1. A New Narrative for the Anthropocene Era: On Boundaries, Interconnectedness and the Global Commons

P. Ehrlich’s population bomb (1968), the misleading interpretation and reception of “limits to growth” Meadows et al., (1972), the “de-growth argument” that we have to cut down economic activities, leaving two thirds of the world population out of the equation, or the “material footprint argument” that the planet reaches its maximum extraction of resources at 50 Gt per year are just a few of many examples of how easily we get misguided, making wrong conclusions. Starvation and poverty have declined massively, the modeling of the Club of Rome has been approved, “poverty is still the greatest polluter” (M. Ghandi) and for the maximum of resource extraction there is simply no empirical evidence. If we start taking human creativity, entrepreneurship, technological innovation, science and the human capacity to wisely adapt to new challenges seriously, the entire story of our common future has to be re-written.

This is also called the small-world paradox: in a world where everything is connected, we already find ourselves confronted with complexity in the small world around us. Things become hyper-complex and we lose our perspective on how to act and respond in our daily routines (Perkins, 2014). The only way to overcome this complexity in the outer world is to increase the complexity in our minds.

Such big loops require a form of secondary-order adaptation that is completely different to primary-order adaptation to an environment. Irreversible non-linear tipping points and asymmetric shocks, affecting even those who have done everything “right”, force us to reframe our risk assessment in a world where everything is interconnected.

See Rathi (2017); this also refers to the so-called 10:50 rule: 10% of the richest people on this planet require over 50% of the resources; see also Otto, Kim, Dubrovsky, and Lucht (2019).

Complexity and connectedness of kinds always have been present in human history, but now they are enhanced, augmented and catalyzed, mainly through information technology, our lifestyle and the sheer number of people living on this planet.

In the Anthropocene Era, any fact turns into a normative statement, simply because we are forced to think about interconnectedness and boundaries. Traditional opposites like matter and mind, individual and society, society and nature take on moral and ethical dimensions. As long as we could afford to think in isolated units, the natural fallacy still held: facts do not generate a moral imperative. In the Anthropocene, this no longer is the case. From now onwards, we are enforced to reconcile our thinking and decision-making with reality (the facts). For example, when we examine a rise in global temperature or a loss in biodiversity, we must come up with a normative statement about this. This finding has significant implications for different disciplines: legal science needs to clarify a new line between private and public goods and determine the responsibility for private property in a new way; economists need to learn to quantify externalities and see how to internalize them, and assess to which extent the free market can generate a fair price according to uneven intra- and intergenerational patterns of distribution. In the field of political science, we need to learn to discuss new forms of local and global governance, their interconnectedness and how to reconcile short- and long-term incentives. In psychology, we need to better understand the components that will help us to transform our behavior, the impact of irrational framing, and how to cooperate. On a general level, we need to understand that interdisciplinary work will change: we can investigate well-nigh every single object from the perspective of every discipline.

Historically we could claim that whereas the first Enlightenment, the first axial time and the first Renaissance were about increasing the differentiation between the outer and the inner world, the second form of enlightenment we are facing now is more about integrating the results of that process of differentiation. This is sometimes called the “great convergence”, following the “great acceleration”. In this great convergence, politics, science, religion, thinking and doing are coming together and becoming reconciled with each other. The most powerful integrators in this process are information technology, spirituality and living within planetary boundaries in combination with a change in lifestyle. The “great convergence” relies on human beings’ capacity for greater creativity, where identifying what we have in common is more important than searching to express each difference (see Baldwin, 2016; Von Weizsäcker & Wijkman, 2017).

However, the reality exists without figures and data. One of the achievements of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan (2007) was its debunking of the false belief—held for centuries—that humans are capable of measuring uncertainty. The “black swan effect” refers to the problem that we tend to confuse statistical probability and any form of security. Weisberg (2014) accurately calls this a form of “voluntary ignorance”.

The question here is: are experts in finance better at anticipating the future than ordinary citizens? There is now an empirical answer to this question, based on 20 years of research with several thousand controlled blind studies. At a time span of under one year, experts do better than chance. For forecasts longer than two years, experts generate similar results to statistical chance. Normal citations with a special interest in the field are equal or better than experts. What mechanism can improve prognosis? General intelligence is helpful, but more important seems to be the “group effect”. Heterogeneous group samples with open-minded communication, a low hierarchy and failure-friendly environments can make the difference (see Tetlock & Gardner, 2015).

We are now significantly more skeptical about the future than 100 or even 200 years ago, despite the fact that we know more than in previous times. One reason for this finding is that we confuse wisdom and quantifiable information. The role of science is not to eliminate ignorance and uncertainty, as both are intrinsic to our outer and inner reality; its role is to solve concrete problems. Uncertainty does not disappear once these are solved, but instead provides the terrain for further questions.

