Steve Harris
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The Word for Our World is Forests

12/25/2020

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I’m not sure what the “holiday season” means in this weirdest of years. A chance to reflect, refresh, and recharge. 2021 will—eventually—be better, even if the first half will be bleak. One of the essential parts of the psychological stresses induced by the pandemic has been the uncertainty over its depth and duration. At least we now have a sense of an ending.

Speaking of which…hopefully, the worst thing that will happen in the last month of Trump is a gaggle of perverse pardons. The Biden Presidency will staunch the bleeding and make incremental steps on many necessary fronts. But the Dem’s ability to really move things forward is severely limited, even if things turn out well in Georgia.

So, both in terms of newsnoise and substance, I’d like to change the subject and talk about something that
* can be done
* have a real effect on a major human challenge, and
* doesn’t depend on who is running our government (or, indeed, most governments)

***

The Earth’s forests once comprised 6 trillion trees. Half of those are gone.

When the Bible was written, the issue of human domination of nature (embedded in Genesis) seemed like a theoretical problem. Even when Francis Bacon sparked what we call the “Scientific Revolution” in the 17C, human ability to leverage new knowledge was a dream. But the knowledge that resulted, compounded with Bacon’s assertion that humans were separate from and superior to nature, launched us to our present place.

The harnessing of knowledge and energy over the past 400 years has brought many wonders, but immense damage has been done along the way. Profound climate changes will, in the absence of wholesale changes in human behavior, cause massive destruction of natural systems, rising oceans, dramatically increased weather, and the deaths of millions of people through storms, droughts, famine, forced migration and flooding. Incremental changes, even if widespread, will only mitigate the likely losses.

This problem is not a surprise. People have been talking and writing about it for a long time.
* It would have been nice if people had figured this out and started to remedy it 160 years ago (George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (1864)).
* It would have been nice if people had figured this out and started to remedy it 60 years ago (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)).
* We have it figured out. Do we want to wait—like corona deniers last spring? How much will we pay to repair and prevent sea-level rise over the next 40 years?

There are two major (interrelated) impediments: inertia and nescience. [FN 1]

In modern times, large-scale intentional human endeavors have only occurred under the aegis of political communities. However, both domestic and international political systems appear to be unable to mobilize action at a scale and pace necessary to significantly mitigate, much less prevent ecological disaster. For example, efforts to construct a global carbon market or otherwise integrate what economists call “externalities” (i.e. things markets can’t account for) run afoul of bureaucratic inertia and incumbent opposition. All efforts—by individuals, cities, companies, and some countries—to attack this problem are to be applauded. But they are not enough.

Indeed, from this perspective, there is little reason to be optimistic. The consistent record of human history is to defer painful solutions to obvious, even life-threatening, problems until the problems become too large to ignore; at which point remediation is implemented at a much higher cost (and intervening damage) than if the problem had been addressed at an early stage.

Winston Churchill famously warned the British government for much of the 1930s about the dangers of a resurgent Germany. Facts were disbelieved or downplayed. Proposals for response were drowned by estimates of the costs involved which would burden an already weakened British economy. The psychological shadow of World War I prevented otherwise intelligent and well-meaning leaders from contemplating what would be necessary in the future. The result was cataclysm.

Once the War began, Britons adopted a new perspective and the question shifted from ‘How could we possibly do a little more?’ to ‘How can we do what needs to be accomplished?’ The same was true in the US after Pearl Harbor. Amazing things happened. Once the US entered WWII, Henry Kaiser figured out a way to produce “Liberty” cargo ships in 4 days rather than 45 days. Once the US entered the War, it was over in 44 months.

Our own experience with the coronavirus over the past year has demonstrated that many—most—people will not take threats seriously if the remedies are painful and the harm seems distant. The apparent multi-vaccine miracle may reverse this crisis. It may also help many people think: “Someone [else!] will figure it out and save us.”

If people cannot be troubled to wear a mask or avoid indoor parties, how much effort can we expect to drive less, consume less, or pay more for the carbon we use? If political leaders (not just our own, but those in most countries) are pusillanimous in the face of dire daily death counts, how much heat will they take for requiring the wide and deep social changes necessary?

