On Being Shown a Way to a Peaceful Global Civilisation

The great religious and philosophical influence in my life is the teachings and life of Baha’u’llah. Taking for himself the appellation, Manifestation of God, the fulfilment of the promise, Baha’u’llah’s life and teachings are of a consistent high-mindedness and ethic, that convinced me of the truth of the matter of His declaration and His mission.

His mission is expounded in over 100 volumes of letters, treatises and books, and include a book of laws (Kitab-i-Agdas), treatises on practical mysticism such as the Seven Valleys, and practical spirituality such as the Hidden Word, and a full exploration of His station in relation to the teachings and prophecies in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Kitab-i-Iqan).

As a number of hotspots of conflict around the world are uprooting millions of people, Baha’u’llah’s declared future and mission to the people might best be encapsulated by these exhortations:

“It is incumbent upon every man, in this Day, to hold fast unto whatsoever will promote the interests, and exalt the station, of all nations and just governments. Through each and every one of the verses which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed, the doors of love and unity have been unlocked and flung open to the face of men. We have erewhile declared — and Our Word is the truth — Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship. Whatsoever hath led the children of men to shun one another, and hath caused dissensions and divisions amongst them, hath, through the revelation of these words, been nullified and abolished…

Of old it hath been revealed: “Love of one’s country is an element of the Faith of God.” The Tongue of Grandeur hath, however, in the day of His manifestation proclaimed: “It is not his to boast who loveth his country, but it is his who loveth the world.” Through the power released by these exalted words He hath lent a fresh impulse, and set a new direction, to the birds of men’s hearts, and hath obliterated every trace of restriction and limitation from God’s holy Book.

” O people of Justice! Be as brilliant as the light, and as splendid as the fire that blazed in the Burning Bush. The brightness of the fire of your love will no doubt fuse and unify the contending peoples and kindreds of the earth, whilst the fierceness of the flame of enmity and hatred cannot but result in strife and ruin.” (Bahá’u’lláh, “Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh”, Passage XLIII)

An important aspect of Baha’u’llahs exhortation is in the realm of our Being. One of his tablets is dedicated to a list of how we are to be to realise the greater mission of the unity of humanity. He is a part of what He writes:

“Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men….” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, Passage CXXX)

On a personal note, I found over the course of a few decades of my adult life, that I seemed to have certain limitations to my development of the practical application of such virtues. I felt that I had, apart from the occasional outright failing, “hit a ceiling’. I felt that I had explorations in life and contributions that i could be making but which in some way I seemed lacking.

Nonetheless, in picking up the yoke of those contributions, especially in creativity, the arts, and theatre, I found an access, a gateway, to another world of human development – ontological coaching. This particular gateway lead me to the thinker, Werner Erhard and the offshoot of his work, the company now called Landmark Worldwide. The work I have participated in through Landmark including the Being a Leader Course in which I met and interacted with an ageing Werner, himself, has had a number of impacts:

i) a breakdown in regard to what i was unable to see regarding my own lack of integrity in the world;

ii) an simple, appreciative, caring acceptance of myself as cause in the matter of my lack of integrity and inauthenticity; and the real limitations of my mind that are a function of my genetical personality and a considerable number of physical and psychic assault events over the course of my upbringing; and

iii) An equally appreciative and exciting recognition of my capabilities and skills that were developed over many decades, including the lessons I learnt from what I failed or did not so well. From this recognition I could aspire to something bigger then who I wound up being that gave me a safer, more controlled, push through life, to participating more fully in the global landscape.

