Phased Leadership

Since my last entry, Maura and I have finished moving into a new home and been busy analyzing all of the information collected by WICO relating to the preparation and implementation of the global strategy to delay extinction. Sally, who has since adopted the surname Sanda (her name until she came out as a sentient artificial lifeform), spared enough bandwidth to help us with much of the data collection and analysis.

We’ve made several discoveries, among them the relationship between social leadership characteristics and the changing distribution of population between activity phases. This naturally required an historical perspective that Maura was happy to provide: 

“To be effective, leaders must address the range of life experiences in their community or else the community loses cohesiveness. Our biology has prepared us to live as colonizers, the first phase, but cultural and technological innovations have enabled us to inhabit the other six phases. 

“One if the most significant of the cultural innovations was a response to most people having become developers, in the second phase. The creation of a government where every person has equal value, and is responsible only for what they do instead of who they are, provided a way for developers to peaceably coexist with the remaining colonizers and coordinate their actions to potentially benefit everyone. 

“As the world entered the adaptation phase in the 1800s, roles and experiences diversified with the use of technology to convert natural environments into artificial environments, and a growing number of governments extended their main tools for regulating behavior, laws, along with new ways to enforce them, to deal with the changing range of interactions people could have with those environments and each other. 

“The number of people increases exponentially with increasing phase, so there is typically a net loss of people in the lower phases even as the total population gets larger, with the greatest rates of loss when new phases start being populated. Such transitions are therefore the most fraught with danger, which the world found out a century later when the fourth phase was breached with twice the population at stake. It took two world wars to set the stage for a truly global community whose scale would be necessary to manage the consequences.

“It’s lucky for us that the WICO framework was chosen for the design of that community. The magnitude of the changes underway and the threat of misjudging them that the last war exposed was enough to convince the world’s leaders to be cautious and provide a means of sharing knowledge and coordinating activities that could have potentially global impact. While national autonomy was still prized, having too much presented an unacceptable risk to everyone; and so, monitoring and control mechanisms were adopted following a vigorous debate about basic values to be adopted on a core level by every organization on the planet.

“Unluckily for us, the risks of developing fossil fuels and their derivatives were not considered as thoroughly as they should have been. Leaders were too fixated on its promise of quickly achieving the ultimate goal of maximum happiness, population, and life expectancy. They also failed to also consider that the goal itself might be a trigger for catastrophic consequences involving variables they didn’t even know existed. 

“The combination of those two oversights led to a series of what we now know as transitions to higher phases over the following 70 years. Despite not understanding their cause, WICO was able to reduce the most disruptive aspects of each, such as radical flipping of ideological dominance within component governments, by tracking and anticipating effects while initiating coping protocols through local agents such as the Extinction Response Units. Understanding their causes and switching governance to ecologically-defined regions and sub-regions will make those efforts more effective and efficient as we intentionally move through transitions into lower phases.”

Along with the majority of other nations, the United States is holding its last major election this year. The winners, most of whom have already been identified, will be responsible for decommissioning of government infrastructure and functions along with any remaining handoffs to the Extinction Response Unit and relevant sub-regions.

Reality Check

History matches ours up to the end of the second world war and only approximates it after that.

The annual change in the number of people within each phase over the period 1950-2050 is shown below for the simulated world of Hikeyay Prime, as a fraction of people in each previous year.

For reference, the following is the annual change for simulation Green (matching historical data) for the period 1950-2040:

Note each pair of peaks, where a large peak is closely followed by a smaller one (such as the pair for Exploiters consisting of a peak in 1973 and the smaller one in 1976).

The large peak marks the transition of people into its phase which appears to be correlated to the dominance of politically right-leaning leadership. The smaller peak appears to be correlated to dominance of politically left-leaning leadership.

This is in stark contrast to the peaks in Hikeyay Prime, a difference that is explained away by Maura as a consequence of WICO’s organization but is actually due to the more well-behaved function used for the underlying ratio of remaining resources to human needs. If the political correlation does hold up for Hikeyay Prime, it is likely with the decay portion of the larger peak.

