancement of human knowledge:

“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.  In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”¹⁵
– Michael Chricton

Thank you, Michael.

Third, ideas and discoveries often emerge in advance of what we know or think we know at the moment – our thinking and knowledge lags the wild real. For example, we’ll soon learn about two astronomers who accidentally discovered the residual radiation of the Big Bang when they were cleaning bird poop off their radars – and then won the 1978 Nobel prize in physics when they figured out what was actually going on! Ideas, discoveries, often sneak out from under our thinking, they emerge, like a “Eureka!” moment: Joel Mokyr reminds that “Useful knowledge more often than not emerges before people know what it will be used for.”¹⁶

Fourth, re-read #3. And #1 and #2. Hence, practical thought and action starts small before going big – in pubic governance, for example, test facts and policy and consequences locally before casting the broad net over larger national strategies. Take the interpretation fight (#1 and #2) seriously, and respect the lag of getting ideas to actually work. Set test spaces to pursue numbers 1 and 2 and 3, above, rigorously, before putting them on the big stage or into national public policy arenas.

Fifth, finally, putting numbers 1-4 together, and this is most critical to a sober and practical attitude, praxis openly accepts, and in fact constantly reminds itself of the limits of investigation or learning. Praxis accepts that it can’t know or doesn’t have, or that it is simply impossible to know all the facts from a given case or problem, or all the variations of a given fact, or to precisely and accurately measure or track each or all of the data-points of a given case – the “data-set” is always incomplete – it “lives” on a wild and indefinitely variable information horizon. And that’s just the current set of facts at hand. Praxis has to admit to itself that, if the data we think we have in the present are incomplete or imperfect or variable – can you say “weather forecasting…?” – then facts projected into the future are likely to be even more unpredictable, variable, and hard, likely impossible, to get a grip on. Praxis embraces and must constantly hound its own limits. It accepts that an investigation or act of learning in the present cannot include unknown facts or data from the future – could anyone in Newton’s time have predicted the theoretical “discovery” of the Big Bang event, Quantum physics, or Black Holes…? Nassim Nicolas Taleb tells the story in his seminal book, The Black Swan, of how honest, heads-up praxis becomes increasingly unstable and unpredictable as it tries to predict deeper and deeper into the future. He describes how the great mathematician, Henrí Poincaré, first realized from his critique of his own data and equations that increasing complexity quickly creates unpredictability or “nonintegrability.” Taleb gives example of how the contemporary English mathematician and pool player, Michael Berry, takes this up with a billiard ball example:

“If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table…and to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome.”¹⁷
Michael Berry

Summary: Praxis is wild, with consequences both simple, intended, obvious, but also wildly behind and beyond or out of its control, even its imagination. It tries to track and focus on the data, still seeking more data, but civilly thinking about, debating, arguing, possibly arriving at “theories” or “hypotheses,” but sharply aware of its own practical limits, ever critical of its hidden human vanities, arrogances, and hubris. It thrives on a healthy, humble, working skepticism so it may remain open to revision as it encounters new data or angles of approach, open always to emerging haggles and fights over the real.

Cairn Logic

Along the way – and our 2-3 million year path from the forests and savannahs to a New York City or a London or a Beijing is a stretch – WG will be suspicious of what we think we know, it will be wary of seeing the world as an already fully mapped space.

Maps lay out boundaries, abstracted edges, some geographical, others political, still others cultural, but any map, including WG’s sketches, should be only warily or uneasily trusted.

Along with maps, then, WG will try to deploy a complementary or second-level thinking. So, on the one hand, an on-trail, i-Phoned GPS geolocator “mapping,” but at the same time, and on the other hand, a bushwhacking off-trail trekking-intuition, a “cairn-logic.”

A stone cairn in Snaefellsnes, Iceland. Photo Credit Attila Adam.

Consequently, the reader will notice, and eventually may even tool up to practice, a kind of subversive suspicion about the “status quo,” or state of affairs, of any current accepted idea or explanation or public policy. Because cairn-logic might uncover past errors and over/under-sights, even false (or not) narratives, we may develop revived habits of critical thinking. A hint at cairn-logic may reveal several intriguing, yet disturbing, disruptions in the ways we have come to hold the past, or present. Random queries pop up, such as:

What is nature…what is “natural”?
Were our early human ancestors “primitive” or were they actually the most phenomenal revolutionaries in human evolution, that is, “prime” (rather than “primitive”) innovators of economy, tech, and culture?
Were the Dark Ages really that “dark”?
What is “money”? When and how does it appear in history?
What is “religion”? Why does its power endure now that we “know” about the atom, or have AI?
Why does slavery get going and how and why does it “end”…or has it?
Why or how or does the Industrial-Scientific Revolution first gain traction in the “West” rather than the Orient?
How “safe” is planet Earth? Is global “warming” or, possibly, “cooling,” our most immediate and real ecological risk?
What the heck is the System “D” or the “Shadow” economy?

Wild Globalization moves in this arrangement of interrogation – the reader can think of it as a revised way to imagine our bios, as an ethos-driven rethinking of “Where have we come from?” and “What’s going on now?” and “Where do we go from here?”

Part I will first attempt to re-imagine and track a history of globalization, from our African savannah “beginnings” to the new jungles and clouds of the “ICT” (“Information-Communication Technology”) revolution. Then we will dive more deeply, outside the routine metrics and narratives, into globalization’s various “flowing” momentums – Wild Sex – Demographics & Culture, Wild Ecology, Wild Tech, Wild Economy-Markets-Capital, and Wild Governance. As we bushwhack together on and off the trail a first chore might be to notice how these flows sneak into and energize the story. A second chore might be to discern how and if WG’s text makes sense, how or is it, in fact, riding and telling the story of the wave, or not?

Photo Credit: Pixabay

1 Shapiro, Beth, Life as We Made It – How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature, New York: Basic Books, 2021.
2 Fogel, Robert William, The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
3 Baldwin, Richard, The Great Convergence – Information Technology and the New Globalization, The Belknap Press of the Harvard U. Press, 2016.
4 Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1971 , p. 5.
5 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.
6 Ibid, p. 6.
7 Koonin, Steven E., Unsettled – What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Dallas, Tx.: BenBella Books Inc., 2021. (Koonin served as Undersecretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under the Obama Administration)
8 A splendid example is found in Clint Eastwood’s and Iris Yamashita’s depictions of the WWII battle for Iwo Jima. A first movie, Flags of Our Fathers, tells the American experience; the second, Letters from Iwo Jima, tells the Japanese experience.
9 Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It – How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature, New York: Basic Books, 2021, p. 44, Kindle p. 52.
10 The term economy, from the greek “oikonomos”, means “manager of a household”- so our family household on a small scale and our national and then global family on the larger scale
11 Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa – Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2020.
12 Fact: something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed, a real occurrence, an event: Latin factum, deed, from facere, to do.
13 “Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.” The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1954, p. 458.
14 James Hillman, the psychologist-scholar who developed a unique “archetypal” approach to psychology develops this attitude in, among other texts, Revisioning Psychology, Harper & Row, New York, 1975.
15 Michael Crichton, author-filmmaker (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) and Harvard trained M.D., 2003 CalTech lecture: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/michael-crichton-explains-why-there-is-no-such-thing-as-consensus-science/
16 The economic historian Joel Mokyr, in an interview with Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity – Intangible Assets, hidden liabilities, and the lasting triumph over scarcity, New York & London, Encounter Books, 2009; republished as Invisible Wealth – The Hidden Story of How Markets Work, New York & London: Encounter Books;
17 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York: Random House, 2007, 178.

Welcome

2022-01-06T00:00:00Z

Wild Ecology

2022-01-07T00:00:00Z

Out of Energy, Ice, Fire…and Darkness

“Warriors sang their “brave songs” Hóka hé! This life will not last forever…Take courage, the Earth is all that lasts…”
Oglala Native War Cry¹

Globalization lives and emerges from a “wild” ecology. Blue, watery, planet Earth, glistening, resilient in her Solar-Galactic-Universal dark home, is carried by uneven momentums of an original “Big Bang” event. If Earth’s 4.5 billion year history were imagined in a 365 day year (525,600 minutes), current data suggests that our genus humans (Homo Sapiens) have been around for about 500,000 years or about an hour of that year. [250,000 / 4,500,000,000 = .000056 X 365 days = 0.020 X 24 hours = .48 hour]. Barely a blip on the geologic clock:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11926892

Stream of Life – Energy “Orders“

“Starting from nothing 4 billion years ago, life somehow contrived to capture high-grade energy from here and there and used it to assemble more life — so successfully, in fact, that life, a very complex form of order, now covers the planet. A second chain reaction of rising order got started with the dawn of agriculture, about eight thousand years ago. Human societies began selectively planting and breeding crops to capture solar energy systematically, and they used the expanding supplies of energy mainly to breed more people, who planted more crops. Humanity’s total energy consumption doubled about every five to ten centuries thereafter, in step with the (slowly) rising population.”
Peter Huber and Mark Mills, The Bottomless Well, 2005.²

We think of “energy” in the present, that is, as we “use” it. And this seems to be the case for wind and solar – the wind-turbine spins, the sun shines into the photovoltaic cell. However, as Huber and Mills point out, the “total energy order” is something altogether different. Any serious thought about wind and solar, as elegant and “clean” as they appear, must include the “total factor production” or what modern economists call “externalities,” that is, the total energy+resource input (including decommissioning and recycling) to gain the net output.