Werner Erhard’s most fabulous work since the 1970’s and the widespread impact of that work on millions of people, was influenced by his vast reading of philosophical and religious thought, a powerful epiphany, and conversations with other modern influencers of thought. In all that Erhard took on the philosopher of Martin Heidegger, a mid 20th century German existentialist, and member and sympathiser of the anti-jewish views of the Nazi Party during WWII and to the end of his life in 1976. Heidegger’s philosophical work and teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany in the 1920’s, inspired many students and fellow philosophers including Hannah Arendt, and the French existentialists such as Satre . By the 1960’s and 70’s Heidegger’s work was presented face value to the world without more than a nod to his Nazi history. The post mortem release of Heidegger’s diaries, showing his dedication to German National Socialism, has certainly un-nerved many who have come to appreciate his works on Being. As might be expected, the philosophical camp falls into those who reckon that Heideggers work can be separated from his Nazi attitudes, and those who reckon they must be entwined. One of the most recent explorations of Werner Erhards early mass coaching practice, “The Forum”, is Bruce Hyde and Steve Kopp’s book, “Speaking Being” ¹ that has an analysis of how Erhard’s work can be seen as a practice of the linguistic and existential philosophy of Heidegger,

I am personally of a kind who can sit with the work of another, regardless of their ideology, and see whether there is something I might find interesting, of wonder, or even true. For example could it be true that, as Heidegger says, there is a ‘throwness’ to human existence, a facticity, such that how existence show up to us is already informed (by ourselves) and is disclosed through our moods. In practice, from this type of view, it is only a short step to asking of anything we have an opinion and as such have an emotion or mood that comes along, “is (xxx) true”? However, developing my capacity for sitting with the diverse view has been also under Baha’u’llah’s encouragement, “Warn the beloved of the one true God, not to view with too critical an eye the sayings and writings of men. Let them rather approach such sayings and writings in a spirit of open-mindedness and loving sympathy.”² without which I may have maintained many of the cultural attitudes I was raised within, some of which are harmful in social practice to others.

While this can seem like a vicious circle of questioning the answer and never coming to a conclusion, indeed my experience is that there is a capacity for humans to holding the inquiry while also standing in an immediate working conclusion. This does require some deft cognitive ability and is not a strength of many people. For those of us for whom it is a strength, there is also an ethical response to also sit with other’s less complex opinions for as long as it requires. Under the practice of ‘consorting’, we might think of the action as providing a clearing or space of listening for anyone to express themselves fully and being ‘gotten’. While consorting is a moral exhortation of Baha’u’llah, “being gotten’ is new language designed by Erhard to express being able to authentically reflect a person’s expression back to them so they can see that indeed you ‘get’ what they are saying. Yet in asking why we do that, the existentialist would say, “in order to (achieve, consequence, avoid)” while Baha’u’llah would also say “for God”. Rather than “God” Erhard simply states, that “to be a leader (consequence) you will need to be given being by something bigger than yourself”. And the placeholder “God” if defined as what is ever unknown and unknowable, the fundamental essence of pre-existence, is as big as it gets.

On the other hand, in the world of action, Baha’u’llah is emphatic about the role of justice both as a personal response and attitude and a social and political response. “Justice and equity”, He writes, “are twin Guardians that watch over men. From them are revealed such blessed and perspicuous words as are the cause of the well-being of the world and the protection of the nations.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, P23)

This brings me to Hannah Arendt, student and lover of Martin Heidegger, who fled to Paris in 1933 after arrest by the Ghestapo. Arendt was Heidegger’s friend to the end. In an interview about her book, “We can Change the World.”, Lyndsey Stonebridge, says Arendt understood that friendship was not transactional. Arendt laid out in a paper called “The Banality of Evil” that it takes a mass of a population to sign up to a progrom like the holocaust. And the people are not evil, they are just making ‘banal’ / ordinary choices given the sweep of a cultural message, and do not believe or see they are comitting a crime. She spoke of the holocaust as a crime against humanity on the body of the jewish people, not just one more anti-semitic progrom. Arendt was also influenced by Husserl who was fired by Heidegger because he was a jew. Yet fully from Husserl and Heiddeger we find a philosophy that can be a practical pathway to a greater human being, regardless that Heidegger himself fell into a narrow superstitious rut of it, perhaps in part to assuage himself of the existential nihilism he experienced as a lapsed catholic and an existentialist.