Such social tipping points occur when small changes in the environment cause large changes in our behavior. Four fifths of an average human’s lifetime is shared with others. This is why we call our species a zoon politicon. Social tipping points are thresholds or a critical mass where minorities can flip into majorities in an abrupt and non-linear way. A social tipping point reflects a dynamic change in social convention. A small, but committed minority can cause and trigger cascading changes in behavior, and neither wealth nor authority is necessary to disrupt an established behavioral equilibrium. This is true for lifestyle changes, sexual harassment, energy consumption and public unrest. At the social tipping point, the given social fabric breaks apart and shifts from A to B; the capacity of self-organization or autopoiesis is reduced, as is the capacity to respond to external shocks. Science has identified the percentage of people in a group needed to trigger such a change. Empirically, it is around 25%. See Jasny (2018).

This “tipping strategy” was first investigated by economist Thomas Schelling (1971).

With regard to the financial system, the Amazon and the boreal forests are of special interest. The Amazon (two thirds of which lie in Brazil) stores up to 180 billion tons of carbon, while boreal forests (70% in Russia, 23% in Canada) store over 340 billion tons of carbon. These largest biomes on the planet are at risk from the global beef, timber, soy, paper, and mining industries. Recent research assumes that 25% of deforestation can trigger a tipping point at which vast amounts of carbon are emitted. The financial sector, on the other hand, is highly concentrated: only a few companies control 50–70% of the export value. Institutional investors with a long-term commitment should have a vital interest in protecting these biomes, as the costs of adapting to a post-tipping point scenario could be unpredictably vast. See Gaffney, Crona, Dauriach, and Galaz (2018).

For more in-depth readings, see Bardi (2017); Gladwell (2000); Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrends (1972); Wuebbles et al. (2017); Steffen et al. (2018); Otto et al. (2020).

One of the core constraints of our brain and our mind is that we are unable to appreciate exponential growth patterns. They are only accessible intellectually and require mental effort. Exponential growth does not mean fast growth, but growth that is unexpected based upon the underlying size. If a tree were 2.7 mm wide after one year and grew exponentially, it would be over 485 kilometers wide after 20 years. The rule of 72 is another rule of exponential growth: it characterizes the doubling time for an investment in relation to the growth rate. If the growth rate is 10%, the investment doubles in 7.2 years. Our annually adjusted economic growth rate is exponential; our compound interest rate, too. Take one cent and double the results each day, and after 30 days you have 5.3 million USD. See Meadows (2008).

One cognitive frame that will need replacing in the Anthropocene is speciesism or the so-called anthropomorphic frame: according to this frame, animals and plants are inferior and subordinate to humans. If we choose not to follow this linear backward-oriented evolutionary view, but instead assume that humans, animals and flowers exist in parallel worlds alongside each other, with different forms of perceptions in the micro and macro world that go beyond human perception, we would start telling our children a different story.

Harari (2014).

One example is the so-called material footprint argument: How much global resources do we consume in absolute terms and what share do individual regions have in this? However, the question is misleading in many respects and leads to the wrong political instructions. On the one hand, the calculations contradict the empirical findings of decoupling. In fact, the US economy has been decoupling itself sustainably from the country’s GDP since 1970. In addition, even absolute electricity consumption has been decoupled from GDP for about a decade now, and CO₂ emissions have actually been declining. The material footprint argument is a kind of “omnibus term”, which mixes different aspects and disguises the real challenges. One ton of sand, one ton of aluminum and one ton of copper are projected equally and then lead to a general increase to 80–90 Gt of resource consumption per year. But each ton of each resource has a completely different energy balance. At the same time, it is often claimed that a limit of 50 Gt per year globally is as much as the planet can sustain. We were unable to find sufficient empirical evidence for this claim, which the reader is simply expected to believe. The term “omnibus” then cannot be used to develop any real policy advice with regard to biodiversity, deforestation or air pollution, except for the indication that economic growth must be reduced (degrowth). But what are 80 Gt, are they good or bad, a lot or a little? They correspond to 0.000001% of the planet’s continental crust, no more. By contrast, a differentiated measurement of individual resources per country is more advantageous. If we apply the right policy we learn that we can consume fewer resources and get more out of doing so: competitive market mechanisms, innovative technologies, public structural adjustments programs, a CO₂ tax and a change in monetary and fiscal policy. See the current debate around A. McAfee (2019).

See Beckert (2016).

F.D. Roosevelt was one the few US presidents able to understand the importance of telling the right story (Roosevelt, 1938). The major socio-economic parameters of American society remained the same throughout the Great Depression: neither resources, the hard-working labor force, the industrial infrastructure, the political institutions nor the market system changed. It was Roosevelt’s story that created a shift on a subjective, not objective level, overcoming collective fear and loss of empowerment. This example shows that it is consciousness that makes the difference, not the given technology, demographic factors or governmental failure. Often, only a few individuals have been sufficient to change the course of history. In situations where we cannot see any way out, we should never underestimate the power of small groups to change the world (Mead, 1934).