So, what do we have to do, to put together, to get to, say, a modern windmill, and how much “energy” and “resources” do we use to get there. It turns out, a lot! Mills reports that, as of 2019, “...a modern wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of non-recyclable plastic. Building wind turbines to supply half the world’s electricity would require nearly 2 billion tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with 2 billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades.“³ OK…that’s a lot, and a lot more than it appears in the “moment” as the blade spins atop its elegant white tower. You think? The white elegance hides wind tech’s total factor production costs and resources. Or, rather, it all boils down to an “energy pyramid.”

Again, Huber and Mills show us how the “highly ordered energy” we use is actually only a small fraction of the total energy network – in 2003, for example, the U.S. produced 100 raw “Quads” (oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro wind and solar) to arrive at our final usage of about 6 Quads. Who knew?

Source: EIA, Annual Energy Review, 2003⁴

It turns out the energy story is all about “pyramids” and “supply chains” or “grids:”

Energy “pyramids”: Over the Earth’s 4-5 billion years the process of energy ordering gives rise to the gradual capture of exponentially greater energy concentrations (e.g., solar to carbohydrate to carbon, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium). Contrary to the possible entropy of the larger Universe, Earth’s processes appear to reflect increasing energy “orders.” We live in a kind of First Law of Thermodynamics oasis, that is, at least for the time being (life of the Sun), we are gathering, accumulating energy.

So, for example, high-energy modern surgical lasers are powered by an energy supply chain – see below. Approximately @6,600 Kilowatt Hours (kWh) of base thermal energy powers a surgical laser’s final flash product; about half of the total energy reaches the final “highly ordered” kWh’s of concentrated laser energy, while the remaining energy is lost in generation and transmission (energy waste). The same principle holds when we drive our kids to baseball practice – most of the energy to either build or move the vehicle has been inputted while all the final “motive” power (gasoline, coal/natgas/solar/hydro-powered electric) that gets the car (and us) to the game is only the last energy increment.

Or consider this pyramid to get to “laser photons”:

Peter Huber and Mark Mills⁵

Earth’s energy supply-chain: The sun constitutes over 99% of the “mass” of our solar system – “here comes the sun…!” As the QUAD chart above illustrates, all life on Earth is powered by the sun’s energy. First, solar energy is absorbed by vegetation >>> Herbivores transform @10% of solar into carbohydrate energy, expel remainder; >>> Carnivores consume herbivores and absorb an exponentially larger energy fraction >>> Human evolution exploits higher food-chain nutrition (meat) to support larger brain-size and intelligence >>> vast amounts of energy gets naturally stored or “sequestered” in the deep fabric of the Earth itself (e.g., hydrocarbons such as petroleum and natural gas) >>> human evolution exploits these fuels (first wood but then coal-oil-natgas-uranium, as well as immediate hydro-solar/wind sources). Human evolutionary intelligence persistently innovates expansive energy resources – for example, in the recent 1990-2020 “second shale revolution” the U.S. electric grid gradually began to convert from primarily coal-fired production to natural gas fired, and in that period U.S. economic output (Gross Domestic Product or “GDP”) doubled, yet CO2 emissions actually drop to 1990’s levels.

21^st Century Notes: 700-800 million people (out of a total @7.4 billion) do not yet have formal or direct access to electricity, less than 20% have iPhones and consequently expansive energy demand will continue to drive and transform the global economy and its geo-political alliances and inter-dependencies; the 21^st century’s “Cloud” economy, and so the iPad or iPhone in your hands, which now uses 2X Japan’s total national demand, will persist to spontaneously expand and require substantially greater, even exponentially greater, energy resources.

“Big”Climate – Ice & “Optimums”

Earth’s elliptical solar orbit is eccentric and varies in @100,000-year cycles; Earth’s axis tilts obliquely in @41,000-year cycles; finally, induced by a still undefined, unknown force, “gravity,” Earth’s axis shifts, or “wobbles,” in @26,000-year cycles, called the “precession of the equinoxes.”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milankovitch-cycles_hg.png

These solar-system momentums – themselves immersed in galactic and universal momentums we do not fully understand – are highly variable and resist accurate predictability, and they are the singular forces which contribute dramatically to Earth’s climate and ecological history. Paleo-climatologists have developed marvelous and clever methodologies (chemical and geological analysis) to try to discern Earth’s deep eco-history secrets. The “paleo” view offers a rich and compelling alternative data-set to meteorological science’s @150 year data-set of more recent “weather.” A curious footnote arises as we realize that the highly developed “paleo-view” is either out of favor or even discredited by current “climate science” specialists, many of whom are in fact not scientists, at all. Consequently, quite to the contrary of “consensus,” the actual state of climate science appears to be lacking in the essential exchange of views and opposing data sets, it’s missing the civil argumentation and debate, the beer-hall performances even, or the wrestling matches of wit and ardor, that usually shape the background drama of scientific method. Indeed, this lack of beer-hall wildness may itself witness a kind of “wild” or spontaneous order, or rather, and this is the curious fold, an apparent wild suppression of wildness, itself, a holding down of the immensely explosive reach of variable and opposing data-sets, a kind of arrogation over data’s own wild spontaneity.

Climate temperatures vary wildly – paleo-climatological records indicate that temperatures were 8˚C (14˚F) warmer as recently as 120,000 years ago; the present climate optimum is actually cooler than previous optimums. The recent Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of Canada in North America (c. 95,000-20,000 years ago) with depths up to 2 miles (3.2 km) or 10,000 feet as it gouged out the Great Lakes – our human ancestors emerged, survived, and thrived from the ice.

The top half of the chart below (“Global Climate, Human Evolution, and Civilization”) tracks how all of civilization’s written history, @10,000 years ago to present, has occurred during the recent climate optimum. On the chart’s bottom half, note the warmer “Late Pleistocene Interglacial” optimums and Homo sapiens emergence around 250,000 years ago.

Image by John Garrett⁶

Debate “rages’ about Civilization’s influence on climate. Contrary to popular belief, less than one-percent of climate scientists’ @12,000 formal research abstracts (1991-2011) thought “human activity is very likely causing most of the current global warming.” [Source: Cook 2013.] Curiously, both the warming enthusiasts and the paleo-watchers refer to the Milankovitch Cycles as key to our fragile, unstable climate. The “warming” folks characterize “weather as unpredictable…[but] climate is…highly predictable.” [Source: Mann and Kump, 2015]. The longer-toothed “paleo” folks, looking back over thousand- and million-year data sets, on the one hand are highly critical of the “warming” folks shorter 100-200 year data-sets and view climate as highly variable and only predictable in very broad, say, 1000-10,000-100,000 year strokes, if that, and on the other positive angle they note that, for example, CO2 is A/The vital nutrient for vegetation and hence all organisms up the food-chain, and in recent decades CO2 has increased causing an observable “greening” of the planet; and B/They observe that both CO2 levels as well as temperatures have, again, according to their very clever and deep geologic and chemical data-sets, been dramatically higher in previous climate periods. [Source: Robert Carter, 2010.]

OK, it’s a wild fight. But what our inquiry wants to ask is, “Why are these warming and paleo folks apparently not talking, not hashing this out…where’s the beer-hall arm-wrestling matches of wit and data and curiosity…why all this heavy-handed and stuffy sounding rhetorical panic…and, kicker questions, who’s accounting for the energy that will have to spontaneously come on-line to support roughly 2B “stealth economy” humans flooding into our cities needing electricity and wanting cell-phones, etc., or, for folks reading WG right now, over the Cloud, all of us who take “energy” entirely for granted, where are we gonna get the vast new energy resources to run our cute little “smart” i-devices and EV’s – where are we going to get the energy to run this stuff if we have to shut down our energy gathering orders “to survive,” the same energy orders that modern industrial-IT-urban Civilization has been building itself upon, like a herd of famished velociraptors, for 250 years or so?” This folks, this mania, this is wild globalization.*

*Sources

[*Sources: Michael M. Mann and Lee R. Kump, Dire Predictions – Understanding Climate Change, the Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, 2nd Edition, New York: Penguin Random House, 2015; Robert M. Carter, The Counter Consensus, A Paleoclimatologist Speaks, London, Stacey International, 2010; Gregory Wrightstone, Inconvenient Facts – The Science that Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know, Silver Crown Productions LLC, 2017.; J. Cook and S.A. Green SA, et al, 2013, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.” Environ Res Lett 8(2):024024; and Legates DR, Soon W, Briggs WM et al (2015) Climate consensus and ‘misinformation’: a rejoinder to ‘Agnotology, scientific consensus, and the teaching and learning of climate change. Sci Edu 24:299–318, doi: 10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9.]

