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DISTANT THREATS

As the Indian yogi Neem Karoli Baba once told me, “You can plan for a hundred years, but you don’t know what will happen the next moment.” On the other hand, cyberpunk author William Gibson observes, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” What we can know of the future lies somewhere between the two views: we have glimmerings, and yet there’s always the potential of a black-swan event that could wash it all away.1 Back in the 1980s, in her prophetic work In the Age of the Smart Machine, Shoshona Zuboff saw that the advent of computers was flattening the hierarchy in organizations. Where once knowledge was power, and so the most powerful hoarded their information, new tech systems were opening the gates to data for everyone. When Zuboff wrote, that future was by no means evenly distributed—the Internet did not yet exist, let alone the cloud, YouTube, or Anonymous. But today (and certainly tomorrow) the flow of information ranges ever more freely, not just within an organization, but globally. A frustrated fruit vendor sets himself aflame in a marketplace in Tunisia, sparking the Arab Spring. Two classic instances of not knowing what will happen the next moment: Thomas Robert Malthus’s prediction in 1798 that population growth would reduce human existence to a “perpetual struggle for room and food,” trapped in a downward spiral of squalor and famine; and Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 warning about the “population bomb,” which would produce vast famines by 1985. Malthus failed to foresee the Industrial Revolution, and the ways mass production allowed more people to live longer. Ehrlich’s calculations missed the coming of the “green revolution,” which accelerated food production ahead of the population curve. The Anthropocene Age, which began with the Industrial Revolution, marks the first geologic epoch in which the activities of one species—we humans—inexorably degrade the handful of global systems that support life on earth. The Anthropocene represents systems in collision. Human systems for construction, energy, transportation, industry, and commerce daily attack the operation of natural systems like the nitrogen and carbon cycles, the rich dynamics of ecosystems, the availability of usable water, and the like.2 What’s more, within the last fifty years this onslaught has undergone what scientists call the “great acceleration,” with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, among other indicators of coming systems crises, increasing at an ever-greater rate.3 The human planetary footprint, Ehrlich saw, is a product of three forces: what each of us consumes, how many of us there are, and the methods we deploy to get the stuff we consume. Using those three measures, the United Kingdom’s Royal Society tried to estimate the earth’s carrying capacity for humanity—the maximum number of people the earth can support without a collapse in the systems that support life. Their conclusion: it depends. The biggest unknown in the forecast was improvements in technology. China, for instance, worryingly expanded its capacity for generating electricity from coal—and more recently increased its use of solar and wind energy at a rapid rate. Net result: the ratio of CO2 emitted relative to economic output in China has plummeted by around 70 percent over the last thirty years (although these numbers hide the continuing steep growth in coal-burning power plants in “the world’s factory”).4 In short, technological revolutions may save us from ourselves, letting us use resources in ways that protect the planet’s vital life-support systems—if we can find methods that don’t just create new problems or conceal old ones. Or at least that’s the hope. But no strong economic force favors such technology revolutions in the long run. The short-term gains are made largely because companies can save money, not because of the planetary virtues of sustainability per se. For example, during the economic crisis that began in 2008, CO2 levels began falling in the United States not because of government mandates, but because of market forces—less demand, plus cheaper natural gas for power plants replaced coal (though the local pollution and health problems caused by fracking for that gas creates other headaches). As we’ve seen, a blind spot in the human brain may contribute to this mess. Our brain’s perceptual apparatus has fine-tuning for a range of attention that has paid off in human survival. While we are equipped with razor-sharp focus on smiles and frowns, growls and babies, as we’ve seen, we have zero neural radar for the threats to the global systems that support human life. They are too macro or micro for us to notice directly. So when we are faced with news of these global threats, our attention circuits tend to shrug. Worse, our core technologies were invented in a day long before we had a clue about their threat to the planet. Half of industry’s CO2 emissions are due to how we make steel, cement, plastic, paper, and energy. While we can make substantial reductions in those emissions with improvements in those methods, we’d be far better off reinventing them entirely so they have zero negative impact, or even replenish the planet. What could make that reinvention pay? A factor unnoted by Ehrlich