In a 2012 article entitled Climbing the Ladder of Awareness Paul Chefurka describes the gradual awakening that many people experience as they learn about the predicaments that we face. Chefurka describes five steps in the awakening process.
Dead asleep;
Awareness of one fundamental problem;
Awareness of many problems;
Awareness of the interconnection between many problems; and
Awareness that the predicament encompasses all aspects of life.
Step 1. Dead Asleep
At this stage there seem to be no fundamental problems, just some shortcomings in human organization, behaviour and morality that can be fixed with the proper attention to rule-making. People at this stage tend to live their lives happily, with occasional outbursts of annoyance around election times or the quarterly corporate earnings seasons.
People at this stage do not understand that the world is changing in a fundamental way. Unusual events — extended summer droughts, for example — are treated as something that that can be handled on a case-by-case basis. Although most people fall into this category, they are increasingly uneasy about what they are being told and — more important — what they observe. These people are edging into Stage 2.
Step 2. Awareness of One Fundamental Problem
Whether it’s Climate Change, overpopulation, Peak Oil, chemical pollution, oceanic over-fishing, biodiversity loss, corporatism, economic instability or sociopolitical injustice, one problem seems to engage the attention completely. People at this stage tend to become ardent activists for their chosen cause. They tend to be very vocal about their personal issue, and blind to any others.
My own transition from Step 1 to Step 2 was to do with the use of alternative fuels. Somewhere around the year 2008 I read an article in a chemical engineering journal to do with the use of ethanol as a biofuel. (Unfortunately, I do not recall who wrote the article or when it was published). The article described the then relatively new concept of converting corn (maize) into ethanol which could be added to gasoline, thereby reducing the need for imported oil.
What was striking about the article was its tone of surprise. The author explained how ethanol can be manufactured from corn. That ethanol can be blended with gasoline, thus reducing our dependency on foreign oil suppliers. So far, so good. But then the author started looking at what we now call Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI). He evaluated the overall system in terms of net energy. He found that it might take more energy to manufacture ethanol than that ethanol provides as fuel. In other words, the ethanol-as-fuel program actually increases the importation of oil from foreign suppliers. It was as if the author had started a straightforward journey to a known destination but had somehow been sidetracked into unexpected territory.
I recognized the author’s tone of surprise but did not make a full transition to Stage 2 until I came across a series of Powerpoint presentations by Matt Simmons (1943-2010). Simmons was part of the oil investment community — he knew the business intimately. Around the year 2000 he became suspicious of the claims made by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) to do with the size of their oil reserves. To get around this secrecy Simmons spent many hours in the library of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in Richardson, Texas, reading many papers to do with oil production in the KSA. Although most of these papers discussed only a narrow topic, he was able to piece together a bigger picture. His conclusion was that the reserves in the KSA were much less than generally accepted, and that the nation would soon be entering a period when oil production would decline. Based on the data that he had collected, in the year 2006 he wrote a book called Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.
My reading of Simmons’ book (around the year 2009) and his internet posts were an Aha! moment. It “clicked” that the supply of oil throughout the world, not just in Saudi Arabia, was finite, and that when it was gone, it was gone. This was my introduction to the topic of what was then called ‘Peak Oil’. It became clear that there is only so much oil in the Earth’s crust, and when it is gone. (I later learned to use the term affordable oil.)
Step 3. Awareness of Many Problems
As people let in more evidence from different domains, the awareness of complexity begins to grow. At this point a person worries about the prioritization of problems in terms of their immediacy and degree of impact. People at this stage may become reluctant to acknowledge new problems - for example, someone who is committed to fighting for social justice and against climate change may not recognize the problem of resource depletion. They may feel that the problem space is already complex enough, and the addition of any new concerns will only dilute the effort that needs to be focused on solving the "highest priority" problem.
Reading and studying about the Peak Oil problem led to an awareness of related issues, particularly climate change. Like most other people, my first response was to ignore these new issues on the grounds that, “that’s someone else’s concern”. But these topics cannot be siloed so easily — they all matter. They are all components of the ‘Age of Limits’, and they all interact with one another, frequently in ways that are difficult to understand or even identify.
Step 4. Interconnections Between Many Problems
The realization that a solution in one domain may worsen a problem in another marks the beginning of large-scale system-level thinking. It also marks the transition from thinking of the situation in terms of a set of problems to thinking of it in terms of a predicament. At this point the possibility that there may not be a solution begins to raise its head.
People who arrive at this stage tend to withdraw into tight circles of like-minded individuals in order to trade insights and deepen their understanding of what's going on. These circles are necessarily small, both because personal dialogue is essential for this depth of exploration, and because there just aren't very many people who have arrived at this level of understanding.
A theme of this site is that we face systems problems; it is not enough to look at just one issue, say climate change, on its own. It interacts with many other issues such as population growth, industrial production, pollution and financial policy.
One of the earliest and most important systems analyses was the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth. The following chart is taken from a later edition of that report. (I have added the date lines.) It shows the manner in which many variables interact with one another.
People who arrive at this rung on the ladder of awareness also come to understand that the interactions between variables are very difficult to identify and measure. No matter how good our mathematical models and simulations may be, they are limited in their ability to predict the future. The models in one zone — say climate change — may be reasonably good, but they do not provide a holistic picture.
One of the themes of this site is that we face predicaments, not problems. Problems have solutions, predicaments do not. When faced with a predicament, we can respond and adapt, but we cannot make it go away.
Careful consideration of interactions can lead to counter-intuitive conclusions, particularly those to do with Jevons’ Paradox. The paradox, which was first postulated by William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used. Overall demand for that resource increases because its lower cost leads to more widespread consumption.
An example of such a paradox is:
We need to reduce our use of fossil fuels, including gasoline.
Therefore, I will purchase and drive a smaller car.
But the gasoline that I save will be used by someone else.
Moreover, because my fuel efficiency is now much better, I may choose to drive more miles than I would have done with the larger car.
Consequently, total gasoline consumption goes up.
Further information to do with this paradox is provided the post Jevons’ Paradox.
Step 5. All Aspects of Life
This includes everything we do, how we do it, our relationships with each other, as well as our treatment of the rest of the biosphere and the physical planet. With this realization, the floodgates open, and no problem is exempt from consideration or acceptance. The very concept of a "Solution" is seen through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.
It is at this stage that the church has something to say.