Perhaps we can all agree that 21^st century souls, along with all of our land and sea co-creatures, breath in this wild climate. Homo sapien sapien emerged from the ice. “Civilization’s” run over the past 10,000 years has been the beneficiary of the present warm climate optimum. Warm optimums are likely the warm pauses, the interruptions, between the dominant 100,000 +/- year-long ice ages. Homo sapiens somehow squeaked out an existence, our existence, as they emerged in the ice’s breathing spaces. The deep data suggests it’s been colder, much, over most of our trek out of the forest and savannah.

“Big” Fire – Volcanism

Fire is the other Ecos story. Volcanoes and “super-“volcanoes randomly dot Earth’s landscape, hide under her oceans, and violently threaten the Bios. The 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption, the largest in U.S. history, reminded us of this natural terror. Yet the St. Helens event was a minor episode – Pinatubo (1991) was 10X greater, Tambora (1815) 100X, and America’s own Yellowstone (@600,000 years ago) was 1000X larger on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (“VEI”):

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VEIfigure_en.svg

Lurking in America’s West lies majestic Yellowstone, a massive gash or “caldera” in the Earth’s surface – the largest volcano on the planet. Its geologic record extends at least 2-3 million years, the same window in time as human emergence. Its most recent eruptions occurred @640,000 and then @160,000 years ago – they disrupted and threatened all earth life.

These super-“fire” events spew massive amounts – measured in cubic miles or kilometers – of volcanic materials (especially sulfur gases) into the atmosphere and trigger what scientists call “volcanic winters” – catastrophic disruption of vegetation, and at the extreme, famines and species extinctions.

Such events punctuate all G1.0-G5.0 Wild Globalization – the Toba super-eruption @71-73 Kya⁷, the 1159 BCE Hekla Iceland eruptions, El Salvador’s 535 CE Llopango, Asia’s 946 CE Paektu, Indonesia’s 1257 CE Samalas, New Zealand’s 1315-17 CE Mount Tarawera, the Shepherd Island 1452 CE eruption, Peru’s Huaynaputina in 1600 CE, and as recent as Iceland’s 1783 Mt. Laki, or Indonesia’s 1815 Mt. Tambora or Krakatoa in 1883. Even the very recent 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines cooled global temperatures for 2-3 years.

“Volcanic winter” aftermaths wreak havoc on global life, especially human culture now dependent upon modern agriculture – 100,000 Irish and 200,000 Europeans are thought to have perished from famines and typus between 1816-1819 following the 1815 Mount Tambora event, the largest eruption in recorded human history.⁸

Fire and ice are the natural extremes of our tiny blue watery planet home. The simple Wild Globalization fact is that our nearly 8 billion souls – dependent on global supply chains and modern food production – are at graver and “wilder” risk today than at any time in our evolutionary history.

Wild Darkness

Blue earth seen from the moon surface: Elements of this image are furnished by NASA

Climate and fire are merely what is “seen” in the visible light spectrum. The Apollo missions captured some of the first images of the Earth seen from space. What do we see? Most will notice the “blue Earth” suspended in “space.” Equally, or more amazing, is the “background” – the vast, incommensurable reach of the universe in which our Earth lives. The darkness.

The brilliant American astronomer, Vera Rubin (1928-2016), was instrumental in convincing scientists “that at least 90% of the total spiral mass, and hence the total mass in the universe is dominated by nonluminous (i.e., “dark”) matter. It took 50 years for the discoveries of Zwicky (1933) and Smith (1936), that clusters of galaxies contained unseen matter, to make it to mainstream astronomy.”⁹

Wild, universal darkness is, it seems, a “dark fullness.” As Rubin reminds us, darkness is the “residual” real of life as we “see” it. Wild Globalization will think a lot about residuals.

Summary of Ecology

Globalization lives in Earth’s magical and wild ecology, Her Ecos. The Earth’s ecology is the home, the “marketplace,” the biggest trail, of earth-life. Globalization emerges from this wild Ecos.

Ecology is part of the “illumed and dark” matter of our global landscape – everything we think we know or can measure or estimate about globalization lives in a natural world – a natural world that is contiguous with the Big Bang, Creation.

We might believe we know or can control, even dominate, Ecology, but of course its physical [and metaphysical] mystery envelops us, holds us.

1 Gardner, Mark Lee, The Earth is All That Lasts – Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation, Boston: Mariner Books, 2022., p. 16
2 Peter Huber & Mark Mills, The Bottomless Well, – The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, New York: Basic Books, 2005, pp. 174-175.
3 Mark Mills, “If You Want ‘Renewable Energy’ Get Ready to Dig,” Wall Street Journal, August 5th, 2019.
4 Huber, Peter and Mills, Mark, p. 10.
5 IBID, p. 46.
6 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=424
7 “Kya” denotes thousands of years ago.
8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
9 Vera C. Rubin, “One Hundred Years of Rotating Galaxies,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 112:747-750, June 2000, p. 748; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/316573.

Wild Governance

2022-01-08T00:00:00Z

The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis.

“We had allowed the system to race ahead of our ability to protect it.”
Brooksley Born, 2007-09 Financial Crisis Inquiry Report¹

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history, a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave.”
H.A.L. Fisher²

“…in politics, in corporate or governmental organization…a wholly new society…yesterday’s rules [are becoming] obsolete…something revolutionary is happening…not merely in the birth of new organizational forms but in the birth of a new civilization. A new code book is taking form.”
Alvin Toffler ³

Quick Take…

Wild Globalization (“WG”)…Ecology-DEMOGRAPHIC-Tech-Economy WAVES…moves ahead of civilization and its governance.

Formal (“big”) governance attempts to arrange human “orders” (e.g., polis, legal, societal, monetary, the formal economy, the “academy” of universities and “higher education”) and so integrate “values” (social-economic-political philosophies, faith-traditions, egalitarian concerns) into formal arrangements and conventions (institutions). Nations are instituted, or “constituted,” into executive, legislative, and legal systems. As well, public corporations are run by “boards of directors” and “bylaws.” And apex faith traditions, exemplified by the Catholic Church, can have formal and highly complex governance, including their own political “state” (the Vatican). Even Paris’ great Louvre Museum or New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art stand as permanent “institutions” of the arts.

And yet, rising spontaneously from day-to-day “street” interplay, we observe humans shaping themselves into less formal, private (“small”), even “counter-cultural” arrangements (the arts, social media, closely held business, independent intellectuals, entrepreneurs and inventors, spiritual societies). Your local hardware store or family-owned restaurant, the Doors or Rolling Stones or Beatles “rock’n’roll” bands, brilliant and original intellects like Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Benoit Mandelbrot, genius inventors like Thomas Edison, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Steven Jobs, or artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude who built the spectacularly yet ephemeral 1976 24-mile Running Fence through the northern California hill country – and then tore it down. And in the ever-wilder 21st century’s global marketplace, we observe over 1 million souls per week spilling into urban centers, often forming hyper-local neighborhood governances, and overwhemling, even defying formal bureacracies, in fact, the shocking “street-up” overflow of entirely unpredictable new social “orders.”

Tracking our wild cairn-logic, these “big” and “small” momentums pressure one another and inter-play in a “state” of incessant, unstable, and hyper-natural evolution.

WG tries to re-read, even re-imagine, governance. Why? Well, can we really claim we understand even the most recent 20^th century, which reads like a Janus-faced collision of peril (1900-1945 world wars and Holocaust; Fisher’s (above) “one emergency following upon another”) and prosperity (1945-2000 globalization re-set and “convergence”)? And then there’s Toffler’s prescient observation of a “new civilization…a new code…” emerging under our feet. Either way, civilization’s “orders,” whether we like it or not, are being re-grounded and re-defined in the wild spaces and interstices of global life.

Longer Take…

Wild Governance needs a longer take because it’s really the result of how we presume we can “govern” this Ecos-Sex-Tech-Econ black box, which incessantly inter-and over-flows, which is deceptively unstable, and therefore which, as we contend here, defies easy or simple definition or precise quantification.