Werner Erhard, in noting this nihilistic quality in existentialism, discovered, and asks us all to discover, that nihilism is not to be battled, yet an inverse solution lies in moving through the nihilistic awareness of existensialism. To understand this, we must understand that nihilism is the idea that the world that humans understand is based in language, and particularly language that contextualised everything. If we take away the context, e.g. ‘a tree provides shade to humans’, we are left with ‘a tree’. It is the thing “tree” that exists, not any such meaning or context or purpose, we might apply. The existential provocation means that everything is meaningless. Werner Erhards, genius insight was that it is all empty and meaningless including empty and meaningless. Erhard in being able to express this, created a practice for building a ‘dasein’, a being as a clearing in which anything could show up, or could be created. In ‘getting’ that empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, dasien (I-Me) can be a future that is really relationship(s) of my own choosing. Simultaneously, Erhard saw that all of our relationships were already of our own choosing. So instead of feeling we are choiceless or driven at times, of any of those choices we are driven by habit or upbringing, we can also move into the created future as our choices. In the clearing of empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, all choices can be divested especially when they take on the complete attribute of meaninglessness. This is not to be mistaken with anything paranormal or super human. This is not about wishful thinking or fantasy. All invitations into a clearing can only be given as allowed by current states i.e relationships including those with ourselves e.g. our bodies and embodied states. In such clearing we can create a future for justice for the whole world, and see that future fully expressed in the world. Baha’u’llahs writings are replete with the created future of a global civilisation and the characteristics of humans and communities and governments required to see that future fully expressed.

In the life of Baha’u’llah and his son and successor, Abdu’l-Baha, certain religious and political authorities murdered many of their followers in Persia. While chastising these persons, they always invited said persons to correction of their moral behaviour. Indeed one such person, on accidentally meeting Abdul-Baha, did implore forgiveness and was accepted caringly and forgiven. This was an extraordinary act, overwhelming to witnesses who knew the suffering and who couldn’t quite grasp the response.

In this day of so many millions dispossessed by conflict, by so many who perform assault because they are provided political and even corporate approval, we must continue to chastise the bad players and the banal supporters, to step down, to reflect on their moral compromise, and to ask forgiveness. Some in the current conflict, like the Nazi leaders, will face war crimes tribunals. The rest like Heidegger will face a lifetime of tolerance. My hope is that the vast majority will face reconciliation and shame and be offered radical forgiveness. That is the only way to a peacful, just world. To those currently in authority I implore you take it.

1Speaking being, Bruce Hyde, Steve Kopp, Wiley 2019

2 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, CLIV

Justice Accountability and Forgiveness

It is the season of Christian Lent and the Baha’i Fast. The wonderfulness of the teachings of Jesus Christ has lead to one signal cultural message down through the ages: no one is taboo by culture, love and care for everyone you come across, and who abides by that forms a brotherhood and sisterhood, a community, a church.

Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, pulled justice, the expression of true brotherhood through the larger socio-political lense, into the centre of a religious framing that includes the acknolwedgement that we are a global civilisation that requires integrative tools beyond that of the individual or the community.

Two qualities lie at the interface of the moral individual and the moral society: accountability and forgiveness.

Accountability is the voluntary open and honest exploration of one’s personal life. Given that the culture of accountability by which a society can go about its business in a secure and confident manner requires formal processes social process of accountability, all issues regarding the conquest and subjugation of another people, the takeover of lands, and the expression of this the enlightenment colonial powers performed on many generations after the first conquest, layers embodied trauma (psychic and physical) on those generation until the epigenetic qualities are ingrained in the lives of people living in a more supportive social environment.