Subregions

More than three weeks into execution of the global strategy, the signs of the transition are more organizational than physical, though we expect that to change rapidly soon. The local division of the Extinction Response Unit just released a set of “subregion” maps for our region that are aligned with the latest projections of climate and ecosystem adaptations. Not surprisingly, their boundaries roughly coincide with the distribution of biomes WICO anticipated for the transition midpoint.

Maura has been back at work, sort of, performing a survey of our closest former test community, TC-013, from a historical perspective, while I do related research in our office. We’ll be in a new subregion when we move close to the university, which is shared by most of the mountains and subject to a different set of conditions for land management and basic survival that TC-013 was instrumental in identifying. This brought up a new direction of research, which I discussed with Maura last night: tracking cultural evolution as a function of subregion definition and mandated resettlement. She initially considered it too large a change in scope, but agreed to think more about it.

“That’s just bureaucratic BS,” Al said when he heard the news. “Nothin’s gonna change except what people call it. Adaptation’s the way of the world now, and everyone’s gotta be ready for anythin’.” He pointed to a weather map on the cafeteria television as we ate lunch. A stationary high-pressure system was baking the Midwest, with a long hot finger reaching as far west as the Rocky Mountain foothills. “That thing don’t care ‘bout ecosystems, and neither will the tornados that swing through next week. We’re just gonna have to ride ‘em out wherever we are until our itty-bitty changes amount to somethin’ big enough.”

“Are you kidding me, Al?” Significant changes between the plains and the mountains were a given for as long as I’d lived here. 

He sniffed, then snorted. “Smell that smoke, Will? This place is on its way to becomin’ a desert thanks to the oven we made, and the best way to shut off an oven is to cut the power. We’re doin’ it in a lot of little ways; and ‘til it works we’re all gonna be just hunkerin’ down wherever we are, which is a great way to cut some more power.”

“But isn’t where you are going to affect how you do it?” I asked the obvious question.

“How many ways do I gotta say it? A forest can become a desert in a week, and it may not have enough time to grow back. If you can live in both, then you got a chance at survivin’.”

“So, you’re saying the subregion rules are meaningless, along with what was learned in the test communities?”

“No. I’m saying we all gotta learn all of it, rules and the reasons behind ‘em.” He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “I thought you had this all figgered out already.”

“The ERU’s doing that coordination thing you always like, setting expectations and rules to match.”

“Point taken,” he said, leaning back. “We swapped places, didn’t we?”

“Looks that way, and it feels weird. What changed?”

He paused. “Perspective, I’d say. You got into history and how people organize life. I got into physics, the why of it all.”

It wasn’t just our new jobs. “Tell me about it,” I suggested.

Reality Check

Al’s new point of view is based on my own concept that rapid changes require flexible thinking and abilities that match the range of changes. The discussion of climate and ecosystems is based on my own observations and knowledge, not a rigorous scientific analysis.

See today’s entry in Will Jackson’s Personal Log for more about the project being worked on by Will and Maura.

Downsizing

Maura and I received feedback on our personal plans today. Like many couples uncertain about whether we want children, we were encouraged to abandon the idea and move into a much smaller home nearer the university where we work. Maura suspects that, in addition, our local community plan is being revised by the Extinction Response Unit to replace the buildings in our neighborhood with natural habitat as a node in a wildlife corridor that would logically join open spaces that have already expanded to our north and east.

“They’re going to have to scrub the coal ash ponds,” she reminded me as we studied on online map of our area, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if they take out the neighborhoods surrounding them in the process.”

“What about the highway?” I asked, pointing to the interstate that runs nearby. It seemed like a significant barrier to any major influx of wildlife.

“That would do more harm than good right now. If I were doing the analysis,” which I knew she did in her old job at the ERU, “I’d keep the critical supply chains in place until a basic level of self-sufficiency can be developed in the dependent areas.”