So, on a lighter side, might governance be better viewed from the angle of “play” or “game” theory? For example, might we observe that our “democratic” governance, at least its day-to-day Washington D.C. version, looks more like a modern game of American tackle football:

Start with a modern sports stadium (a formal edifice, a marbled “structure”…think the Roman “Forum”…or, on its other face, the Roman Coliseum…?)
Next, there’s an official “Rulebook,” the game’s legal structure…the rulebook “sets” the field and bureaucracy of play…“referees” and “judges” govern the play or at least that’s what we’re supposed think.
Fans fill the stadium, some “war-painted” and “fanatic,” yet still ordered like a “body-politic.”

Opposing teams “huddle” in bureaucratic (gov/corp”) “meetings”…
The team (“gov-corp”) leaders, the “O” offense’s “QB” (“Quarterback”) and the “D” defenses “MLB” (“Middle-linebacker”) get the “play,” like a pre-planned “program or policy” charted out with “X’s” and “O’s” to bring specific “intended consequences” – the play-call comes down from the “boards of directors-coaches.”
Teams meet at the “line of scrimmage” (“Mainstreet…”)…the “O” and “D” are set in bureaucratic “formations” (lineman, linebackers, corner-quarter-half-full-backs, safeties, split-tight-ends, wideouts, like various gov-corp “departments”)…things look organized, “set” in place – the QB even yells “SET!” to get the play going…
Next, the QB gazes over the “D” and the MLB tries to guess what the “O” will do…the various departmental players jump around; the players brace for action while the crowd tenses with anticipation…
Initially, the “play” may look like it’s working…but then, uh-oh! all hell can break loose…! The linebackers “blitz” the QB, the “protection” breaks down, so the QB scrambles and un-intended consequences ensue – the QB avoids the LB’s annihilating tackle and spots the wide receiver, and, Voila, an innovated pass over the middle…and…wait, uh-oh again…INTERCEPTION! and the game reverses…

So first we see intentional “order” or “governance,” then opposing forces collide to produce the exciting order of “play,” and finally a new “order” (intended and unintended) emerges and the line of scrimmage either advances or retreats. The whole scene is “wild” yet there is an order, an order of play. Why do the fans show up? Why is tackle football the new iconic game of America? Is it because, first, the game epitomizes all the nuances of modern culture – bureaucratically and technologically organized play and power? It’s also because football is war. It’s about power. It celebrates primordial human behavior and skills – teamwork, passing “spears” on the hunt, even “sudden death” conclusions. It’s a virtual and violent battlefield, with an “air” and a “ground” game. Coliseum entertainment. And like any game, fans show up for the sheer excitement to witness and celebrate unknowable and unpredictable outcomes. Play starts with the expectation that outcomes are unpredictable – from the start any arrogance of order is humbled by the play of forces. Finally, football is relatively transparent and so practical – the “best” team wins; fans accept the outcome – games celebrate what works practically and spontaneously in the field of play. There is a “wild order” to play.

Examining how we play can tell us a lot about how we think we can act with each other and how we think we can govern ourselves and our world-space. Intelligently and ethically – or not – skills that carried us out of the original wild. Football is curious because its field of play and fanatic spectating shows us how wild and violent we can be and yet how the “order…through…seeming chaos…to…new order” play “sets” and then “re-sets” the spectacle that is us.

21^st century governance is playing out like a game between, on one side of play, modern totalitarian states that put government power and control first (for example, China, North Korea, Russia, Iran) and, on the other side, the less steady examples of elected “representative” self-governance or “democracy,” so arrangements that supposedly place the freedom and rights of citizens first (highly imperfect examples include European countries, the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand).

Clearly, the totalitarians believe they have a point – a small, elite ruling class (for example, @2% governed the failed U.S.S.R.; @5% now comprise the ruling Chinese Communist Party or “CCP,”; indeed, many view the massive 2 million worker strong U.S. federal government as an elite and at times quasi-totalitarian bureaucracy) appears more efficient on the surface and may seem to respond more quickly than the awkward, less centralized “democratic” systems. That’s why this is the 21^st century’s really big game, it’s the Super Bowl of governance. How to “govern” the wild Eco-Sex-Tech-Econ field of play?

“Civilization” perpetually tries to convince itself, and us, that its governance has things “under control,” that it is “orderly and organized,” that the trains and planes will run on time. Or that its debt will be repaid.

Wild governance simply observes that, if the recent 20^th and now 21^st centuries’ perils and prosperities are witness, then minimally we need to re-think how we have come to call this “civilization,” and maximally we need to confront how these “wild” flows, which have hyper-evolved and are now expressed with exponential scale and effect, may nonetheless also carry equally evolved and unique human skills: on the one hand practical intelligence (“Science”), and on the other the subtle, less obvious, but essential wisdoms to act under ultimate, ethical concerns (“Ethos”).

And as Toffler and many others observe, the “codes” are changing; both sides’ rulebooks are in play.

**Examples of “Wild Governance”**

In the U.S., for example, when the Federal Reserve “adjusts” interest rates, as Alan Greenspan did by lowering rates in the 1980’s (soon after Toffler’s comment), it’s like the ref’s coming out for the 2^nd half of a 1980s-vintage Denver Broncos/Oakland Raiders football game, and saying, “OK, in the 2^nd half the field is now 120 yards long, there’s five downs instead of four, and we will no longer call unnecessary roughness – you can break legs and beat head’s in to your heart’s (and the crowd’s) delight…!”

>>> RESULT: Today, partly inspired by Greenspan’s “active” Fed policy, the U.S. Federal Reserve has exploded both its balance sheet and the market’s money supply, which in turn has triggered very high and “wildly” unpredictable inflation and market bubbles. Add to that massive and bi-partisan over-spending and the U.S. government now carries $30+ TRILLION in short-term debt (borrowed annual budget spending) and perhaps another $60-90 TRILLION in “unfunded liabilities” (future estimatted obligations of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid that the Federal government has no idea how it will pay ). In a word, DEBT.

In China, across the line of scrimmage, errant totalitarian governance may be working even harder. Under China’s CCP, citizen-owned real estate can easily become “open game.” The CCP provincial governments can move in and move out farmers and individual landowners with small pay-offs – it then turns around and sells leases at high profit to large corporate developers for urban apartment complexes, malls, etc. With this practice, and in just one recent decade, the CCP has displaced as many as 65 million citizens, the population of the U.K.

>>> RESULT: China has also amassed yet cleverly concealed DEBT tucked away in CCP controlled banks and corporations and in local cities and provinces. And “…from 2009 to 2015…China’s governments collected 22 trillion yuan just from selling land. That’s comparable to selling all the land in Manhattan two and a half times over. Nationally, land sales in China account for roughly a third of all fiscal revenue.”⁴ And incredibly, global markets allow the CCP to hide or not report this debt, or as one senior CCP minister was glibly quoted in 2013: “If China were to declare that nonperforming loans were in fact much higher than thought, does anyone really benefit?”⁵

1 The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Authorized Edition, New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.
2 H.A.L. Fisher, quoted by Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989, p. 291.
3 Toffler, Alvin, The Third Wave, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980, pp. 274-281.
4 Dinny McMahon, China’s Great Wall of Debt – Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, pp. 70-71.
5 Ibid, p. 6-9; McMahon observes: “There was a certain appeal to his reasoning. Why should China endure unnecessary pain if the authorities could just waive the rules for a while? (Of course, the strategy works only if authorities use the time they buy to clean up the mess. Five years after that conversation [in 2018], the scale of the problems has only worsened.”

Wild Sex & Culture

2022-01-09T00:00:00Z

Demographics

Global composite north-pole centered map of early human migrations as determined by mitochondrial population genetics – numbers and colors reflect millennia before the present. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution

“SEX...and Violence…” – “Sex…and Violence” – “sex” is thrown in to get your attention…it’s the “human wave” – the flow of populations over time, to demographics, literally the “recording, description, or measurement of people.” “Violence” casts the dark, shadow-side of the human story. As Beth Shapiro tells it:

“By 700,000 years ago, lineages belonging to the genus Homo were distributed from the southern tip of Africa northward and across Europe and Asia.…Today, every described Homo lineage apart from our own is extinct…our ancestors killed off all the other human lineages in Africa, left Africa for Europe where they killed off the Neanderthals, and then spread across the rest of the world killing off whatever remnant populations of non-sapien humans they encountered.”
Beth Shapiro¹

Wild Globalization attempts to “re-sense” in the context of global “civilization” three realities of our ancient human story: First, we reproduced, both within our own ranks but also by reproducing with other hominid competitors (e.g., Homo sapien DNA includes traces of Neanderthal DNA). Second, our competitors, all of them, failed to endure – some could not keep up with us; the rest we assimilated or eliminated. Third, How did we do that? – We survved, and even thrived, under the evolutionary pressures of scarcity – but perhaps also in competitions with other competing tribes, so kind of like what we now call, for example, “football,” – by exploiting powers of intelligence, innovation, and “working-playing-inventing-fighting-dying-praying together” – what we call “culture.”