Accountability and justice cannot be performed without recognising the true nature of the impact to the conquered people. Indeed I would argue that it is so difficult to outlive this trauma over generations, it is the one thing that has taken generation after generation to war for the past several thousand years. Only the very hard work of accountability can give the conqueror ease even as their descendants carry the trauma of their murders down through many generation afterwards, also living tortuously in our epigentics. Only a full and willing accountability provides a pathway out of our social traumatised behaviours.

When a full and willing accountability has been formally established, what some call a truth-telling, then two redemptive actions can be motivated: a recompense for the losses caused by conquerors (true justice); and, because the recompense can never be fully made for genocidal policies or slavery, the victims across time might resort to radical forgiveness for the shortfall. I would encourage the victims to forgive or at least play with forgiveness even if for the rest of life, for in that lies a path out of the malaise of victimhood to a true empowerment. However we need to be honest with ourselves that forgetfulness is forgiveness (not the other way around) and forgetfulness is only induced by being offered a full accounting of wrongs done against us and a full recompense where it is needed both individually and socially. Such social acts of social integration allows the perseverating mind to rest and turn to other more developmental, transformative and productive living.

Australian Referendum 2023 – THE VOICE

Today I received the official Australian Government referendum booklet to insert chapter XI (9) into the constitution.
The proposed changes to the constitution will be to add:

“Chapter XI – Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
(i) there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
(ii) the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
(iii) the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures. “

I encourage everyone to fully read this statement to really get clear what it says and what it doesn’t say. For example, get clear that we are talking about both Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders.
Ask as you read it, do I really know what each of these words and phrases and sentences refer? For example, do you know who a Torres Strait Islander is? Do you know who an aboriginal person is? Do you know what “make representations” means and what it doesn’t mean?

It is important for all readers to note that (iii) means that the Australian Government (parliament) has authority over the Voice and from government to government there is a possibility that the composition, power, functions, and procedures are changed in line with the policy position of the government of the day. I think it is reasonable to expect that a conservative government will tend towards marked limiting the powers of the Voice and even a labour government will tend to restraining the powers of the Voice. The actual functions and powers etc of the Voice may actually lie in the hands of the cross-benchers and greens. As I expect future elections to increase the independent ranks in the federal parliament, so the power of that group to impact the Voice will be considerable. Indeed, I wonder whether the Voice itself provides the platform for some First nations leaders to become well known across Australia and capable of being elected as independents in federal parliament.

The official referendum booklet comes with a fully sculptured argument for the YES and NO vote campaign.

The first thing I noticed after reading these campaigns is that they fall down into 2 classic social distinctions: i) the hopeful: those with an eye on a future that isn’t going to happen anyhow with all the hope that it will transform what appears broken in our society ; and ii) those with an eye on the risks that are being taken by going on a journey into that future that isn’t just the default future given by the current social and political framework.

I am, myself, a cautious person. However i am also a hopeful person. And while some people fall down fully as anti-risk and others fully as risk-taking, these two distinctions are not dichotomous. I prefer to have my cake and eat it. My, now, considerable experience of life (usually called being an old fart), has lead me to the conclusion that I can have my cake and eat it, that we as a society can have our cake and eat it. On one condition. Life requires effort. A good life requires extraordinary talent, education, research, and innovation. Democratic political life requires constant gardening by the population to both restrain the authoritarian’s power while ensuring we foster those extraordinary domains.

What does all this mean for the Voice? The Voice is a recognition that the Australian Government as currently constitutionalised since 1901 has failed and will continue to fail to bring First nations Peoples into a democratic process that works for them. It is a recognition that, in having a political system that fails First Nations peoples, also impacts mainstream society, especially by having us less democratic and more authoritarian than we say we value. The current response by the Qld Government to imprisoning 10 year olds (mostly indigenous children) in watch-houses is one such reach for authoritarianism in the face of far better practices to reduce juvenile crime. In other words, indigenous peoples, because they currently have no real power at the voting booth, are constantly being treated through an authoritarian lens rather than the lens of research and innovation, as befits a robust democratic society.