I recalled a graph from the global strategy showing a projection of average personal consumption during the transition. It showed a trading of waste for what it simplistically called needs and wants, with artificial structures used for wants such as living space being replaced with materials that could be better be assimilated into ecosystems. Waste includes pollution such as the coal ash and gas emissions that make places unlivable, as well as those unlivable spaces themselves that need to be reclaimed. “To me, a lot of roads help produce waste, so removing them should be a no-brainer,” I responded.

“Let’s wait for the updated plans before we pass judgment,” Maura suggested. “In the meantime, we should start looking for a new house.”

Reality Check

Will’s home setting is loosely based on my own, and I am personally searching for a smaller house for obviously different reasons.

Establishing low impact self-sufficiency for the population of a metropolitan area like Colorado’s Front Range would be problematic under the best circumstances, not to mention cleaning up waste in its many forms (such as coal ash, which is a real) and cutting off its sources which provide income to many people. One approach that can help was chosen by the simulated world: reducing population by limiting births and limiting medical prolonging of life, as well as enabling emigration to areas with more resources.

Following is a graph like what Will was recalling:

Trip Plans

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 52 DAYS

Our small GAP team got through the third page of our task list today. Most of the tasks involved data processing, along with scanning of paper photos and maps collected from the three test communities over the past month. It wasn’t all secretarial: we got to manually study what we were scanning and record anything we found of interest.

Starting tomorrow we will be visiting the two other test communities in the Rocky Mountain region, learning firsthand about their daily activities by actually participating in them. We’ll spend most of the weekend at one of the communities, TC-014, which is in the middle of Wyoming butte country and part of the desert biome. Then we’ll spend nearly two days at TC-015, northwest of Yellowstone National Park in Montana's temperate grasslands biome and near both the desert and temperate coniferous biomes.

Maura reminded me that the first test community that I visited with her (TC-186) is also in temperate grasslands, and near the temperate broadleaf biome. Al added that some of the most interesting ecosystems are mixes of several types, and the borders of the Yellowstone area are among his all-time favorites in the United States. During the trip we’ll be able to make assessments of a variety of environments with a Personal Environmental Assessment Kit, “running it through its paces” as Al likes to say.

As I studied a map of our route in our now crowded office at the RMOC, I felt an echo of the concern I had with the distribution of test communities. I asked, “Doesn’t it bother either you that these communities are downright tiny and out of the way?”

“What’s your point, Will?” Al asked. “Except for our number thirteen, they’re in proximity to the stations for observin’ verification. You know that.”

“But do they represent what most people will experience? I get that the commune flavor matches what might be the case in the end state, and the isolation helps keep the data clean.” I realized I really was talking like an engineer. “But can we count on them reflecting what people in even modest-sized towns would be able to do, or want to do?”

“They’re not aliens,” he said. “Most of ‘em have grown up near the communities, or got their education in large cities. They know what to expect.”

“Is that really the same thing?” I pushed.

“Al’s right,” Maura said. “This was all considered when the reference strategy started being developed. It wasn’t considered an issue. What do you recommend instead?”

The answer suddenly became crystal clear. “We take it on the road.”

“Take what on the road?” she asked.

“Like what we did when we were testing the PEAK around here. We start the roll-out early, informally, enlisting everyone we meet to start taking the first steps and get used to seeing things differently. Let’s face it: we already know most of what needs to be done. The experts in the test communities can get out into their local communities and begin educating people immediately, get them thinking creatively about what to do next.”

Maura paused, apparently taking it seriously. “Extinction Response is already working with local governments on the roll-out. How would this be different?”

“That’s at the government level. It has the appearance of being imposed on people from the top. I’m suggesting simultaneously building from the bottom up.”

“Let’s talk more about it during our trip,” she said. “We can ask the testers what they think.”