Yet, pessimism is no reason not to “take up arms against a sea of troubles.” Feeling resigned or ‘tuning out’ will kill (more, and increasing) people.

Unlike German rearmament or pandemic prevention, those who perceive the problem can still act effectively in the absence of tops-down direction or leadership. What is required is a “coalition of the willing.” Not a league of countries, but a collection of those people, organizations, and governments who “get it.”

What is to be done?

Planting trees can do it.

Taking, for discussion’s sake, a target of 200 gigatons of carbon to be sequestered and an average carbon storage capacity per tree of ? ton, all it would take is 400 billion trees. That would make a big dent in the climate change problem. Now, since we (as a planet) are down 3 trillion trees, there is plenty of space to plant 400 billion, even given the huge expansion of the human footprint. One recent study of climate change shows that by 2100, climactic effects could well reduce the global economy by 5-7% (or about $5T/year). So, investing $10B a year would seem like a good investment. [FN 2]

Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House back in the ‘80s used to say that “All politics is local.” Trees are, too. Environmental conditions vary, county to county and country to country. And with global warming, what might have made sense to plant twenty years ago, may not make sense twenty years from now. Beyond the botany, forests need to be supported by local people; it’s better for the trees and better for the people: communities connected with the earth. This means adding a tree to a backyard, adding a dozen to a park, finding an open space (highway rights of way, for example) and plant a few hundred.

Many people and groups around the world are starting to do this, but most projects are necessarily small. And, given embedded climactic and cultural differences, there is good reason for a multitude of projects around the world. There is no reason to force their integration or control all these efforts, but there is plenty of opportunity to coordinate, share information and best practices, and foster the flow of funds from both public and private donors to well-designed, well-organized, well-supported, and sustainable projects. Until this year, there were two projects which have spoken of the size of effort referred to here, but they have no plan behind their catchy slogan of a “trillion trees.” The Nature Conservancy has a “billion tree” program. The Arbor Day Foundation in the US has a 100 million tree program. The National Forest Foundation in the US has a plan and infrastructure to put in 50 million trees by 2023.

In pre-pandemic 2020, Marc Benioff and the World Economic Forum announced a coordination effort for a trillion trees. Awesome. Perhaps they will be the information infrastructure to help local efforts around the country, but they’re not planting anything directly.

Most actual planting groups talk about their ‘stretch’ goals; that they are doing more than they’ve ever done before. It’s true and is admirable; but incremental improvement isn’t enough. After all, planting 400 billion trees would mean 8,000 projects of the size of the NFF program.

400 billion trees. It’s a lot. But, it’s feasible. The land (2 billion acres) is there, the science is there, the money (USD 100B) is can be found. How can it be knit together?

Local science, local land, local people, local planting; global funding, global network, global results.

Besides the moral benefits of personal/community action, the practicalities of the size of the project and the diversity of environments means that many localized projects have to be organized. After all, we’re actually talking about more than just planting, we talking sustainable long-term carbon sequestration that fits in with local people, local cultures, and local environments. How can we provide them with the knowledge, tools, ‘best practices,’ and a meta-community network to make this more feasible?

Recently, I connected with a group called Eden Projects that has been planting trees for fifteen years. They were pretty small for the first ten years, but now have been ramping up, building on a network of local projects that they manage on three continents. They combine science and an investment in local communities who they pay to plant and maintain trees and forests. This year, they are planting over 100 million trees and are committed to a radical expansion of their capabilities into the billions every year.

They’re getting my attention and support. But even if they plant 20 billion trees in the next forty years, we still need another 20 projects like them. So, there’s lots of work to be done. Planting trees is not the only approach, it’s certainly not a simple solution. But it can be done by those who are willing.

There is an old Chinese saying:
      “When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.
        When is the second-best time to plant a tree? Now.”


1 Nescience (one of my favorite words) means willful ignorance.
2 I have some back-up for all these numbers. Contact me for more details.
3 Comments

Rising and Falling Powers

12/18/2020

0 Comments

 
The ink was barely dry (well, the electronic ink, at least) on Joe Biden’s announcement of his national security team last November when Sen. Marco Rubio, eager to start positioning himself for the 2024 race, announced he would oppose the nominees’ Senate confirmation. Rubio referenced the US-China geopolitical situation and decried the group as “polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”

This was (another) faint echo of the McCarthy Era’s debate about who in the US government “lost China.” The same arrogance of embedded and stale hegemony as 70 years ago; as if China was “ours” to lose then and China’s rise in the past 40 years is ours to stop now.