I expect the Voice will lead to all sorts of additional haggling in the policy arena. This will create some modelling for how our democracy might more fully develop to engage the population more fully into the future.

While there is no issue beyond the scope of the Voice, any well constituted representation will be savvy in the choice of their battles as per their cost-benefit analysis. In other words, we could leave the agenda of the Voice, to the Voice without feeling we need to hold a maternal or paternal nag over them. The parliament itself, of course, can apply a schedule for representations from the Voice such that it minimises delay in legislation. It would, of course, be of no use to ask for Parliament to use the same schedule for the political parties represented, and to limit the ability of parties to delay legislation on the table, or even getting on the table. In other words, certain politicians do seem to be arguing the issue of delay from a hypocritical stance.

The No vote has determined the Voice is more bureaucracy, and certainly I expect the institution to come with the relevant support required. Improvements to the main problems besetting first nations peoples does indeed require more public servants. It requires exactly the right amount of accountable administrative management. This is part of that extraordinariness I wrote above. The other big part of that extraordinariness is in the requirement for widespread expert social innovation services that have never been developed nor applied with any efficacy in Australia. It is my hope that the Voice will be a champion for social innovation as befits the best practice solutions for health and poverty. This is immanently doable but for the lack of political will.

The Voice is the possibility for restoring the failure of integrity with the original inhabitants of this land that occurred with the british colonisation and invasion of the lands, and the ongoing manipulations to ensure those peoples remain divested of the land. Such lack of integrity keeps Australia as a nation, in the doldrums of growth and development. We lag, not because of our incompetence to bring innovation to the table but because, in denying the indigenous peoples of Australia, we live in a world of denial. And more than any one area of denial, it is our denial of our own self worth that comes from failing to bring indigenous Australia fully into the national fold. When denial is our mantra, we deny ourselves a role in our own democracy, leaving ourselves to criticise from the sidelines, our own long time loosing team – Australia.

The Voice will not only be an amplification of the voice of first nations Australians and the possibility for bringing innovative solutions to bear, from developing productive and flourishing communities to vastly reducing prison numbers, the Voice will also become a lightning rod for every misconceived Government policy and every failure of mainstream communities to bring effort to bear in their own determination of unity. In this, I apologise to the First nations peoples and the leaders for, in supporting the Voice, bringing the additional grief you will be subjected. And in this, I promise to be in the public square making a reasonable argument for expectations and stalwart rejections of essential racists, political grandstanders and the socially indolent.

WHY MEN ARE VIOLENT and WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Domestic violence and depression are companions of unresolved anger. That men hit women partners is because they can dominate the woman physically; and they often have the woman isolated with them.

On the first issue, I have dissuaded much bigger men from hitting me because presenting in rage is an unknown for men even when faced with a smaller man. A man in rage can be very dangerous, and many men know this and can read it because they have experienced the effects of rage as they grew up.

Violent men are ignorant cowards when it comes to expressing their anger, anxieties, mistakes, to others and their partners. I write this without malice. It is what it is. Violent men are also ashamed of their actions. They avoid talking about their shame because, as long as no-one else gets to know, they can maintain a facade of ‘nothing happening here”. Keeping up that facade leads to more effort, more anxiety, more anger, more violence.

By the time a male is an adult, violence is addictive and should be treated like alcoholism: once given to violence , always given to violence. On that, we males do have violent tendencies and some of us are even trained by our governments to disinhibit those tendencies and go to war. In a ‘peaceful’ society, on any given week many males are training to be violent towards each other in constrained rules called rugby.

It requires a lot of training in respect and calmness and being around women and listening to them, to mitigate these effects. There is a huge social and political responsibility around this that is not being met and so many men are disinclined to believe there is another way of being. TEven suggesting thatthey have an excuse to continue their behaviour is a disempowerment of the most damaging type. It is a complete failure of leadership.