Reality Check

The descriptions of the settings for the test communities are a general match to reality, but they are still fictional.

Sampling Error

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 66 DAYS

“To be successful in its search for objective truth, science must identify, combine, and explain all viewpoints.” That sentiment, inscribed on a large plaque in the lobby of WICO’s Boulder field office, guided yesterday’s study and evaluation of the protocols used by test communities to report local conditions and the results of applying parts of the global strategy for use in refining it. I was also admittedly biased by my belief that the strategy’s probability of success would be greatly increased by: (1) encouraging a mindset of creation instead of remediation; and (2) using people’s innate reactions to an environment as a means of assessing its health.

I started by applying a lesson learned the hard way as a journalist: context is everything. The context in this case was the selection and definition of the test communities themselves. Based on my earlier discussions with other members of the Quality Assurance team, the communities (or “test environments” as the team often called them) were established or enlisted because of their proximity to observation stations used in the biosphere assessment which had been located on the basis of ecosystem characteristics.

The “regions” used in the global strategy were defined much later as random samples that, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, would together provide a meaningful picture of how a set of global variables are distributed around the world. I was reminded of how strange they looked on a map, some being extremely large, others looked relatively small, and not all of them contiguous. Rico Sanguini the data analyst had explained when I first saw it that territorial connection wasn’t nearly as important as the relationships of the main global variables such as ecological resources.

With the help of Innes Johnson, one of the technicians at the field office, I constructed a map showing the locations of the test communities along with the region boundaries. It was immediately obvious to my untrained eye that the communities could not be representative of the regions. Johnson told me she had noticed the same thing, and been told that the apparent disparity didn’t matter because the environmental considerations were most important anyway and the biosphere assessment had proved that they were adequately represented.

I decided to ask Sally for clarification since she was likely the original source of the explanation. “I can’t help you with that, Will,” she responded.

“You can’t or you won’t?” I pressed, surprised by the refusal.

“Within the scope of assuring the best chance of success, your concern is not worth pursuing. I appreciate your diligence, though.”

It was the first time in our relationship that I felt genuinely irritated with her. “You’re too busy. I get it,” I said, and decided to find my own answer.

There are three test communities in the Rocky Mountain area, each in an ecosystem type or “biome.” WICO classifies the entire area as belonging to just one region, which encompasses five states. Worldwide there are 12 biomes for 300 regions, represented by 120 test communities. Two things stood out from these numbers: the original number of regions was based on the number of existing test communities, which averaged about ten per biome; and the Rocky Mountain area should have one test community at most. 

Following my original instructions, I studied the reporting protocols and a sample of recent reports with an eye for the types of information being collected and sent. While the protocols were nearly identical, I noticed a clear bias in the reports, both in terms of environmental observations and the health and welfare of the residents. Someone smarter than me would need to do the analysis, but it looked like the types of environments and access to cities were playing huge roles in determining what the residents were choosing to report and how they were framing it.

From yesterday through part of today I discussed my concerns with Maura, the field office personnel, and the rest of our team. By the end, we agreed that there is a significant problem with the whole process. Sally was no more forthcoming with them than she was with me, which suggested a potentially larger issue.

Reality Check

The quote about science on the plaque and Will’s biases are all mine. 

I am not a journalist. I first learned “context is everything” from history professors in college, who insisted that reports of events should first be interpreted based on the experience of the originators. At the time I was majoring in physics, which focuses on understanding the fundamentals of how everything in nature relates to everything else in deterministic and non-deterministic ways, which together define context for what all experience. My career as a test engineer reinforced the lesson as I was forced to identify characterize the influences of measurement equipment and environmental conditions on test results. Success in my next career as a technical writer (with similarities to journalism) depended on keeping goals, audiences, and biases of sources and audiences in mind when writing documentation, as well as understanding the real-world subjects and the many potential influences on them. Now as a freestyle researcher and writer who creates more than I report, context must be thoroughly internalized to ensure consistency and quality in what I share with the world.

