Explanation of Dark, Green, and Reality

Dark Green Reality came about by fiddling around with available user names without resorting to numbers, hyphens, dashes, or any other cumbersome marks. The term "dark green" I learned about no more than a week ago and it felt descriptive enough as a label I could apply to myself that I took it and put it with all the other labels I've tried on.

It is an ideological label, a species of environmentalism with it's own characteristics and intellectual foundation. What's more, it has barely been used, no one seems to call themselves a Dark Green, and I can feel free to attach or detach whatever I want to it. Dark Green is counter distinct to Bright Green. Primarily, the difference lies in the realm of what is possible in terms of economic growth, industrial civilization, and the throughput of material resources drawn from the Earth needed to maintain our current economic lives. In a nutshell, it is in regards to the capacity of the Earth to support the kind of material comforts and standards of living we in the West (especially American standards) have grown accustomed to over the last several generations and the prospect that these standards can be replicated throughout the rest of the world. My view is that they cannot be replicated and that if we try to do so as a matter of policy, we will not just simply fail, but fail tragically.

But this isn't just some classic doom saying in the tradition of the Book of Revelations , or the end of the Mayan calender, or some other supernatural force that feels it necessary to destroy people. Instead, it is what is known, hypothesized, theorized and projected about the natural world through science and reason. This is human knowledge about the human condition. On that basis, it must be taken seriously and not treated as a variant of the above fictions purporting to foretell the end times. What a dark green understanding shares with the fictions described above is the possibility that human civilization (global, industrial) could conceivably end or be severely truncated as an ongoing concern due to the nature of the problems I will describe in this blog.

Any understanding of what we collectively face as a species must include an appreciation of certain conditions that will force a change on us in the way we inhabit the planet. There is a crossroads between Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the size of the human population living at present and it's projected growth over the coming decades. These are all deeply interrelated subjects, and all will interact in ways that are broadly predictable but difficult to set a specific time frame on. What's more, however these problems manifest themselves in reality, we will see the impact through our social systems, such as community, government, the economy, and through relations between people, classes, and countries.

These events will not be pretty. You might say that some changes could be better, must be better, but that we ourselves and future generations might well wonder what we were thinking as we got into such a fix. The fix, as I see it, is this: There are too many people using too many resources, overtaxing the planet's rate of regeneration, and too few who realize this. What this inevitably means is that the scale of human life on the planet must be and will be reduced. It means either we do it voluntarily in a managed, fair, and humane way, or it will occur involuntarily, unfairly, and inhumanely. The crucial difference between those I am calling dark and bright greens comes down to that. It is one part level of urgency and another part level of pain that is unavoidable in adapting to the condition we find ourselves entering.

I will describe what is generally understood and not understood about peak oil/resource depletion, climate change/global warming, and the population issue over the next several posts. I'll describe them separately and then move to a description of there interactions. But lastly I will now say a few words about reality. I'll just say that whenever I use the word I see imaginary quotes around it in my head. Though I believe there is a reality out there that is perceivable and comprehensible, the rub comes at the perceiving and comprehending stages. Always the big question of philosophy, it has been answered to some degree by science. It is the single most effective way we can discern what we commonly might think of as "objective reality". The reality of the material world, the world of the senses, of measurement, of testing and retesting, of reproducing the results of those testings, in order to find a statement that cannot be made false.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what is meant by the word "theory". In common parlance, what is usually meant is "hypothesis", that I hypothesize something is the case, rather than theorize because a theory is something much more elaborate, something that has withstood a measure of testing. A hypothesis is what you have without much evidence. The most well-known theories are ones that have been tested rigorously over many decades and have yet to be made false. The power of a theory is in it's ability to explain natural phenomena. Once a discovery has been made that lies outside the explanatory power of the theory, the theory is scrapped. Or it is reformed. Either way, it is no longer useful as a tool, or a framework, in which the processes of the natural world can be understood. This means that the older the theory, the longer and more frequently it has been tested, the better it represents reality.

We must accept that science is a critically important way to understand reality. There may be other ways for a person engage the world, to heighten or expand the individual experience of life, whether it is spiritual or meditative. But I don't think it is possible to overstate what a mistake it would be to ignore what we learn from science.

To close this post, I will lay out some statements I will demonstrate to be true in the weeks and months ahead. Primarily I will show why a gloomier forecast is warranted. Why green energy, new technology, old technology, and traditional economics will not be enough to spare us from some rough times ahead. However, because true skepticism requires that the skeptic be willing to be proven wrong, I will survey counter arguments and the evidence used to support those arguments that point to a happier outcome for humanity. Lastly, just to be clear about what I mean, I am not forecasting the end of the world, the destruction of all life on the planet, or anything like the aforementioned end times scenarios. I am saying that life in the twenty-first century will be inhabited by people with very different expectations, lifestyles, beliefs, and mythos than those who occupied the people of the twentieth century industrial civilizations.