Men need real men to lead them and lead them out of their cowardice around emotions and relationships. The cycle of violence can only be broken by: the woman leaving immediately and without return no matter how redeemed he become – it’s time for another life; and the man to enter an anger management program immediately and for the rest of his life. While he may not have hit a woman for 10 years, the man must consider himself at risk to others for the rest of his life and continue to be grateful for his non-violence and continue to talk with other men about his ongoing shame and guilt around domestic violence. We do need structures to bring men into. We are at a loss on this matter however I was given an inkling when talking to the bartender of a biker bar about a Men’s anti-dv event. The bartender, in welcoming the invitation, said, “Here, when we are aware a member has committed an assault on a woman, he gets banned.” Men need an explicit place in male society, and, through that, society and relationships with women. From that place, when a man commits assault, he becomes exiled from that society for a period in which he has provided or shows he is providing adequate recompense and safety fro the woman. This would go for assault on other men. As I intimated above, we shouldn’t believe in ‘rehabilitation’. Rather we should believe that a violent adult male is always a violent adult male. However, we only need it to be proven that his behaviour is manageable. And of this we can place measurable criteria. That’s not to say I don’t believe in the transformed life. Yet there is nothing for society to add in measuring the behaviour. A transformed life is simply one in which the behaviour requires no attention, it is created by the tranformed internalised context of the perpetrator. While that means their life is peaceful by the internalised context, and that requires no effort to maintain, to society it is the peaceful and recompensed behaiour that is important.

We absolutely need to make women safe and give them lifetime support towards realising their potential and raising their children to reach their potential, in the context of the loss and heightened responsibilities in their life. Exile into a gaol, of men, fathers, is a punishment to their partners and children. It is a loss of presence, relationship and resources from their lives while a man gets free shelter and food. Rather the violent man should be exiled in community, in a known house under productivity, service, and educational orders. If this is implemented in the first case of a man assaulting a woman, the knowness about that man assists the community ensuring prevention of escalating violence. Likewise it engages that man with his incompetence and set him on a path of emotional competence. Anyone should have a right to maintain a proximity order for as long as they wish, of anyone who has assaulted them. We should all give up the shame of being assaulted. And when we see someone breaking a proximity order with another, we should immediately intervene, call for policing support.

Can we, as a culture, find our way to a straightforward process to mitigate all human violence, resolve all justice issues associated and keep people, especially women and children, safe. I believe if we can be straightforward about the lesser cases of domestic violence, we can begin to save women’s lives by also mitigating the worst excesses.

The 3 Scenarios of Climate Response

I’d advise everyone with an interest in restoration technologies such as iron fertilisation to read the new book by the founder of the Foundation for Climate Restoration , Peter Fiekowski.  Peter has been investigating this work and others with a lot of the scientists over a decade or more, so you will find identified in the book the parameters for the appropriate use of such technologies.

On the broad issue of technology and science in climate change solutions. While many investigations were in their early bloom a decade ago, much is now known. And of the unknowns, such as ocean fertilisation, a lot more research in the field is now required. For some people (an I have talked to environmental consultants who raise this objection), trying to solve nature with science is anathema. And they have a lot of well-documented stories of everything that has gone wrong so far. Even if there was an outside chance of making an error, let’s say, to really stretch the argument, making an endangered species, extinct, why might we use science? The answer to this question is a risk management one. It goes like this, (and you can fill in the data gaps): What are the losses of xxx species, xxxxx individuals of flora, fauna and human, and whole local and regional ecosystems, given three scenarios: unmitigated climate change; nett zero emissions by 2050 but only by restoring local ecosystems; and restoring atmospheric CO2 levels using a range of technologies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering as such in a variety of ways.