Primate evolution stretches back roughly 57- 85 million years. Hominid-like beings appear in the African savannah around 4-7 million years ago, the “Homo” genus perhaps 2-3 million years ago.

Notharctus tenebrosus, American Museum of Natural History.
49 million years ago. Attribution: Claire Houck, New York City, USA.

Our “proto” human ancestors started to do at least four things differently: they walked upright (“bipedalism”), they evolved opposing-thumbs, their brains got much larger (“encephalization”), and with these they developed survival-driven team-working and communication (advanced intelligence and language). Sophisticated intelligence expressed in language are the phenomenal differentiators of Homo sapien-sapien, and the wildest, most radical evolutionary ploy ever ventured by nature herself.

WG explores how human evolution emerged as a new order of evolution itself. To survive, humans innovated scarce resources and began to change their given environment. Human intelligence-innovation strategies changed things and sped up the pace of evolution. The human version became hyper-natural. We mastered fire and made artificial tools (e.g., the atlatl – see “Wild Tech”) that hyper-empowered our natural body. We began to store excess food and fuel resources (see “Wild Economy”). And we began to create social orders of beauty, governance, and faith. WG’s explores how these primary drivers of modern globalization – ecology, demography and culture, technology, economy, and governance – were long evolved by the time written history, or “civilization,” appears about 10,000 years ago.

Deep in the paleo-archives we find France’s Chauvet Cave, dated @30,000 years BCE, roughly just 1200 generations ago in demographic time (25 years per generation). Chauvet art reveals how our “pre”-history ancestors were perceiving their world and creating beautiful, sophisticated paintings that rival the great modern artists. Notably, it appears that the human appreciation and creation of beauty surfaces thousands of years before “Civilization.”

HTO- Chauvet Cave, France, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9667279

As Homo sapien sapien, the “thinking thinker,” reached the later stages of the Pleistocene “stone” age, it’s apparent that our human linage had risen to extraordinary and “singular” achievements. 1/We had not only endured the great ice and fire ages, we had prospered. 2/We had begun to direct and change, if not control, much of our natural condition by using our intelligence and hyper-natural inventions, like the atlatl. 3/We had innovated our way out of raw scarcity and ingeniously had begun to produce and reserve excess foods, fuels, shelter. 4/We had begun to ritually mourn passed souls and to honor our great and beloved leaders, our mothers, fathers, warriors, and ancestors. 5/And, like no other creature that ever walked the earth, we had begun to perceive and experience our natural world as an “objective reality” that at once terrified us and so demanded “mythic” stories so we might be able to somehow live with its terrors, its tornadoes and hurricanes, its volcanoes and earthquakes. In those same stories, however, we instinctively sensed the possibility that we might not be able to fully account for nature’s deep and mysterious origins and realities. To paraphrase the Catholic philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan, the human mind and soul incessantly pursues “…the full set of answers to the full set of questions…” Our curious, unconstrained minds, probed more deeply, and in the throes of a singular curiosity we came to empower nature as “given from the divine, from the heavens.” In the same mythic tellings we had set the course of both “science” and “faith.”

Apparently, we had done all these things before we began to write words or records down. Beauty and art, sacred chanting and song, dance and love in community, indeed, faith and imagination, all preceded writing in the historical record. All these were born and maturing by the time the “new stone” age Neolithic begins roughly 10-12,000 BCE, before the conventions of “history” want to say Civilization got legs. And we’ve just recently learned that folks had figured out “beer” about 13,000 years ago, so for the record, it appears we were also partying before we were writing(!).* [*Source: “13,000-year-old brewery discovered in Israel, the oldest in the world.” The Times of Israel. 12 September 2018.]

The “new stone” Neolithic Age gets moving in the latter “moments” (still, thousands of years and scores of generations) of the Pleistocene and was probably stirred by two major transformations: First, around 12,000 BCE the ice sheets retreated and the earth’s climate shifted into the present and warmer climate optimum (see Wild Ecology) – all living creatures get along better when it’s warm; Second, as our populations grew we likely over-hunted the ungulate herds (see “excess production” in Wild Economy) and then the clever among us started to think that maybe, instead of chasing wild game, we could “raise” and “husband” them, creatures like wild goats and sheep and pigs. We continued to gather wild grains which were most abundant in the fertile river valleys like the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BCE), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BCE), and later Central Mexico (5,000 BCE), and Northwestern South America (5,000 BCE). Though it’s not clear how, and while many communities remained smaller and dispersed, with the development of animal husbandry and early agriculture, we gradually began to settle.

So into the Neolithic and folks, again over thousands of years, began to “reserve” some of their excess grain, then to “plant and grow” it, and, voila!, the First Agricultural Revolution gets moving around 9,000 BCE.

Curious to the notion of “Civilization,” however, “writing” doesn’t appear in the record until @4-5 thousands years ago – Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics surface in the form of “credit systems.”* [*David Graeber, Debt, The First 5,000 Years, 2011]. It appears that banker-folks may have been the first known “writers” keeping account of “credit value.”

Providing loaned resources (seed, land) to aspiring planters and farmers likely triggered three revolutions, really. First, the Agricultural Revolution itself – excess production of grains, early grain storage, and so the early examples of food security. Second, modern credit systems were born which “levered” economic growth – a bigger “something” (future crop) could be produced from a smaller “something” (loaned seed-grains, land). Third, OR NOT! – modern economic “risk” comes on the scene – so if the loaned crop failed the borrower was at risk of becoming “indentured” or enslaved to the lender, and Voila!, credit systems appear to coincide with the beginning of slavery as an accepted and common human institution.

Slavery appears in the archaeological record at least 10,000 years BCE, perhaps resulting from the capture of conquered enemies. Enslavement included women and children, including children sold into slavery to repay “debt.” Under civilization’s earliest known agricultural developments, human beings become “commodities,” bought and sold and used as repayment for agricultural indebtedness.* [*Meltzer, Milton, Slavery – A World History, Da Capo, 1993, p. 9-12)

It’s all wild. Globalizing civilization, as it moved into new adaptation and exploitation strategies, minimally survived and maximally thrived as it emerged under the momentums of what we describe as “black box energies or forces” – ecology, sex-demographics-culture, technology, economy, and governance.

Slavery’s long reach connects modernity to at least our Neolithic ancestors. It endures today in the back shadows of Communist China’s apparent formal public policy towards the Xinjiang Uyghur Muslims, or in the United State’s southern border policy which facilitates, even encourages, the Mexican cartels’ billion dollar human trafficking industry. “Wild” signifies the emergence of “spontaneous “orders” in a freely (or enslaved) evolving world – good and evil paint the historical record as well as our “modern” present. Enslavement and brutality haunt humanity – “evil,” here slavery, exposes the shadow-side of our hyper-nature. We’re clever but we also, in our nearly unrestrained state of freedom, are capable of the horrors that trace contiguously through our short trek out of the deep woods. “Civil” includes our wicked and monstrous barbarities against our fellow brothers and sisters, and constitutes the dark side of the “wild.”

This hyper-natural way of adapting has transformed evolution. No longer is evolution constrained by biological mutation or survival alone – nature has endowed us (and we’ve grabbed…!) with our own version of “intelligent-innovation evolution.” So, 1/What used to take hundreds or thousands of generations or millions of years is now happening as quickly as one or two life-spans: the Wright Flyer flew Kitty Hawk and just 70 years later we were on the Moon. 2/More astonishingly, the speed of change is itself accelerating – it’s on an exponential trajectory.* [*Geoffrey West, SCALE, the Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, New York: Penguin Books, 2017.]

Robert William Fogel’s concept of “technophysio…spiritual…cultural evolution” Brings to bear wild globalization’s convergence of technological change, cultural transformation, and governence. Fogel’s timeline, below, initially tracks the flatter, less dramatic path of population and technolgy from the First Agricultural Revolution (c. 9000 BCE) to the Enlightenment (17th Century CE). But then the trajectory chjanges, exponentially, wildly. In a second phase the sudden and accelerating pace of quantitative change (tech+population growth) rides technology and innovationj fromk the Enlightenment into the Second Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions to the present Internet, Genome Project, and now, already off thje chart, the “Cloud Revolution.” It’s not gradual – it’s a rocket ride.

(Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 75)

Fogel’s model, on its surface about “economy” – he was awarded the 1993 Nobel in Economic Sciences – is not shy about insisting that “spirit” and “economy” energize culture simultaneously. His The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism traces America’s story as a singular economic and spiritual history, from its earliest immigrations out of Europe and the subjugation of the American continent’s native peoples, through the Revolution, through the Civil War and Emancipation, into the 19th-20th century egalitarian state, to our 21st century’s current disheveled reshuffling. His story-telling brilliantly captures the emergence of Civilization’s “spontaneous orders,” painting both the brilliance and the wicked shadow-side of its irrepressible momentums, including the awkward, even bizarre attempts by American Calvinists to assimulate native peoples into Christianity, or the monstrous and tumultuous march through and out of America’s formal institution of slavery. “Ethos” emerges and forces itself on “economy,” and vice versa.

Quick Hint: Wild Globalization essentially makes two moves: First, it’s major move tries to critically re-track our deep and modern histories and the “energies” that seem to drive Civilization. This analysis appears to show that what we call “Civilization” might be better explained as a “black box” phenomenon – we can guess what’s going “into” the box, and we can observe what’s coming out of the box, but we have no way of knowing the mercurial chemistry flowing within it. Second, it’s minor move tries more modestly to simply open honest and plain-spoken conversations among diverse factors and viewpoints about how we can best move along in the 21st century – WG’s own bias suspects we must rely heavily on freedom-based “positive-negative feedback loops.” Which suggests we have to find a critical, even skeptical approach, to how we assess our “state-of-affairs.” The major move suggests we must be hyper-vigiliant, skeptical, of our governance powers. We need to honstly recognize that our ethical responses to ecology-culture-tech-economy-governance are at best awkward and late, and at worst dangerously errant. In a nutshell, it seems that human civilization has virtually indefinite potential to manage vast resources but that the way forward is reminiscent of space-flight, e.g., to the Moon or Mars or beyond – it’s a passionate and obsessive and constant course correction along an unstable trajectory.

WG’s Tracks – Bushwhacking through the Cairns:

G-1.0 The Pleistocene: “Out of Energy, Ice & Fire” – Tech, Economy, & Culture” (~2M – ~200,000 to ~10,000 years BCE)

G2.0 The Neolithic: Settling…Cultivating…”Civilization” – (10,000 BCE to 500 BCE)

G-3.0 Ancient & Axial Age: Buddha, Socrates, Jesus…’freedom’ and ‘soul’…” (500 BCE-1200 CE)

G-4.0 Science & Industry Revolutions: Energy, Warming Climes, The “Great Divergence” and Demographic Expansions (1200-1820 to 1990 CE)

G-5.0 The “Great Convergence,” Internet, Energy, Welfare-Debt, Exploding Urbanization (1990-2020)

G-6.0 Where now? – Knowledge-Wisdom? Energy, Automation, Small-Big Gov, Freedom(?), Great Demogrpahic “Reversal”? (2020 Forward)

STORIES **of “Wild Sex & Culture”**

In the West: Every time the 80 million American Baby-Boomers, or “Woodstockers,” did it they caused havoc. Case in point, when they started having kids Proctor and Gamble made a fortune innovating and selling disposable diapers – but when the Boomers settled down, stopped having babies, and diaper-demand collapsed, P&G wasn’t paying attention and almost went out of business.

1973: Boomers reached first home-buying age around this time and when they started shacking up there weren’t enough homes and mortgage resources so home-values and mortgage rates went through the roof – these factors were significant for the next 30 years of financial history – we see Big-Gov go steroidal trying to help folks buy homes by creating HUD, Fannie and Freddie (to lend more money…) and “neighborhood redevelopment” (…to a lot more folks), we see home mortgages “securitized” and mortgage rates rise to 17% by 1981 and then gradually ease off from 1981 to, oh you guessed it, the 2007-09 Financial Crisis. And yes, Boomers became “real estate” geniuses – we could “re-fi” every 3-4 years, buy boats and cars, put our kids through college, vacation, and still end up with a lower monthly payment! Financial gurus we were!

In Asia: 1950-1986: Global population explodes from 2.5 to 5 billion souls. Someone writes a book called Famine 1975!⁴ about global starvation “time-bombs” – too many people, not enough food. But then – oh wait! – someone else re-invents new fertilizers made from oil and gas and, Voilà!, today’s 7.5 billion of us are better fed though many are now over-eating (developed country obesity) and we are now dangerously vulnerable to “food supply chains.”

China’s “Middle-Income Trap”: China’s population is getting older too quickly, that is, due to declining birth rates (in part due to its 1980-2015 “one-child” policy) their younger demographic age groups are growing too small to care for the larger senior age groups. As well, China’s “per capita wealth” will not achieve equity with the developed nations before this occurs.[5. Source: World Bank] Many observers think China’s leaders (the Chinese Communist Party, “CCP”) are heavily influenced by this development. It may be a major factor behind their new “Belt and Road” initiative which aims at gaining political-economic dominance over as much of Eurasia’s population demographic (and really the entire globe under their sacred “all under heaven” Tianxia doctrine). Russia’s declining birth-rate demographic is in worse shape and may play a role in its motivation to re-capture a younger and more demographically vibrant Ukraine.

1 Beth Shapiro, Life as We Made It – How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined-and Redefined-Nature, New York: Basic Books, 2021, 53-54.
2 Harry Dent, The Roaring 2000s, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998, p. 35.
3 “Mya” – “millions of years ago.”
4 William Paddock, Famine 1975!¸Little, Brown and Co., 1967.
5 World Bank 2020 Estimates: U.S. ranks 15th at $69,958; China ranks 100th at $17,312.

Wild Tech

2022-01-10T00:00:00Z

“Wild Tech” gets legs (and arms) in and out of the fire and ice.

Tech is human innovation.

Wild human technology-innovation appears in the paleo-record as a new emergent order of evolution.

“…it took four thousand years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse…65 years to go from the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine to landing a man on the moon…[and] over a billion people…watched it happen.” ¹

Robert William Fogel

“…the only way we can think about technology is in evolutionary terms.” ²

Joel Mokyr

Surviving the deep ice and great volcanic fires, our ancestors turned fire on itself long before (+1 million years ago) we were fully “human.” They used fire to protect themselves in the deep night, and they began to cook their food.

Tech is wild because it advances before and ahead of culture, or human’s ability to control it, and especially ahead of our ability to get an ethical handle on its impacts. This is most obvious in the history of human violence and warring capacities: inventions like the atlatl, the cross-bow, gunpowder, and the atom bomb have entered the evolutionary record and radically reshaped human history.

Early humans and even proto-humans started to “make things…homo faber.” Artificial things. Things not found in nature itself. Things created by humans. Especially tools of the hunt and the kill and the fireside.

Someone even came along and made the “atlatl.”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlatl.png

It’s just a stick. But “whittled,” shaped. Yet still…just a stick. Or not? It’s now, possibly, something different. It’s a tool. But the atlatl-stick is meaningless, itself, without the spear. Or the arm.

It’s now an “extension,” a kind of prosthesis – it’s manufactured…synthetic…artificial. It’s not powerful, until, the hand and arm take hold of it. Voilà! The atlatl-ed-arm is now a hyper-arm…!

The atlatl changes the human arm – but the arm itself has not changed. It’s still “natural.” Or is it? OK, alone, it is the “same.” But with the atlatl, and spear, not “quite.” By taking hold of the atlatl, and the spear, the human arm now commands a radically new and synthetic power, synthetic because it’s a new “synthesis” of nature itself transformed by human intelligent innovation. It’s more powerful because the atlatl increases by as much as 300% the distance a spear can be thrown effectively. The atlatl thrower is an entirely new evolutionary phenomenon. An innovation-order of evolution.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nativo_do_Novo_Mundo_lan%C3%A7ando_flecha_com_o_propulsor_ou_est%C3%B3lica.jpg

So what’s “natural” or “un-natural” here? And what, if anything, do we gain by making the difference? OK, the whole game is different. We have the atlatl, for heaven’s sake (!), and lots more meat, and now everyone in the neighborhood is running. Away. Quickly. Suddenly, we rule the grassy or the forested roost. For now. Until…the next big-small thing, the next atlatl-like gadget, the next crossbow or atomic bomb, comes along…

The reader can wrestle with their own take on the “natural” question. In WG’s take, though, the question just doesn’t track out in a serious way. It’s just not a helpful distinction. Possibly even a distraction.

Our technologies, from the atlatl to the atom, trace the footprints of a new order of nature – human innovation-intelligence driven evolution. Nature’s own experiment. But now hyper-nature. Wild…wilder.