In a larger context, such a narrative needs to be able to transcend the dichotomy of changes and necessities, pure coincidence and universal laws, where such dichotomies are combined and reconciled in a chaotic manner (see Jacobs, 2010).

This process of civilization was first described by Norbert Elias (1997); on the discrepancy between the pessimistic perception of our world and the objective data-based development, see Pinker (2018), Rosling et al. (2018), Schröder (2018) or the websites gapminder.​org or ourworldindata.​org.​

See Brunnhuber (2016, 2018, 2019).

See Bourguignon and Morrisson (2002), Pinker (2018), Roser and Ortiz-Ospina (2018), United Nations (2019).

This parable has been adapted from the ancient one. The Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant tells the story of six blind men who go on a journey to explore the nature of the elephant and therefore touch the animal in different places such as its side, tusks, trunk, knee, ears, and tail. All of them gain a different impression of what the elephant looks like, as none of them have touched the whole animal. As John Godfrey Saxe (1936) later explained in the related poem, the truth is based on the sum of all the different findings rather than on one perspective. Some versions of the story mention a king or wise man who oversees the situation and finally concludes in a moral statement when he explains the situation to the blind men (for example Ireland, 2018). The modification of the parable in this book also refers to the commonly used expression of an “elephant in the room” that metaphorically describes “an obvious problem that no one wants to discuss”.

To give further examples, political scientists tell us about the institutional framework within which autocratic or democratic decisions are made and how political legitimacy is enacted. Lawyers explore the legal framework within which we have to operate. Agronomists tell us about the impact of resource depletion, rare materials and the different forms of farming. Environmentalists warn us about the decline in biodiversity, melting ice caps and bleaching coral reefs. Neuroscientists create images of the brain, and clinical and social psychologists identify individual behavioral aspects and patterns of group dynamics in each of us. Then we have engineers, who generate the latest technological findings in nanotechnology, brain chips, new materials, IOT and automation. The experts on poverty and hunger, health care and education share their insights into the latest data and developments. The military experts tell us what is in the national interest and has to be defended and what does not. Politicians reflect public opinion on what is best. And finally philosophers shed light in the moral aspects of all this. None of them are wrong, but each discipline is lacking the monetary and financial design and the helicopter view to put it all together.

Historically, over the centuries general knowledge became discipline-specific expertise, going from fewer than 10 disciplines taught at universities in the nineteenth century to over 150 in the twentieth century to several thousands of disciplines and sub-disciplines today (Braxton & Hargens, 1996; Bunge, 2003). This compartmentalization has expanded knowledge tremendously, but dissociates this knowledge from reality, producing masses of statistically significant, but in part irrelevant information (such as: “Do we really need this study?”) that is dissociated from knowledge in other disciplines (such as: “Do they really know what is going on?”) Any further cognitive specialization means that we risk losing our perspective of the whole (see also Karlqvist, 1999).

Can we achieve a 100% rate of renewables globally by 2050? Apparently we can, including grid, storage and curtailment. The costs for power would be cheaper by 52 Euro/MWh compared to 70 Euro/MWh in 2015 and this transition would generate millions of additional jobs. However, the transition to renewables is associated with the high initial costs of bailing out of the fossil fuel industry. See Ram et al. (2017).

See United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) (2013).

Despite the trade-off between ecological and social challenges, we should not overstretch the argument. The 12% of humans suffering from daily hunger can be managed with about 8% of our global food chain, and the 9% of humans lacking electricity would add a 0.2% additional burden to our global CO₂ budget (FAO, 2017; Holt-Giménez, Shattuck, Altieri, Herren, & Gliessman, 2012; IEA, 2017).

We tend to overestimate negative events in the short term and underestimate potential long-term exponential impacts, leading to false beliefs and conclusions on how to reconcile the real challenge of climate change with challenges of social needs. Empirically, negative events impress themselves upon the mind twice as fast as positive ones. So if we want to create a positive story, it needs to be at least twice as strong as its negative counterpart.

One response to this non-trivial dilemma is that we identify financial mechanisms that maximize our global commons, reducing negative externalities. Competitive markets consolidate and stabilize themselves through constant expansion and acceleration, mainly in an exponential way. Instead of deregulating and redistributing money to stabilize the system, we propose installing a parallel system that will partly downsize, but always “right-size” the conventional system to its adequate proportion. A parallel currency system can provide this mechanism, reducing the compulsion to grow, path dependency and lock-in effects and providing a rationale to cap and share in a world where physical boundaries and full-time interconnectedness are leading the way. How that works will be explained in greater detail below.

