For Norman:P

In trying to provide a foil for your ideas, I can only muster a scattered selection of thoughts. I hope it stimulates some discussion, just the same.

Part of how I'd like to challenge your thesis of some inevitable energy dynamic proceeding in such a way as to determine the ongoing sixth human extinction (pretty much the way it is happening) is to look at what global society values. I look through the lens of landscape, but also through consideration of Africa, a place that in human civilization is deemed next to the land at the bottom of the hierarchy of things valued and respected. The African megafauna didn't die off as they did in other continents. But even now, Africans might be castigated as being more like monkeys than people. That's supposed to be ab insult. Black Africa never invented the wheel. That is seen as a sign of "backwardness," but the wheel and other rotary motion lead us right up to the jaws of extinction. But maybe I should lump the feminine in there along with land and Africa as a consortium of the lowly among a global value system.

Africa: 

I single out Africa, for the west, critically the US, denigrates Africa, whereas Africa offers the US, as the hegemonic western power, a second chance. American Africans comprise 13% of the US population, while American African culture predominates throughout the nation. America has such a historical intermingling with African culture that it clearly would have the advantage over China in establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with Africa. But it would have to stop using black Americans for target practice and for other oppressive purposes. Meanwhile, all the energy in the room is taken up by people who want to do exactly the opposite of what I recommend, and do it in the name of "making America great again!" A few points about Africa and energy:

- The surplus energy derived from African slaves' production of sugar and cotton underpins the industrial revolution.

- Western civilization overlooks that, and overlooks the natural world that was the catapult draw for African peoples. Western civilization, by the nature of its thought structure, can't relate to the Africa/nature connection. No wonder the west treats nature as a dead thing and the African as cursed, and no wonder it would destroy its very self by so doing.

- Rhythm, a major asset of the African, greatly extended a given amount of material energy. The role of rhythm and fractals in producing energy needs to be studied. I suspect that it is the convergence of fractals with rhythm that has led to the predominance of the African in sports and music. Rhythmic work songs helped withstand brutal, killing forced labor.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals?language=en

http://fraktalneenergije.com/en/energy.html

Women and Land:

I would also put women and land in the category of what the west, as with the African, considers worthy to be exploited but of no inherent value. But women don't excel at violent crime or old growth deforestation. Women, perhaps inevitably for a fledgling species coming to grips with vagaries of civilization and its extremely limited psychological resources, have been subordinated to the categories males dominated, categories like ethnicity, tribe or states. Women have been subordinated to support these male dominant divisions, taking their identities from them, while emerging feminism thought (only possible in a high-surplus-energy system) might support speculation about detaching women from male dominant structures, producing something like a separate feminine species. Land is inextricably intertwines with issues of the African and the feminine in western thinking. And women separated from male constructs, become, potentially, the first humans to identify as a global entity over any other grouping, putting land first.

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https://medium.com/@End_of_More/legacy-oil-bcac8157070b

"What we see around us represents energy surplus. Every piece of glass, plastic, brick in every house represents surplus fossil fuel. As does every road, railway line and aircraft."

Most people don't understand what is meant by surplus energy. That includes artists. But you seem close to defining it even more understandably than we have seen thus far. I suppose that part of the explanation means we can achieve sufficiently abundant energy to create surplus things other than the basics like food and shelter. But I don't think that's an automatic stage of energy dynamics. There appears to be such a thing as infection via energy-related paradigms that are accidental and circumstantial. I believe that at each stage of "cultural evolution" a cluster of attitudes inevitably associate with an "energy state." The energy state, while essential, can't be separated from the cultural state. The two are mutually determinative of the other's achievements. What happens on a small and finite planet isn't what necessarily has to happen. It is instead happenstance, embodying an extremely fledgling species, a species that simply happened up on fire (as Gail repeats) and the subsequent effects of heat (as you discuss).