Countries rise and fall, as I (and Paul Kennedy) have pointed out before. As often, a country rises (i.e. gains global military/economic/cultural power) even while another country rises even more and it appears that Country A is falling. Power (which includes the perception of power) is relative. [There’s probably a good line here about “absolute power is absolutely relative;” but I won’t go there!] That’s certainly the case with the US and China these days, even discounting whatever absolute decline was wrought by Trump’s flailing melodrama of a foreign policy.

Kennedy showed that there is a pattern in which great powers either get “fat-and-happy” or over-extended in their commitments. Leadership is hard, competition is tough at the championship level, in football or geopolitics. So, there is no surprise that the “American Century” might well be over.

The question is what, if anything, to do about it. Too often, historically speaking, the relative decliner is too lazy or frustrated and starts a war. It seems that this was the road (at least in terms of trade and economics) down which Trump was headed and which Rubio is claiming in his proto-Presidential positioning.

Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914 were certainly in this position; fearing the growth and potential industrialization of Russia. Similar arguments could be made for Germany and Japan in the late ‘30s, vis-à-vis both the US and Russia. One could even make the case that this was the situation faced by the Southern states as they joined the Confederacy in 1861. The idea is that even though war is a crapshoot, the broader geopolitical and demographic trends are so ominous, that war looks like the less bad alternative. However, since humans are slow on the uptake, the decision in favor of conflict usually comes so far along in the process that the apparently falling power is too late to overcome the long-term trends and, after some initial success, succumbs to the long-term rising power. See, e.g., German vs. British or American war plane production in the 1940s or German (1917) or Japanese (1941) sneak attacks triggering US entry into WWI/WWII.

In our case, the long-term rise of China is neither surprising, nor under-explained. However, having gotten used to being the only dog on the top of the heap after the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, we just don’t like it. That power vacuum has not been filled (and neither Russia, India, or the European Union is capable of filling it). China’s aggressive foreign policy, built on a huge upturn in its economic and technological capabilities is the result. It is driven not only by capabilities, but also by a national mythology of being Chung Kuo (the “Middle Kingdom”), around which all other countries/barbarians would align themselves. It shows up in trade, in intellectual property theft, in territorial claims in India, Bhutan, Vietnam, and the South China Sea, and in its well-funded economic diplomacy across the global south. It shows up in China’s swift and effective (if heavy-handed) handling of the Coronavirus outbreak. Nothing made the Soviet Union look so good in the 1930s (hidden oppression and famines notwithstanding) as the liberal democracies’ struggle with the Great Depression.

And so, America, after the hand-wringing and Trumpian foot-stomping, what is to be done?
I’m certainly not suggesting that we “go quietly,” kow-tow, and brush up on our Mandarin. Nor will a national boycott of Kung-Pao chicken cut it. Perhaps we could rename fortune cookies as “freedom cookies,” since that worked so well against “French fries” in 2003.

Certainly a more assertive stance against the Chinese is called for in terms of trade relations. Certainly a more resolute stance in favor of human rights of the many ethnic minorities (Uighurs, Tibetans, etc.) would be appropriate; hopefully, in coordination with the EU. Certainly mobilizing South and South-east Asian countries in common causes (economic and territorial) is overdue.

Having said that, we’re also certainly not going to war if China invades Taiwan or completes its dissolution/assimilation of Hong Kong. The nihilism shared by Southern slaveowners and Kaiser Wilhelm II was bad enough, but in a nuclear age, it’s nonsense.

Actually, to use a sports metaphor, the best defense against global “decline” is a good offense. We have a lot to say and do with countries around the world where Chinese have been liberally  and often clumsily strewing their cash and ideas. More importantly in terms of democracy and trade, if we want to be competitive, we have to compete!

We also have to be realistic. Just wanting China to act like a 2d tier power isn’t going to make it happen. They’re not. Bringing rocks back from the far side of the Moon shows some serious techno-chops. As much as power determines things in the world, they have more of it than they used to and, in that sense, are entitled to have the world look a bit more like they want it to.