In the first scenario, we are already experiencing touch and go on species loss. At some point we will begin to have local ecosystems fail, here and there. And as that chaotic system change amplifies over time a certain tipping point will probably cause the collapse of all global ecosystems which could increase those losses logarithmically and very quckly. Here’s a species loss story from the USA in the 19th c to exemplify what can occur. There was a pigeon called the Postal Pigeon. It is recorded that there was only one huge flock of these pigeons in such numbers as to darken the sky for hours when they flew overhead. Colonisers would just go out with shotguns and shoot in the air and bring down hundreds of pigeons. It seemed they never dented the population of these birds. Then one year, and it is estimated that the flock numbers were still around 1 million birds, the species went extinct. Apparently less than 1 million birds created a breeding collapse. In other words, we will find it difficult to predict the collapse point. Perhaps we are already near there.

In the second scenario, we already have 95% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Natural restoration like planting trees is estimated as unlikely to restore the CO2 levels except over a long time. Meanwhile the chaotic climatic conditions are already perturbing though a high flux and that flux drives itself along a positive feedback loop. Some of you will be aware that the mathematical theory called chaos theory was identified by a climateologist, Lorenz. To remind us, Lorenz in the 1960’s found that an 1/1000th of a shift in the conditions (a parameter of data) at any time compared to a predictable order, will create a vastly different weather pattern over time. This came to be called the butterfly effect. The greenhouse in which we are now living is not just a new stabilised system. It is a very unstable system that will, for sure, over a long time, find it new ‘strange attractor’, a new stability, a new more or less predictable pattern. But whatever happens between then and now throws all ecosystems and human communities to the whim of an increasingly unpredictable and volatile weather system. And at ‘then’ the pattern will be most likely unkind to our current ecosystems and therefore unkind to us. We may still find ourselves faced with tipping point collapses of ecosystems, globally.

In the third scenario, we are able to restore the greenhouse to pre-industrial levels. Let’s say over the period 2030-2050 there is a double effect: the gradual movement to nett zero emissions from humans AND the gradual removal of legacy GHGs from the atmosphere. The weather continues to be increasing unpredictable but now also in a different way, hopefully a softer way, as energy is removed from the climate and weather system.  I doubt we can say that we can ‘restore the climate’ which is the catch phrase of F4CR, however, so long as we have i) softened those volatile and unpredictable effects in the first instance; and II) bring the climate to a new more human-friendly balance, we will have mitigated the loss of many species, billions of individual members, local ecosystems and avoided tipping into global collapse, then only being able to say that a species loss (say) is unlikely under a new technology is the only viable stand we can make for a future that can sustain us and the ecosystems we flourish within.

I have come across arguments, the most recent during a trip through a town called Lismore, NSW, Australia, in which an environmental activist told me she would be okay with the loss of human beings from the planet, so long as we just stop playing God with nature, coz the planet will bounce back. Given what we had seen here in 2019-2020 with massive bushfires (wildfires), I must admit to a horrified feeling at the casualness of dealing with the possibility of the losses worldwide. A few weeks after our conversation Lismore had the biggest flood since colonised settlement, 14metres, people clinging to rooftops to get rescued. Two weeks later, it got re-flooded, just a clean-up of the first was partly underway. The issue with this is that, Lismore is flood-prone, it was predictable, except this year people thought the flood period was over, safe for another year, and then it was just worse than ever, and a double dose. I haven’t had the opportunity to find out whether anyone feels differently about the climate ‘mission’, in Lismore. I have some empathy. It is a big ask for us to deal with all of who we are as human beings without feeling it can all go to hell in a handbasket. It is a big ask to take on that we might make choices that result in the loss of a species for the saving of a hundred species (this is the classic challenge from moral philosophical mind games). While there’s no such thing as an isolated species loss as fall-out, definitely not when it comes to endangering the lives of a lot of homo sapien sapiens for those critters have a tendency to hunt and dig up and chop down anything for their survival. Nonetheless, it is an important question for all of use to ask, what would we trade off (let go, even for now) for what we would work towards solutions. I think we can certainly avoid species loss from any technological adventuring as there is no reason why we are unable to finese any work. And there is hopeful expectation in most arenas that the technology even improves ecosystem restoration as well a human economic activity.