International trading, trafficking, financial flows and energy supplies all represent some sort of global connectedness, but remain pretty abstract in numbers. By contrast, interconnectedness is difficult to perceive on a global level for each individual. One way to look at this is: the amount of water and the amount of air on this planet have stayed the same throughout history (Berner & Berner, 2012). Each time we breathe in—and each person does this about 17,000 times a day, and there are 7.5 billion of us doing so—we are breathing in what previous generations over generations have breathed in (World Bank, Indicators, 2018a; Yuan, Drost, & McIvor, 2013). The same is true of every glass of water we drink. We were always connected with one another in the past, and in the future we will be connected even more. See for example Ford (2016), or Utke (1998). For an application of the concept, also see Capra (2010).

In fact, the cultivation of unique understandings of Taoism is an ongoing process that has led to diverse traditions. According to Kirkland (2004), this diversity results from an ongoing re-identification and distinct cultivation of “taoists of some stripes in some periods”. Kirkland suggests that different generations construct their own forms of Taoism out of distinct elements, which leads to continuities and differences in the understanding of Taoism over time.

In fact, Western proportions of sacred geometry are similar (for example the “golden rule”), establishing an intrinsic link between beauty, proportion and goodness. In Greek philosophy we find the expression “kalos kagathos” which means “beautiful and good”. This means that if we want to do the right thing and make the right decisions, we need to search for and should be exposed to the beauty of right proportions. The TAO represents such a proportion.

There is indeed a link between Confucianism and Western thinking, exemplified in communitarianism. In the West, we have enjoyed unparalleled experiences of individual freedom and self-realization, but these gains go hand in hand with ongoing losses. One of these is increasing fragmentation and the lack of a common narrative, leading to the question of the relation between the individual and society and nature as whole. This is addressed by communitarian social scientists such as Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Robert Bellah (see for example Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; MacIntyre, 1984; Sandel, 1982; Taylor, 1989).

Slaus, Giarini, and Jacobs (2013).

We could go further, stating that whereas in the West external technologies and empirical evidence are leading the way towards greater understanding, Taoism is more of an internal way that tries to identify and explore some sort of inner order. Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 with its system of checks and balances, the overall narrative in Europe and most of the world has focused upon the external, upon technology, upon balancing asymmetric forces. China on the other hand followed a tribute system, with the Chinese emperor in the center and the rest of the world circling around him—a hierarchical system that is center-focused, centrifugal and able to maintain its own balance (Kissinger, 2015).

See Walach (2019).

It was F.E. Schumacher (1973) who 50 years ago foresaw most of the developments we are facing now. Whereas any fossil-driven economy is based on an uneven distribution of oil, gas and coal, triggering political friction and a war-prone economy, renewables represent a more decentralized energy source that has the potential to create the basis for a peace economy. Renewable energy includes further components like “intermediary technologies”, which are more in line with the human dimension, honoring the intrinsic value of nature and transcending human activities.

The concept of interconnectedness we are experiencing now in the era of the Anthropocene resembles the state of the ecology of the mind first described in detail by Gregory Bateson (1972). The context is what gives meaning. If there is no context, there can be no real meaning. Isolation and abstraction are a universal impossibility, as everything is interconnected with everything else. We frankly could study everything though the lens of every discipline.

There is a link to the Green New Deal (GND) Initiative: historically, the GND is rooted in F.D. Roosevelt’s 1933 New Deal initiative to stimulate the US economy, mainly through public infrastructure programs. This agenda was based on F.M. Keynes’s economy of public deficit spending. The Green New Deal then describes a political agenda that is trying to counter the ecological and social challenges of the twenty-first century using a similar recipe. The advantage of this is that the GND provides a framework that transcends isolated problems and starts to acknowledge the need for a change in the system. The challenge is to make sure that this term—GND—goes beyond “business as usual” and “piecemeal engineering”, substantially upgrading the given operating system, “changing the rules of the game” and ending with a “new societal contract”. This needs to include a reform of the care economy and social infrastructure programs, as well as investment in technological and digital infrastructure. To date, apart from the demand for “green investment bonds” (European Investment Bank), regulatory efforts and systemic changes to the financial system have not formed part of any national, EU or US program. If these “changes to the rules” are not considered, the heralded “just transition” into a new era will remain no more than a greenwashing process in which we appease one another but fail to make any meaningful change.

See Mitchell (2017)

To note: In the same year that the UN published the SDG agenda, Pope Francis published the encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015), which in part complements the UN SDGs. Whereas the UN goals focus on management and global development, where regions have to “catch up” with the overall process of globalization, wealth and growth, Laudato Si’ embraces a different perspective. Here, the commons are considered to be a gift to humanity that has to be fostered and cared for instead of managed. From this perspective, Laudato Si’ is a declaration of interdependency, where all living species are interconnected with each other non-hierarchically and should not be subjected to the dictates of modern technology and finance.