But both the effort implied in a “good offense” and the maturity implied in realism will take some real work and some changes in our outlook: a bit less global entitlement and self-righteousness; a bit more teaming (compromising) to gain alliances. We also need to take care not to let competitiveness overwhelm us as often happened during the “Cold War” where we turned too many blind eyes towards behavior in competed-for countries (e.g., Argentina, Congo, Iran) for anyone’s good.

China is a rising power (absolutely). The US is therefore, in relative decline (however much we may still be the envy of the vast majority of the world). Whining won’t work, Mario, even if it gets you some votes.


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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

12/11/2020

1 Comment

 

(“Who will watch the watchmen?”)

The answer we have been living under for 230+ years was famously laid out by Montesquieu and realized in the doctrine of separation of powers in the Constitution. Under this model, each of the “three branches of government”: legislative, executive, and judicial is supposed to be limited in its natural tendency to accumulate power by the countervailing authorities of the other two. Despite the wide range of the ordinary jousting between and carping about each branch from advocates of the other two, the only fundamental shift among the three since the early 19C has been the accumulation of discretion by the executive branch, which has been driven particularly by the increasing breadth of governmental action and responsibility, as well as military technologies which have altered the nature of the nominally limited Presidential war powers.

Another change, however, calls out for remediation: the embedded nature of the political class as a whole which has manifested in members of Congress serving for multiple decades with little competition, hideous gerrymandering, an ossified duopoly of political parties, and election mechanisms corrupted long before Citizens United (2010). We have created a political oligarchy whose differences from the “democratic centralism” practiced by the Chinese Communist Party are far fewer than we would like to think. And, as is the nature of oligarchies, they prefer to “police” themselves, with the result that, once in office, Congressional “Ethics” Committees are a joke (Congress writes its own special health insurance and pension rules and exempts itself from standard rules preventing discrimination and abuse) and impeachment has descended into political theater.

Addressing these concerns will require a set of Constitutional changes that go beyond the simple tinkering of imposing term limits and reserving political speech rights to actual persons (i.e., excluding corporations). Efforts in the post-Watergate era which led to the creation of the Federal Election Commission (another model of bureaucratic toothlessness) were well intended but ran headlong into the power of incumbency and First Amendment sanctimoniousness.  When ordinary political processes have been corrupted, expecting them to produce useful and meaningful controls is naïve.

In The Republic, Plato proposed that a council of Guardians, made up of a small group of the wisest, best educated men, would be the best form of government. Such an approach doesn’t sit well in a democratic age with risks of corruption and difficulties of selection looming large. Nor does the closest current example: the Iranian Republic, bode well for a plenary, omnicompetent group dictatorship.

Perhaps a blending of Socrates and Montesquieu might be an improvement. A council of the wise whose scope of authority was limited to electoral and governmental integrity. They would be charged with administering electoral laws and constitutional provisions, including limitations on expenditures and methods, processes of selecting candidates, demarking electoral districts, and hearing allegations of corruption and other improper behavior on the part of elected officials.

A group of 5-7 members, eligible for a single term of 5-10 years, prohibited from further participation in politics and government (for themselves and their immediate families) could be trusted to act for the public good. Two members would be chosen by each house of Congress (using weighted voting to limit majority domination) plus three members to be chosen by the Supreme Court.

This Democracy Council would combine aspects of a standard administrative agency (including a combination of rule-making and enforcing powers), the recent upsurge in state-created citizen redistricting commissions, and Congressional “Ethics” Committees. Funding would be constitutionally guaranteed at a multiple of the budget of the Supreme Court.

A fourth arm of government might seem too radical, but this Democracy Council might be seen as at least half a branch. Judicial in stature, legislative in powers, but with a limited jurisdiction and enforcement powers, it might be an important step in restoring confidence in the democratic process. There are many examples of election commissions used in other countries, some of which have maintained integrity and independence from incumbent governments, from which we could draw lessons.

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The Laws of History

12/4/2020

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After a recent posting here, my friend Trevor Getz challenged me to respond to a recent article in The Atlantic about the views of entomologist-turned-psychohistorian Peter Turchin. The subtitle reads: “A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.”

