Updates

It took less than a day for WICO to release a new version of the global strategy. Knowing Sally, a nearly-complete draft was probably ready before Secretary General Decatur started his announcement yesterday. By early this afternoon I had a good idea of that the scope of changes were; and, an hour after that, I finished briefing Louis Delambre and the rest of the PFR leadership about the implications for the program.

A huge change to the strategy is that the global defense industry is being fully (rather than partially) co-opted to develop and deploy technologies for pollution cleanup; natural habitat restoration and creation; climate geoengineering; and safe decommissioning of the industries and technologies with ecological impacts that are unsustainable under the global conditions targeted for 2040. Another major change is a much faster decrease in raw material mining and processing to both eliminate new ecological impacts and choke off the material supplies for ongoing personal consumption. Finally, the strategy considers what could extend our species’ longevity based on new projections of self-sustained impacts that can’t be stopped, dominated by potentially forced population control for people struggling for basic subsistence and naturally motivated to have more children.

Since the PFR program deals mostly with personal behavior, those last two changes are the most consequential. The former test community members in the program’s core group were already trained for static population and near-subsistence consumption at the end-state, having drawn more inspiration from experiences of a few remaining isolated indigenous groups than advice from self-proclaimed experts in the dominant high-impact cultures. During my weekend visit to Hikeyay, the commune that was WICO’s inspiration for TC-013 and the source of Maura’s greatest personal growth, several residents echoed the PFR core group’s opinion that the transition to the end-state is likely to be more difficult than living there. Predictably, that view led to the unanimous conclusion that the focus of everyone should be on creating the end-state as soon as possible, and that trying to ease the transition would be an unnecessary - and perhaps harmful - distraction.

Despite WICO’s gag order being in effect, I asked Maura how PFR’s response compared with any proposed changes to the strategy deployment plan. She followed orders and didn’t shared any details; but I could tell from her exuberant support of the end-state focus that it was too unpopular a position to be taken seriously by management. 

Reality Check

Until now, I’ve ignored discussion of the rapid uptick in population with low personal consumption that follows the “transition” from 2019 to 2040 associated with the low population/nature ratio that results from the combination of the transition and the self-sustained impacts that are reducing total resources. When and if the self-sustained impacts are halted will largely determine how much the simulated world’s extinction is delayed (the functional relationship between cumulative consumption and resource decrease is the other determinant). Management of population size would mostly affect the amount of personal consumption used for what I call “wants” with more population having historically provided labor for basic resource acquisition and processing to help ensure group survival and create built infrastructure for use in further growth.

Region 35

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 82 DAYS

Sally warned me that statistically half of Region 35 was effectively dead, with three in four people living in what WICO classified as a state of collapse and the rest pushing for more growth that could eventually drive everyone into collapse. What I found when I visited there was an urban area that was indeed half-dead, if you counted infrastructure that had no resemblance to natural habitat (where anyone or any animal could survive using what was there) as “dead.”

There were plenty of stores around that imported food and other supplies from outside; and I could see how, on average and with a lot of imagination, they might be considered “habitable.” The areas where the wealthy lived had more green spaces, populated by trees and animals that seemed to be more visitors than residents. A few parks added to the appearance of natural habitat around the region, but they were by definition designed more for visitors only, with attempted residence by any creatures strongly discouraged.

This was where the core group of saboteurs had lived and worked while they hatched their plan to keep the world from inverting the ratio of artificial to natural habitat. They thrived in this environment, or thought they did, depending as they did on imported resources whose ultimate origins were no longer visceral enough to comprehend or respect.

I realized that the global strategy was as much about re-establishing that direct connection with the sources of life as it was about preserving the life itself. Here there was no urgency to achieve that goal, and I could imagine how even starting down that path might be perceived as scary, or even repugnant. Sally’s insistence on viewing each region as a spectrum of conditions reminded me that there were pockets of people who felt differently, especially among those who visited more directly habitable areas, but there were also people who were literally dying and failing to be born because the connection to their nature was effectively severed.

Reality Check

This is largely based on a simulation of a global region, intentionally vague in terms of location in order to focus on the characteristics of interest. General observations are based on my extensive experience in urban environments, mostly through my thirties.

Education on Hold

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 95 DAYS

I met with Education group leader Victor Lansing to discuss how the group’s efforts match with the set of rules in the strategy’s agreements section. My hope was that we could collaborate and save time in both of our activities, as well as ensuring that we were consistent. “We saw some value in what Sanda wrote in that section,” he told me, “but there is too much there, and it is too complex for average users to understand and use. Also, the rules tend to be far too general for our purposes.” Rather than borrow from it, they decided to start from scratch with guidance from Sanda like the hand analogy she/it shared with me last month. 

“Our group’s focus has been on teaching about the main drivers of extinction, and how to reverse them. The simplest, but not the easiest, are population and over-harvesting, which take extensive cultural conditioning to limit. Habitat loss can be reversed by tearing down buildings and avoiding or breaking up roads so animals can move easily between contiguous areas of land. Pollution is the hardest, because it typically requires technological aid to identify, remove, and detoxify, and we are deferring to the WDP group for guidance on that subject. Invasive species can be very difficult to eliminate, especially if they are established in an ecosystem or easily spread by animals or plants whose movement we cannot - and often do not want to - control; we are mainly providing guidance about how not to move them in the first place.”

What he described seemed far too complex for the approach I expected they were using. “In my experience, analogies tend to fall apart fairly quickly,” I shared. “How much detail can you teach without putting everyone through the equivalent of a college-level course? Also, how do you deal with the fact that technology typically used for such teaching, including books, is going to be phased out as the strategy is implemented?”

I was prepared for him to be annoyed, but I was totally surprised by his response. “Sanda was helping us with those issues. We have been on hold since the crash to find out how the strategy will be affected, so we do not waste time and resources based on the wrong idea of what is needed.”

“Isn’t what you just talked about fairly straightforward?” Even someone with my limited knowledge could put together a decent package, with placeholders for what wasn’t known.

“The stories we might tell would have a lot of potential pitfalls, as you anticipated. We need an expert like the AI to ensure we do not go down a proverbial rabbit hole by picking the wrong representatives for the concepts and facts.”

I offered to help, but he insisted that the best approach is to wait for Sanda to come online, which we are expecting tomorrow. Of course, they are counting on the questionable assumption that there won’t be serious problems uncovered during testing.

Reality Check

The discussion of extinction drivers is based on my understanding. Views of my alter-ego are also my own.