and others who have tried to diagnose this dilemma: ecological transparency. Knowing where to focus in a system makes all the difference. Take the biggest mess facing our species: our slow-motion mass suicide as human systems degrade the global systems that support life on this planet. We can begin to get a more fine-tuned handle on this degradation by applying life cycle analysis (LCA) to the products and processes that cause it. Over the course of its life cycle a simple glass jar, for instance, goes through about two thousand discrete steps. At each step the LCA can calculate a multitude of impacts, from emissions into air, water, and soil to impacts on human health or degradation of an ecosystem. The addition of caustic soda to the mix for glass—one of those steps—accounts for 6 percent of the jar’s danger to ecosystems, and 3 percent of its harm to health; 20 percent of the jar’s role in climate warming is from the power plants that feed the glass factory. Each of the 659 ingredients used in glassmaking has its own LCA profile. And so on, ad infinitum. Life cycle analyses can give you a tsunami of information, overwhelming even the most ardent ecologists in the business world. An information system designed to cache all that life cycle information would spew out a bewildering cloud of millions or billions of data points. Still, digging into that data can pinpoint, for instance, exactly where in the history of that object changes can most readily reduce its ecological footprint.5 The need to focus on a less complicated order (whether in organizing our closets, developing a business strategy, or analyzing LCA data) reflects a fundamental truth. We live within extremely complex systems, but engage them lacking the cognitive capacity to understand or manage them completely. Our brain has solved this problem by finding means to sort through what’s complicated via simple decision rules. For instance, navigating our lives within the intricate social world of all the people we know gets simpler if we use trust as an organizing rule of thumb.6 To simplify that LCA tsunami, promising software zeroes in on the four biggest impacts four levels down in a product’s supply chain.7 This offers up the roughly 20 percent of the causes that account for about 80 percent of effects—the ratio known as the Pareto principle, that a small amount of variables account for the largest portion of effect. Such heuristics determine whether a flood of data offers up a “Eureka!” or we suffer from information overload. That decision (Got it! versus Too much information) emanates from a thin strip in the brain’s prefrontal area, the dorsolateral circuits. The arbiter of this cognitive tipping point resides in the same neurons that keep the turbulent impulses of the amygdala damped down. When we hit cognitive overwhelm, the dorsolateral gives up, and our decisions and choices get worse and worse as our anxiety rises.8 We’ve reached the pivot where more data leads to poor choices. Better: Zero in on a manageable number of meaningful patterns within a data torrent and ignore the rest. Our cortical pattern detector seems designed to simplify complexity into manageable decision rules. One cognitive capacity that continues to increase as the years go on is “crystallized intelligence”: recognizing what matters, the signal within the noise. Some call it wisdom. WHAT’S YOUR HANDPRINT?

I’m as trapped in these systems as anyone. Yet I find it hard to write about this without sounding shrill; our impacts on the planet are inherently guilt-inducing and depressing. And that’s my point. Focusing on what’s wrong about what we do activates circuitry for distressing emotions. Emotions, remember, guide our attention. And attention glides away from the unpleasant. I used to think that complete transparency about the negative impacts of what we do and buy—knowing our eco-footprints—would in itself create a market force that would encourage us all to vote with our dollars by buying better alternatives.9 Sounded like a good idea—but I neglected a psychological fact. Negative focus leads to discouragement and disengagement. When our neural centers for distress take over, our focus shifts to the distress itself, and how to ease it. We long to tune out. So instead we need a positive lens. Enter www.handprinter.org, a website that encourages anyone to take the lead in environmental improvements. Handprinter draws on LCA data to guide us in assessing our habits (such as in cooking, travel, heating, and cooling) to get a baseline for our carbon footprints. But that’s just the beginning. Then Handprinter takes all the helpful things we do—use renewable energy, ride a bike to work, turn the thermostat down—and gives us a precise metric for the good we do by lessening our footprint. The sum total of all our good habits yields the value for our handprint. The key idea: keep making improvements, so that our handprint becomes bigger than our footprint. At that point we become a net positive for the planet. If you can get other people to follow your lead and adopt the same changes, your handprint grows accordingly. Handprinter is a natural for social media; it’s already an app on Facebook. Families, stores, teams, and clubs, even towns and companies, can increase their handprint together. So can schools. That’s one venue where Gregory Norris, who