Now, whenever a historian offers predictions, check your wallet, and whenever someone talks about the “laws” of history, find another conversation—quick!

I have to say that I share Turchin’s medium-term pessimism about US society and global economic and ecological outlooks. However, having read some of his other work, I don’t share his methodology or certainty.

In fact, when I first looked at this article about Turchin and predictions, I immediately thought of Gavrilo Principe, the Serbian assassin of Archduke Ferdinand, whose pistol provided the spark that set off World War I. It is not too much to say that if the ‘barista’ at the Sarajevo Starbucks (avant le lettre) had taken an extra couple of minutes preparing Principe’s macchiato, then Principe would not have been in a position to shoot the Archduke when the latter’s car stopped to back up after making a wrong turn, right on the corner where Principe was sipping his brew. Then: no July Crisis, no mobilizations, no war (at least not the one we got and any other would have sent the world in quite another direction). It was, in short, a fluke. No “laws” of history, psychohistory, or cliometrics (statistical analysis of history) could have predicted it.

Similarly, if you had asked a hundred political scholars and pundits in late 2014 who would be elected President two years later, a certain orange-coiffed individual would have never been mentioned. Nor, to take our immediate situation, were any of the prognostications about 2020 made just a year ago worth the electrons they are printed on. In fact, (as was much noted at the time) a shift of only 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have swung the 2016 election. And, as an echo (though much less covered in the media), a shift of about 42,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have re-elected the President. That is not to say that Clinton’s election in 2016 would have disrupted Turchin’s diagnosis, nor that the Biden victor will do so; merely to note that a swing of 3% of 1% of the vote certainly qualifies as a contingency, which sends the universe barreling down a different course.

Is it possible to extrapolate trends and find some patterns as bases of prediction? Sure. But, as I have said in other contexts, “The only thing we know about a strategic plan is that it’s one thing that won’t come to pass.” Can bright people, working at a sufficiently large scale, find some useful insights about the nature of human development? Absolutely. However, to project these into the future is another matter. There’s a big gap between plausibility and likelihood; a few seers are ever audited.

All these predictions depend on the (often unspoken) principle of “ceteris paribus,” a delightful Latin phrase which we know “all else being equal.” Great for economists and other simplifiers; but, history is replete with contingencies, personalities, and other surprises that have laid around every corner. And, if a contingency doesn’t show up, then the predictor is more likely to be right, at least directionally. I can think of a dozen plausible contingencies—some good, some bad—that would toss every prediction of the next twenty years into the garbage. So can you.

Moreover, projecting cycles of history (as Turchin does) is a practice as old as the Mayans and Tibetans. It doesn’t take much to look backward and see a rich list of “the rise and fall of ____.” Paul Kennedy did much the same as Turchin with historical grounding and considerable insight in his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in 1987. (It’s all just an analogy from Newton: gravity, inertia, and all that.) Rejecting rigid cycles as a historical model is not to embrace the Enlightenment-driven contrary view that we are on an inexorable path to the “sun-lit uplands” of human civilization (to steal Churchill’s phrase). Perhaps, as Steven Pinker has argued in a couple of recent books, things have been getting better (civilizationally) for the past several hundred years. Will it continue? No one knows.

I was glad to see that Turchin acknowledged his intellectual debt to Isaac Asimov, whose sci-fi Foundation series (1950-52) included a character named Hari Selden. Selden, too, claimed to have discovered the laws of human behavior on a universal scale which enabled him to predict the course of developments far into the future. This science of “psychohistory” worked for a while, but then got knocked off course in a big-and-dramatic way by a mutant fluke, until some new heroes came to save the day. Perhaps Asimov was trying to re-establish Enlightenment optimism after European civilization had been knocked off course by Gavrilo Principe and Adolf Hitler.

Turchin may be right about his theory that our society will crash under the weight of too many in the “elite” class, or Piketty may be right that the cause will be that group having too much money. But we don’t need history to teach us the morality of inequality or social distension. We should fix them on our own, even if they won’t drive us over the cliff. Ditto on climate.
History, as I have argued several times in this blog, is great for many purposes (and it’s fun, too). But the future,… it’s a mystery.




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    Condemned to Repeat It --
    Musings on history, society, and the world.

    I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

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