**Examples of “*Wild Tech***”

The Internet: “The internet will change everything. The industrial Revolution brought together people with machines in factories…the Internet revolution will bring together people with knowledge and information…And it will have every bit as much impact on society as the Industrial Revolution. It will promote globalization at an incredible pace. But instead of happening over a hundred years, like the Industrial Revolution, it will happen over seven years.”³

The iPhone or “Mobile” in the Arab Spring: “The effect of mobiles, computers, satellites – there is a generation coming that is outside the traditional controls…something else is happening.”⁴

Big Data: “…Because the internet was measurable, it was authoritative. It defined morals around what behaviors really are, not vice versa. Any aspiration to see things from a perspective beyond that of day-to-day reality came to seem pointless and risible. Western religion in all its expressions was undermined. Less well understood was that the internet approach to data, and to reality, undermined all types of thinking aimed at understanding systems from the outside – not just religion but also science, political ideology, and deductive reasoning. Big Data worked by correlation, not by logic. …The information-gathering capacities of the new internet firms brought them into both collusion and competition with government. Google claimed to predict the onset of flu season better than the CDC. SWIFT…could generate precise measure of total economic activity in a society by using the data from the bank transfers it handles. …Google and SWIFT were private companies – yet their regulatory and public information roles made them look like governments in embryo. …The problem was not the expansion of government until it crowded out the private sector – it was the expansion of the private sector until it became a kind of government.”⁵

1 Robert William Fogel, interview with Kling & Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity- intangible assets, hidden liabilities, and the lasting triumph over scarcity, New York & London, Encounter Books, 2009; republished as Invisible Wealth – The Hidden Story of How Markets Work, New York & London: Encounter Books, p. 58)
2 Ibid, Joel Mokyr, in interview with Kling & Schulz, p. 115.
3 John Chambers, President, Cisco Systems, in interview with Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999, P. 117.
4 Egyptian historian Mohamed Haykal describing the 2010 “Arab Spring,” quoted by Gerald F. Seib, “Now Dawning: The Next Era of Middle East History,” WSJ, 2-1-2011.
5 Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement – America Since the Sixties, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2020, pp. 191-192.

Wild Economy

2022-01-11T00:00:00Z

“Economy” = Resources>>Innovation>>Production>>Excess Reserves (“Capital”)>>Entrepreneur>>Markets

“In Alaska, during the first gold rush, one winter was particularly rough and a famine ensued. To survive, people only had sardine cans, and a lively market took place in this rare commodity. One fellow bought himself a can of sardines at an extraordinary price, but was surprised to find, upon opening the box, that the sardines were rotten. He went back to complain, but was told by the can’s previous owner: “but those weren’t eating sardines, they were trading sardines!”
– Louis-Vincent Gave, Too Different for Comfort, 2013.¹

“A market…does not consist of the steel, shoes, or cotton, or canned food that flows through it….it is the structure through which such goods and services are routed…it is not simply an economic structure…[but] a way of organizing people, a way of thinking, an ethos, and a shared set of expectations…The market is thus as much a psychological structure as an economic reality. And its effects far transcend economics.”
– Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, 1980.²

“Birth charts tell us decades in advance when new generations of consumers will move through predictable spending cycles…If you remember nothing else, remember this: sex drives our economy – and that’s probably why economists have never figured it out, and probably never will!?”
Harry Dent, The Roaring 2000s, 1998.³

Like Ecology, Sex-Demographics, and Tech, Wild Globalization re-considers the problem of “value“ – not just “What is something “worth” in a market? But how do we know it? How do we accept something’s value? We suspect it’s more than just “economic” but perhaps even more importantly it’s “cultural.”

WG will explore the possibility that the problem of value comes before or is precedent to economics – modern economics went astray when it lost sight of this ‘fundamental mystery”: “But, adds Marx, “the whole mystery of the form of values lies hidden even in the most elementary form, and its analysis is our fundamental difficulty.”⁴

Longer Take…

“If the physical world is so uncertain, so difficult to know precisely, then how much more uncertain and unknowable must be the world of money? Finance is a black box covered by a veil. Not only are the inner workings hidden, but the inputs are also obscured, by bad economic data, conflicting news reports, or outright deception. What coefficient of correction should I apply to a broker’s self-serving stock tip? And then there is the most confounding factor of all, anticipation. A stock price rises not because of good news from the company, but because the brightening outlook for the stock means investors anticipate it will rise further, and so they buy. Anticipation is a feature unique to economics. It is psychology, individual and mass – even harder to fathom than the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Anticipation is the stuff of dreams and vapors.”
Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, 2004.⁵

“Value” speaks in fact as WG’s primary concern. Value is the “primal” background and elusive “residual” of the human evolutionary order. WG wonders if wild value isn’t about “sardines in a famine,” or Mandelbrot’s “anticipation,” or what Toffler refers to as “not simply an economic structure…but a way of organizing people…of thinking, an ethos…”?

In this context WG will talk about “economics” and offer an alternative approach. It will argue that economy emerges from “nature’s” own survival strategies – “scarce resources” to “innovation” to “excess production and reserves” to “virtual capital,” to “entrepreneurs” and “markets.”:

Human survival triggers “the management of scarce resources” – competing with other players.”⁶
Scarcity triggers innovation (e.g., the “atlatl” – see Wild Technology).
Innovation improves hunting and gathering which then produces excess reserves.⁷
Excess reserves (food, fuels) gives rise to excess “virtualized reserves”…or “capital.”
Central governance concentrates capital (e.g, plant-seed, land) and innovates debt credit systems.
Consumers emerge from Exchange Markets and Entrepreneurs.
Innovation-Evolution energizes this process we call “Economy.”

Led especially by Marx, modern quantitative economics has over-stressed, even bullied, “capital” (what WG instead refers to as “excess virtualized reserves”) and has often lost sight of, or proportionate valuation of, the other stages-steps-layers of the total economic process – lost sight in fact even to have named the whole thing “capitalism” when in fact we could just as easily name it “scarcity management”…or “survival innovation”…or…”producton-competition-market!” etc. Rather, economy is also a black box, a continuous, incessant, disruptive-creative, phenomenon, with all of the various and variable stages leveraging and shaping the whole. And, at the same time, every stage overlaps and gives hard-to-measure momentum to the other stages. Capital’s mass derives from the pain of scarcity and the power of the survival-innovation response which produces excess reserves, so in one light capital is really the “after-thought,” the “residual.” Each stage contributes its own immense vitality – and at any point in economy’s evolution any one element – scarcity…innovation…reserve capital…entrepreneurs…markets…consumers – can appear to dominate. But how can we really know which stage is actually most powerful at any given moment? And, hold your capital pocket-books (!), our 21st century growth version is in fact accelerating, it’s happening faster and faster, with increasing momentum.

Curiously, if we listen carefully to Toffler, value chases and is chased by ethos, so, for example, by a concern for what is “fairly priced” – when we buy or appraise a home for sale we don’t just say “market value” we say “fair market value.”

Under WG’s critique we will notice how anything can become a marketable product for sale on a market –a can of rotten sardines, an ear of corn, a pig, a barrel of oil, the elephant tranquilizer fentanyl, human beings – yes, the history of “civilization” is of course deeply, wickedly and permanently stained by human slavery. Animal trafficking and atrocities also figure in. In globalization’s current edition, human and animal commoditization and trafficking continue to be burgeoning industries. And growing. Robustly.

How does a market place a value on a human being? Are we concerned with that? Do we place another kind of value on an “illegally” traded human child and if so, what motivates that sense of value? Is that what we think we mean by an ethical concern?

Wild Globalization’s read of the value problem emerges from its re-thinking of a human innovation-intelligence evolutionary order. From human evolution we can observe two new and simultaneously appearing survival strategies: on the one hand, a new order of material or cosmological value which leads to SCIENCE; and, on the same, singular surface, a new order of metaphysical value which leads to ETHOS. These are the gathered and hunted schemas that fill our past and will carry the water of our future.