To begin to address our predicament, we must pay primary attention to the longest lasting tribal groups--the Australian aborigines of 50,000 years duration, the 20,000 year long San culture of South Africa and the 100,000 year pull on a catapult that produced the San. It is a distressing habit to shoehorn these ancient people (who still linger on) into a paradigm of western making. "They are simply an early version of us." But that is false and painfully presumptuous. These people were different from us, with a cluster of life ways and values unlike our own. The overpowering surplus energy that our line of people discovered and that crushed these early peoples changed our very essence in the process.

"The Apollo space programme was itself a legacy enterprise built at the top of a pyramid of energy/industrial/technological input started by the Wright brothers. (or the steam engine, depending on your perspective). That meant a buildup of almost 2 centuries of industrial strength to deliver a series of moonshots. The ultimate propulsion system was no different from that of Chinese fireworks 1000 years ago. (exploding chemical combustion/reaction)."

"Try to think of it as a 200 year pull on a catapult, rather than a Kennedy speech."

These quotes make it as clear as I've seen how what we do now is based on the past. Like the Apollo space program's association with China!

 This gets to the point, and is an excellent educational measure.

Thinking Inside/Outside the Box (samples):

- I see how desperately hard it is to get sensible ideas understood in my own community. The most elementary planning recommendations fall on deaf ears. The following examples are not at all untypical. People don't have the freedom of mind to routinely think outside the box. For some reason, I'm incapable of thinking inside the box. The possibilities that for most people seem unimaginable are for me simple and obvious. To say that the human species follows laws that determine their doing stupid things of the sort that I can see through makes no sense to me. (I have my own huge gaps of understanding, but there are many people who can fill in for me with those, while there seems to be fewer who can replicate the qualities I excel in. A system where people could fill in for my deficiencies but allows me to fill in for theirs might get a lot more accomplished). 

 

- Our village water coop has several large water tanks. Exposed to the blazing sun, they tend to get infected with listeria. I suggest that they install a shade structure to decrease sun exposure, as well as provide more rain catchment surface. Does this very simple suggestion sink in? No chance. They're thinking of all kinds of technical and chemical fixes instead.

So there are enormous human difference wrought by special circumstances or accidents which can relatively blunt those deterministic views of thermodynamics and energy dissipation as also oversimplification and one-size-fits-all analyses. (I read where genetic traits correlate to how land was used to apportion power centuries ago...something to that effect anyhow.)

 

Collective vs Individual

We may differ in how both are viewed:

- In some cases, the collective is given due when I think it's the individual that matters.--Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Luther, Columbus, by no means all a bunch of saints.

made the world enormously different from what it might have been (good or bad) without them. 

- In other cases, just the opposite--emphasis on individual prepping rather than how communities are organized. Taking the individualism which is merely a recent offshoot of capitalism--and probably serving isolation and inability to confront the power structure--as the inevitable condition of humans. 

- A great deal of how I see the present derive from what ancestors did centuries ago. 

- What it is to be human are behaviors, not our physical hardware. This means having little reverence for the genetically human. If they aren't deemed human, they might be treated as one would a fly, a pig, a rodent. So it might be that it's the program people follow, and nothing else, that determines their value. 

- It is mistakenly believed that Earth's predicament can be addresses through the lens of human affairs. It's the land that matters most.

 

 - I'm not interested in individual survival but rather in following what experience, will and other attributes lead me to do. I don't see us as automatons.

 

Art:

Art is free. An artist should imagine the world as they wish it to be. The artist cannot be a realist. 

The artist isn't realistic. To be realistic is to conform to someone else's idea of reality. The artist's reality might not seem realistic to anyone else at first. Too often, thermodynamic determinism flies in the face of individual proclivity. It is unwaveringly "realistic."

(At some further point, I will consider if art is one of those surplus things. The San of South Africa appear exceedingly simple and basic compared with Australian aborigines. The latter seem to have elaborate body and mural painting, together with elaborate rituals. Why the difference? Rhetorical question at this point.)