developed Handprinter, sees special promise. Norris is an industrial ecologist who studied with John Sterman while at MIT, and then taught life cycle analysis there. Now he’s working with an elementary school in York, Maine, to help it grow its handprint. Norris got the head of sustainability at Owens-Corning, the giant glass products corporation, to donate three hundred fiberglass blankets for water heaters to the school. In Maine, those blankets can reduce carbon emissions by a significant amount—and save households around seventy dollars a year in utility bills.10 Houses that get the blankets will share part of their fuel savings with the school, which can use that cash to make improvements at the school and still have plenty left over to buy water blankets to give away to two other schools.11 Those two schools will repeat the process, each giving blankets to two other schools, in an ever-expanding sequence. The math of such a geometric progression augurs a ripple effect throughout the region and, potentially, far beyond. In the first round, every participating school gets credited in its handprint with a reduction of some 130 tons of CO2 emissions per year, for an expected blanket life of at least ten years. But Handprinter also gives it successive credits for every other school in the chain; in just six rounds that should include 128 schools, a carbon reduction of around 16,000 tons of CO2. Assuming new “rounds” every three months, that would be 60,000 tons by the start of the third year, and 1 million by the fourth. “The LCA calculation for one house’s heater wrap starts off negative, when you assess the wrap’s supply chain and life cycle,” says Norris. “But once you get into the impacts of its use, at a certain point it becomes progressively positive for greenhouse gases” as a home draws less power from coal-burning power plants or uses less fuel oil.12 Handprints put the negatives (our footprint) in the background and positives in the foreground. When we are motivated by positive emotions, what we do feels more meaningful and the urge to act lasts longer. It all stays longer in attention. In contrast, fear of global warming’s impacts may get our attention quickly, but once we do one thing and feel a little better, we think we’re done. “Twenty years ago few people paid attention to how their activities mattered for carbon emissions,” Columbia’s Elke Weber observes. “There was no way to measure it. Now the carbon footprint gives us a metric for what we do, making these decisions easier: you can diagnose where you stand. What we measure we pay more attention to and have goals around. “But a footprint is a negative metric, and negative emotions are poor motivators. For example, you can get women’s attention about getting breast exams by scaring them about what might happen if they don’t get examined. This tactic captures attention in the short term, but because fear is a negative feeling, people will take just enough action to change their mood for the better—then ignore it. “For long-term change you need sustained action,” Weber added. “A positive message says, ‘Here are better actions to take and with this metric you can see the good you’re doing—as you keep going, you can continually feel better about how you are doing.’ That’s the beauty of handprints.” SYSTEMS LITERACY

Raid on Bungeling Bay, an early video game, put the player in a helicopter that was attacking a military enemy. You could bomb factories, roads, docks, tanks, planes, and ships. Or, if you understood that the game was mapping the enemy’s supply chain, you could win with a smarter strategy: bombing his supply boats first. “But most people just flew around and blew up everything as fast as they could,” says the game’s designer, Will Wright, better known as the brain behind SimCity and its successive universes of multiplayer simulations.13 One of Wright’s early inspirations in designing these virtual worlds was the work of MIT’s Jay Forrester (John Sterman’s mentor and a founder of modern systems theory), who in the 1950s was among the first to try to simulate a living system on a computer. While there are reasonable concerns about the social impacts of games on kids, a little-recognized benefit of games is acquiring the knack for learning the ground rules of an unknown reality. Games teach kids how to experiment with complex systems. Winning demands acquiring an intuitive sense of the algorithms built into the game and figuring out how to navigate through them, as Wright points out.14 “Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind—all the ways kids interact with games—that’s the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. As the world becomes more complex,” Wright adds, “games are better at preparing you.” “Kids are natural systems thinkers,” says Peter Senge, who brought systems thinking to organizational learning, and has more recently been teaching this perspective in schools. “You’ll get three six-year-olds looking at why they have so many fights on the playground, and they’ll realize they have a feedback loop where calling names leads to hurt feelings, which leads to calling names, with more hurt feelings—and it all builds to a fight.” Why not embed this understanding in the general education our culture passes on to our children, like Mau’s tutorial in celestial navigation? Call it