**Examples of “*Wild Value***”

Industry and Manufacturing: “For a real grasp of economics, skip the books and lectures. Get into the garment trade. In 1945, my father tried to restart the clothing business he had before the war. …The rubble of war lay all around…warm clothing was scarce. So my father…bought cheap, rough wool cloth…cut it into patterns…The business did well enough. But then my father died; tastes changed…suddenly my father’s inventory had little value…merchants came to buy the stock, but my mother refused all offers…Finally, I took matters into my own hands and…sold it off…I got some extra cash for the family and a lively appreciation of that classic economic concept, value.” Benoit Mandelbrot & Richard Hudson⁸

Monetary Exchange Chaos: ”Evidence abounds of abnormal foreign-exchange markets. A Citigroup study in 2002 found unpleasantly sharp price swings in several currencies – dollar, euro, yen, pound, peso, zloty, even the Brazilian real. On one day, the dollar vaulted over the yen by 3.78 percent. That is 5.1 standard deviations, or 5.1σ, from the average. If exchange rates were Gaussian [following “normal” standard deviation] that would be expected to happen once a century. But the biggest fall was a heart-stopping 7.92 percent, or 10.7σ. The normal odds of that: Not if Citigroup had been trading dollars and yen every day since the Big Bang 15 billion years ago should it have happened, not once.” Benoit Mandelbrot & Richard Hudson⁹

Stock Index Valuation: “…Wild randomness is uncomfortable. …Suppose you are asked to calculate the average size of companies in the software industry. So you go down a list, counting the firms, adding up their reported revenues, and dividing one number into the other to get a simple average. But how long should the list be? Just the top fifty publicly traded firms? Every company in an industry directory? Every firm that files a tax return and says it is in software? Impossible to say: Each time you lengthen the list and add more, smaller firms, your calculated average drops. And what about Microsoft? It is the colossus of the industry, dwarfing every other firm. Try to survey the industry: If you include Microsoft in the sample, it grotesquely inflates what the survey suggests the “typical” company value is. But if you exclude it, you ignore the most important company in the industry. In short, the distribution of company size is wild – Wild West, in the view of Microsoft critics.” Benoit Mandelbrot & Richard Hudson¹⁰

Blockchain “Belief”: “The blockchain, Mr. Srinivasan continues, “is a religion that works.” Here’s why: “If you take 10,000 people and put them in a circle and they close their eyes hard and say, ‘Let this plane fly,’ it’s not going to fly. But if they close their eyes hard and say, ‘Let this thing have value,’ and they all value it, they’ve suddenly got a price for it.” They will exchange things of economic value among themselves and the external world can interact with them. “In the same way that once you’ve got enough people, you’ve got a nation, you’ve also got a currency. So, beliabnoref is actually something you can now materialize into currency.” –Balaji S. Srinivasan¹¹

Capital, Labor, & Technology Value: “…technology (unlike capital and labor) cannot be observed or measured directly, so it must be the residual (or “Solow residual”) after the contributions of the other two factors to “total factor productivity” and to overall economic growth have been taken into account.’* The term “residual,” however, is quite misleading. Whereas 12 per cent of the doubling of American productivity growth between 1909 and 1949 can be explained by the expansion of capital per worker, the residual or total factor productivity accounted for the other 88 percent increase. Some Residual! As Sachs and Larrain have commented, the residual “is really a measure of our ignorance.” –Robert Gilpin¹²

Ecology Value: “The bad news began at 5:12AM on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, when the northernmost 296 miles of the San Andreas Fault, from the California town of Hollister to Cape Mendocino, where the fault disappears into the Pacific Ocean, ruptured. The shaking lasted 55 seconds in what was ultimately an 8.3-magnitude earthquake. The eastern side of the fault had moved to the southeast by 24 feet. …In San Francisco, the earthquake was bad but the fires that resulted from broken gas lines were worse, because the quake had also broken the water mains. After firefighters pumped the sewers dry…With no water to fight the fires…soldiers used dynamite to collapse buildings into heaps of rubble that they hoped would serve as firebreaks. More often, the explosions started new fires. …Though almost none of San Francisco was insured against earthquake, the vast majority of it was insured against fire. …So citizens with houses that had been heavily damaged by the quake, but spared the fires, set their own homes ablaze. More than 27,500 buildings covering 500 square blocks…the financial center of the American West, was gone.…approximately half of all fire insurance policies in San Francisco were still issued by British companies and the quake hit the British hard. …London-based insurers began loading gold on ships…Thirty million dollars of gold was sent in April, with more sent during the summer and $35 million sent in September alone….equal to 14% of Britain’s total stockpile. …Operating under the gold standard, this sudden outflow of gold from London was such a massive shock to the British financial system that the governors of the Bank of England did the only thing they knew to do: they raised the interest rate they were willing to pay those who left their gold on deposit… Every stock market crash has an external catalyst at its heart. These external catalysts – some are acts of nature, such as the 1906 earthquake; some are geopolitical, as in 1987 and 2010; some are political, as in 2008; and some are criminal, as in 1929 – are not sufficient themselves to start a crash, though they are necessary. …Not only was the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 the catalyst for what became known as the Panic of 1907, but the analogy between earthquake and stock market crash is particularly apt. Some geologists point out that the beginning of a major earthquake, the nucleation, is identical to that of a minor tremor, but the sliding of the one tectonic plate against another stops quickly in a minor tremor as friction overcomes tension. In a major earthquake, the sliding doesn’t stop until all the coiled tension has been released; an earthquake is a tremor that doesn’t stop. Similarly, as stocks decline in value during a correction, investors begin to recognize value and step in to buy at a discount; greed overcomes fear. During a crash, unique forces align. The decline doesn’t stop as these forces overwhelm the ability to know what value is.” –Scott Nations¹³

1 Louis-Vincent Gave, Too Different for Comfort, GaveKal Research, 2013, p. 61.
2 Toffler, Alvin, The Third Wave, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980, p. 302.
3 Harry Dent, The Roaring 2000s, 1998.
4 Goux, Jean-Joseph, Symbolic Economics: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Ithaca NY: Cornell U. Press, 1990, p. 32; quoting Marx, Capital.
5 Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, New York: Basic Books, 2004., p. 28
6 The brilliant American economist, Thomas Sowell, says it like this: “Economics is the study of the use of scare resources which have alternative uses… What does “scarce” mean? It means that what everybody wants ads up to more than there is.” (Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, Philadelphia, Basic Books, 2011, 4th Edition, 3)
7 WG includes labor but reads it as a secondary economic order – an obvious presence but a secondary result of primal scarcity and the subsequent evolutionary response, innovation.
8 Benoit Mandelbrot, & Richard L. Hudson, The (Mis) Behaviour of Markets, New York: Basic Books, 2004, 225-226.
9 Ibid, p. 97.
10 Ibid, pp. 36-41.
11 Balaji S. Srinivasan, interview by Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 9-23-2017, Opinion, A11.
12 Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 111; *Gilpin is referencing Joseph Stiglitz, “Comments: Some Retrospective view on Growth Theory,” in Peter Diamond, Ed., Growth/Productivity/Unemployment: Essays to Celebrate Bob Solow’s Birthday, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, 556, and also **Sachs and Larrain, Macroeconomics in the Global Economy, Sachs, Jeffrey D., Larrain, Felipe B., Macroeconomics In The Global Economy, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993, ISBN 0-13-102252-0, p. 556.
13 Scott Nations, A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns that Defined a Nation, New York: Harper Collins, 2017, pp. 16-19, my emphasis.

Wild Globalization

About the Author

Wild Globalization 1.0 (250,000-10,000 BCE)

G1.0-Out of Energy, Ice & Waters, Fire…and Darkness

Out of the ice & WATERS – Global climate:

Out of DARKNESS

“Human”…the “hyper-natural”:

Human “Hyper-Natural” Culture – Science, Art, Myth, and Faith

Wild Globalization 2.0 (10,000 BCE to 32 CE)

G-2.0 – “Settling…Cultivating…” – The Neolithic (10,000 BCE to 32 CE)

Trekking the Wild Neolithic: Bearings, Cairns, the Samí

Bearings

Cairn-Logic: Human-Change “Radicals”

A Sleighride with the Sámi

The Neolithic

Ecology: The Neolithic Climate Optimum

Demographics: Husbandry, Agriculture, Cities

Hints at How We do "Wild G"

History

Bios

Ethos & Praxis

Cairn Logic

Opening Act

Opening Acts: Globalization – Bushwhacking Its Wild Path

Hints About Method, Data, Rules of Thumb – History, Bios, Ethos-Praxis, & Cairn-Logic

History

Bios

Ethos & Praxis

Cairn Logic

Welcome

Wild Ecology

“Big” Fire – Volcanism

Wild Darkness

Summary of Ecology

Wild Governance

Examples of “Wild Governance”

Wild Sex & Culture

WG’s Tracks – Bushwhacking through the Cairns:

STORIES of “Wild Sex & Culture”

Wild Tech

“Wild Tech” gets legs (and arms) in and out of the fire and ice.

Tech is human innovation.

Examples of “Wild Tech”

Wild Economy

“Economy” = Resources>>Innovation>>Production>>Excess Reserves (“Capital”)>>Entrepreneur>>Markets

Longer Take…

Examples of “Wild Value”

“**Human”…the “hyper-natural”**:

**Examples of “Wild Governance”**

STORIES **of “Wild Sex & Culture”**

**Examples of “*Wild Tech***”

**Examples of “*Wild Value***”