References to the biosphere assessment are loosely based on my experience in systems integration and testing of environmental variables. The number of biomes is real, and my derivation of the numbers of regions is based on actual population estimates. 

Stages of Progress

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 9 DAYS

WICO signaled that its strategy testing has not gone well by going dark until today and then pushing its deadline for roll-out back to March 1 from the optimistic date they set a week ago. Ambassador Lazlo was tasked with explaining what happened at a morning press briefing.

“We have had to increase the resolution of monitoring and control,” she said in answer to a question about whether the test results were forcing a change to the strategy. “The number of regions is now three hundred, which decreases the uncertainty in global status to no more than five percent. 

She added that regions have been reclassified for easier understanding and assessment of what actions should be made over time to achieve a given outcome. “World history, and likewise the history of every region, can be divided into four stages of change in the number of people and how they live their lives. They focus on growth until further growth ceases being healthy for them and the other species they share their environment with. If they choose more growth then they will transition to a stage where they are consuming the basis for a natural existence, with a resulting peak in everything they might hope to achieve. Attempting to grow more than that will collapse the ecosystems they depend upon for survival along with all aspects of their lives as biological beings.

Lazlo provided a graph showing the new set of regions and the stages they were in last year (shown below). Roughly one-fourth of the world’s population was (and is) in the peak stage, and two-thirds was in the collapse stage. Taken as an entire world, we are in the peak stage, bordering on collapse.

She explained, “The stages are directly correlated with the ratio of people to nature in each region, or, more precisely, the resources consumed for basic survival by people as a ratio of the remaining resources of that type in the environment. Fractions are used here because they easily show how many other creatures support each of us at a given stage, as the denominator minus one. Collapse clearly occurs because each creature depends on at least one other to support it, and we have through civilization stopped directly supporting them.

“Note that the trend line indicates how growing population will tend to move a region to a higher stage. This progression is not inevitable. People in a region can consume less, have fewer children, leave, or die, and have the region fall back to a previous stage if the damage to ecosystems is not too extensive or experiencing self-perpetuating collapse.”

Reality Check

The delay in updating this blog was due to my choice to refine the simulation down to the regional level before reporting on progress. Lazlo’s description is obviously mine, and the graph is a random set of data using the Timeline model’s projection of last year’s global averages.

Strategy Includes Pollution Fighting Technology

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 12 DAYS

At today’s WICO press conference, Ambassador Lazlo announced that testing of the global strategy will begin tomorrow and likely last for at least a week. She then introduced Zara Adsa, who is on the team dedicated to development of tactics for tracking and managing climate feedbacks, and has expertise in reducing air pollution without causing more atmospheric warming by the loss of its cooling effects.

She began with a statement. “One of our strategy’s goals is to remove and render harmless all pollution from the biosphere, with priorities on air and water because of their critical roles in maintaining life. Ideally, we would like to enlist the help of natural processes that include contributions by other species that help maintain healthy ecosystems. We are however not averse to using technology to supplement the effort, so long as it does not make things worse. Both approaches are built into the global strategy.”

When asked what kinds of technology she meant, she revealed that genetic engineering of microbes already present in the air is underway using existing approaches developed originally by the international defense industry. She added, “The microbes are being programmed to engorge themselves, convert the pollutants into non-toxic substances, and then die, with their remains available as food for plants and animals. Our team’s management function includes ensuring that resulting growth of the consumers does not overload their ecosystems; in other words, causing more problems than we fix.”

Several reporters expressed concern about the inherent danger of deploying new technologies like the one she described. She replied, “As I implied, it is an option that would only be employed if natural solutions cannot be found and scaled up as necessary. The fact that conditions are as bad as they are is a strong signal that enough natural solutions either do not exist, or are not being deployed appropriately. The discovery process will identify which is the case, and assist other species as much as possible where deployment is the problem.”

Reality Check

The pollution problem is real, but the approaches are totally speculative.