systems literacy. Gregory Norris has become part of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he long taught a course in LCA. He and I did some brainstorming about what a curriculum for kids in systems and LCA might look like. Take those particulates that are emitted less by power plants if homes use a water heater blanket. There are two main kinds, both damaging to the lungs: tiny particles that go into the lungs’ deepest recesses, and some that start as the gases nitrous oxide or sulfur dioxide and transform into particles that do the same damage. These particles are an enormous problem in public health, particularly in urban areas like Los Angeles, Beijing, Mexico City, and New Delhi, where highly polluted days are frequent. The World Health Organization estimates that outdoor air pollution causes about 3.2 million deaths yearly worldwide.15 Given such data, a health or math class could calculate for a smoggy day in a city the resulting “disability adjusted life years” (or DALY; one DALY unit equals the loss of a year of good health)—computing the days of healthy life lost due to particulate emissions. This can be calculated for even a tiny amount of exposure and translated into its role in increased disease rates. Different topics would analyze these systems in their own way. Biology would explore, for example, the mechanisms involved when particulates in the lungs lead to asthma, cardiovascular disease, or emphysema. A chemistry class could focus on the conversion of the gases nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide into those particles. Social policy, civics, or environmental studies could discuss the issues of how today’s systems of energy, transportation, and construction routinely pose such threats to the public’s health—and how these systems could be changed to lower those health risks. Embedding this learning in school lesson plans erects the conceptual scaffolding for systems thinking that can be elaborated on more explicitly as children at higher grades engage the specifics in greater detail.16 “It takes a panoramic attention to appreciate system-level interactions,” says Richard Davidson. “You need to be attentionally flexible, so you can expand and contract your focus, like a zoom lens, to see elements big and small.” Why not teach children these basic skills in reading systems? Education upgrades mental models. Helping students master the cognitive maps for, say, industrial ecology as part of their overall education means these insights will become part of their decision rules in adulthood. For consumers, this would affect thinking about what brands to buy and which to avoid; for decision-makers at work it would come up in everything from where to invest to manufacturing processes and material sourcing, to business strategy and risk avoidance. Most especially this way of thinking should lead some among our younger generations to become avid about research and development, particularly along the lines of bio-mimicry—doing things the way nature does them. Virtually all of today’s industrial platforms, chemicals, and manufacturing processes were developed in an earlier era when no one knew or cared about environmental impacts. Now that we have the LCA lens with systems thinking, we need to rethink them all—a huge entrepreneurial opportunity for the future. At a closed-door meeting of several dozen heads of sustainability, I was encouraged to hear them tick off lists of improvements their company had made, ranging from energy-saving solar-powered factories to sourcing sustainably grown raw materials. But I was equally depressed to hear a chorus of complaints boiling down to this: “But our customers don’t care.” This education initiative should help solve that problem in the long run. The young inhabit a world of social media, where the forces emerging from digital hyperconnections can sway markets and minds. If a method like Handprints goes viral, it could help create the now-missing economic force that makes it imperative for companies to change how they do business. The more well-informed minds the better. When we confront an immense system, attention needs to be widely distributed. One set of eyes can see only so far; a swarm grasps much more. The most robust entity takes in the greatest amount of relevant information, understands it most deeply, and responds most nimbly. We, collectively, can become that entity. Add systems literacy to the long and growing list of what people around the world are already doing to avoid a planetary meltdown. The more, the better: there may be no single fulcrum for change, but rather many widely dispersed ones. That’s the argument made by Paul Hawken in his book Blessed Unrest. When the 2009 Copenhagen climate meeting (like all the others) failed to come up with an agreement, Hawken said it was “irrelevant because I don’t think that’s where change comes from.” Hawken’s perspective: “Imagine 50,000 people in Copenhagen exchanging antennae and notes and cards and contacts and ideas and so forth and then spreading back all over the world to 192 countries. Energy and climate is a system; this is a systemic problem. That means everything we’re doing is part of the healing of the system and that there is no Archimedean point in the system where we’re either failing or, if we pull harder, we’re going to succeed.”17